OpenAI on Tuesday slammed Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the organization and released a trove of emails purportedly sent by the billionaire showing that he backed the creation of a for-profit entity.
Musk filed a suit against the ChatGPT maker 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 dismiss all of Elon’s claims,” further accusing Musk of ditching the company and setting up his own rival after he’d tried and failed to take control of OpenAI himself.
Musk, who helped to get OpenAI off the ground in 2015, claimed in his suit that Altman and others had reneged on a foundational agreement that the company’s research would be “freely available to the public” by becoming a “de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.” Microsoft has invested a reported $13 billion in OpenAI’s for-profit arm.
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In a blog post 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 go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless… I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment,” Musk wrote to Altman and Brockman in November 2015.
The founders say they realized that the incredible costs of developing artificial general intelligence—AI systems that can perform as well as or better than humans—involved attracting an amount of investment “which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise” as a non-profit, according to the blog.
“In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity,” the blog claims. “Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding.”
“We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” the post continues. “He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should ‘attach to Tesla as its cash cow.’” In December 2018, one email from Musk reads: “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”
Amid the refusal to grant Musk total control, the blog claims, the SpaceX founder “soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.” Musk created his own AI company, xAI, last year.
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply 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 towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” the blog says.
