Sam Altman talks about how in 2014, the so-called "elderly" in the field thought the idea of OpenAI is baseless.

"In 2014, we started saying, "You know, we should really do something about this." It was incredibly unpopular at the time. We had said we want to make an AGI lab, and all the elders of the field were like, "You're insane. You're a scammer."

This is because, at the time, people thought AGI was 100 years away and none of these approaches were going to work. We really said, "Let's just push on this one idea that scaling deep learning seems to matter."

We didn't know at the time how beautifully predictable the scaling laws were, but it was at least clear back in those days that if you threw more compute at something, you got better results most of the time.

We kind of just decided we were going to push on it as far as we could."

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From 'TreeHacks" YT channel (link in comment)