OpenAI on Tuesday criticized Elon Musk's lawsuit against the organization and released a trove of emails allegedly sent by the billionaire that show he supports the creation of a for-profit entity.
Musk filed a lawsuit against the maker of ChatGPT last week, accusing the research lab and its CEO Sam Altman of betraying OpenAI's original mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. OpenAI now says it intends to “move to deny all of Elon's claims,” also accusing Musk of abandoning the company and creating his own competitor after he tried and failed to take control of OpenAI himself.
Musk, who helped launch OpenAI in 2015, claimed in his lawsuit that Altman and others reneged on a founding agreement stipulating that the company's research would be “freely available to the public” by becoming a “de facto subsidiary of the world's largest company.” Technology company in the world: Microsoft. Microsoft has invested $13 billion in its for-profit arm OpenAI.
in Blog post On Tuesday, OpenAI claimed that Musk pushed the founders to raise hundreds of millions of dollars more from investors than the $100 million Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman initially aimed for. “We need to get a lot bigger than $100 million to avoid looking hopeless,” Musk wrote to Altman and Brockman in November 2015. “I think we should say we're starting with a $1 billion funding commitment.”
The founders say they realized that the high costs of developing artificial general intelligence — AI systems that could perform as well as or better than humans — entailed attracting an amount of investment “far beyond what any of us, especially Elon, had thought possible.” d be able to file as a non-profit organization, according to the blog.
“In late 2017, Elon and I decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity,” the blog says. “Elon wanted a majority stake, initial control of the board, and become CEO. In the midst of these discussions, he withheld financing.”
“We could not agree on profit terms with Elon because we felt it conflicted with the mission of any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” the post continues. He then proposed instead integrating OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon sent us an email suggesting that OpenAI should “pair with Tesla as its cash cow.” In December 2018, an email from Musk stated: “Even raising several hundred million will not be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.
Amid the refusal to give Musk full control, the blog claims that the SpaceX founder “soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.” Musk created his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, last year.
“We are saddened that it has come to this with someone we greatly admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress toward the OpenAI mission without him,” the blog says.
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