The ChatGPT developer has rejected the billionaire’s claims outlined in a lawsuit last week. Musk claimed that OpenAI was allegedly focused on making money and forgot about the primary goal — development «of artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity».
OpenAI responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit, stating that he once wanted to gain «absolute control» over the company by merging it with Tesla.
«When we discussed the commercial structure, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla so that he would have absolute control, including «a majority stake, initial control of the board of directors, and the position of CEO», — the post says on behalf of OpenAI’s co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Shulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. «We could not negotiate a commercial agreement with Elon because we believed that any person with absolute control over OpenAI would be opposed to our mission».
In the lawsuit, Musk claimed that OpenAI has effectively become a «closed-source Microsoft subsidiary» that focuses on making money rather than benefiting humanity. He adds that the startup has abandoned the original nonprofit mission it helped fund, which is a breach of contract.
Despite the fact that Musk’s complaint mentions the «founding agreement», it has not been officially made public, and OpenAI’s post does not directly mention its existence.
OpenAI also defends its decision not to post open source code to its creation:
«Elon understood that the mission did not involve the use of open-source AGI (general artificial intelligence)», — the post says.
The company attached a January 2016 email correspondence in which Sutskever wrote: «If we are getting closer to creating artificial intelligence, it is right to become less open» and that «it is perfectly fine not to share research», to which Musk responded in the affirmative.
Musk’s lawsuit also makes other strange accusations, such as that GPT-4 is «a de facto proprietary Microsoft algorithm» that represents general artificial intelligence. OpenAI also rejected these claims in a separate letter to employees.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 and announced at the time that it had $1 billion in funding. Judging by the published old emails, it was Musk who suggested this figure, although he himself provided the company with less than $45 million.
«We need to use a much higher figure than $100 million so that we don’t appear hopeless… I think we should say we are starting with $1 billion in funding… I’ll cover anything that other investors won’t».
Further, Musk’s departure and refusal to provide the promised funding became problematic for OpenAI — as the development of large-scale artificial intelligence models, such as the DALL-E image generator and the GPT series, required a lot of money. Eventually, in 2019, the startup announced the creation of a new commercial organization to fund research and began working with Microsoft, which provided billions of dollars in financing and resources, while securing exclusive licenses to use OpenAI technologies in its own products.