OpenAI hits back at Elon Musk, saying he supported its for-profit ambitions

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has hit back at Elon Musk, who’s suing the corporate for chasing profits and forsaking its original, nonprofit mission of developing artificial intelligence to profit all of humanity.

In a blog post Tuesday night, OpenAI published a lot of partly redacted emails sent from Musk to company officials. The emails appear to indicate Musk (pictured) acknowledging that OpenAI would wish to make a “ton of cash” with the intention to fund the big computing resources it needed to bring its AI ambitions to life.

Within the emails, Musk, one in every of the co-founders of OpenAI, argued that the corporate had virtually no probability of making a successful generative AI platform by raising funding alone, and that it might need to seek out alternative revenue sources to survive.

As an illustration, in a November 2015 email to OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, Musk stated his belief that the corporate would wish to lift way more than $100 million if it were to “avoid sounding hopeless.” As an alternative, Musk suggested that the corporate commit to obtaining as much as $1 billion in funding, and promised that he would make up the shortfall within the event it did not secure that quantity.

OpenAI says Musk never followed through on that commitment and as an alternative only provided $45 million in funding, while other donors raised $90 million.

Later, in a Feb. 1, 2018 email, Musk told OpenAI executives that the one viable path forward was for Tesla Inc., his electric automotive company, to purchase the startup. The executives declined the suggestion, and Musk ultimately quit the corporate later that 12 months.

In December 2018, Musk emailed Altman and other executives to say the corporate wouldn’t remain relevant with no dramatic change in execution and resources. He said “this needs billions per 12 months immediately or forget it,” before adding, “I actually hope I’m flawed.”

OpenAI’s executive team agreed with the necessity for billions of dollars and in 2019 formed OpenAI LP, which is a for-profit entity that exists inside the company’s larger structure. It was OpenAI LP that saved the day, transforming what was essentially a worthless startup into the $90 billion valued company that it’s today. Altman has been credited as being the mastermind of that transformation and pivotal to its success.

Since then, OpenAI has developed a really strong relationship with Microsoft Corp., which has committed over $13 billion in funding. Microsoft has develop into its closest partner and collaborator, and has privileged access to OpenAI’s technology.

In his lawsuit filed last week, Musk said OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft violated its founding charter, and that this represents a breach of contract. Musk’s lawyers are asking for a trial jury and are demanding that it pays back the profits it earned through its OpenAI LP entity.

Musk’s lawyers further allege that the inner workings of GPT-4, the big language model that powers ChatGPT, are a whole secret “except to OpenAI – and on information and belief, Microsoft.” He argued that this secrecy is driven by industrial interest quite than for safety reasons.

OpenAI responded to the lawsuit, saying it intends to dismiss all of Musk’s claims.

Musk had been critical of OpenAI prior to filing his lawsuit. In November, he appeared at The Latest York Times’ DealBook conference, where he told an audience that the corporate had deviated from its original mission. “OpenAI needs to be renamed ‘super closed source for max profit AI,’ because that is what it actually is,” he said onstage on the event. He added that it has transformed from an “open-source foundation” to develop into a multibillion-dollar “for-profit corporation with closed-source” technology.

OpenAI was originally founded to counter what its founders believed was a serious threat posed to humanity by artificial generative intelligence, or AGI. Upon its founding, it created a board of overseers to review all products it created, and originally it made the code for all of its early projects public.

In its blog post, OpenAI said it has not diverged from its original mission and that it might move to dismiss all of Musk’s claims. The corporate insists that its technology is broadly available and that it helps to enhance people’s lives. It also reiterated its commitment to the security of its products.

“We’re sad that it has come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired – someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we might fail, began a competitor, after which sued us once we began making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” the corporate said.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons