Gabe Newell donated $20 million to OpenAI, and also secretly helped the company and Kojima

Thanks to the lawsuit between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, internal emails and documents related to OpenAI’s early years have surfaced online. As PC Gamer noticed, they unexpectedly mention Valve founder Gabe Newell. According to the documents, in 2018 he donated $20 million to OpenAI and for some time served as its only informal adviser.

Judging by the documents, OpenAI’s early successes were largely connected to Gabe’s support. His donation was the second-largest private contribution to OpenAI between 2016 and 2020, after Elon Musk. At the same time, Newell was also the only member of the company’s informal advisory board.

Gabe’s relationship with OpenAI was connected to two projects. First, the OpenAI team used Dota 2 to train its neural network.

However, what interested the businessman most of all was neurotechnology. Newell founded Starfish Neuroscience, a company developing chips for brain-computer interfaces. According to the documents, the Valve boss actively communicated with Elon Musk about his company Neuralink. Musk shared the results of Neuralink’s closed experiments with him — including the successful implantation of thousands of electrodes into a monkey’s brain. And where does Hideo Kojima come in? In one of the emails, Newell personally asked Musk to arrange a tour of SpaceX for the Japanese game designer.

In other news from the Musk ecosystem, the tech mogul recently launched XChat, a WhatsApp competitor for iPhone and iPad. Additionally, reports have emerged that SpaceX is planning to venture into in-house chip manufacturing.

Do you think Gabe Newell’s interest in AI and neurointerfaces will influence Valve’s future games?