OpenAI, the developer behind one of the world’s most popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, ChatGPT, has released a series of emails between its board members and Elon Musk regarding the latter’s desire to transform the company into a “for-profit” entity.
On March 5, a blog post co-authored by leaders behind OpenAI, including Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba, was released to share some facts about the company’s intentions and relationship with Musk.
This follows a lawsuit against OpenAI filed by Musk on Feb. 29 over an alleged breach in the original agreement to make AI breakthroughs “freely available to the public” through a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft.
Musk’s suit urges OpenAI to revert to its principles as an open-source company while requesting an injunction to prevent the for-profit exploitation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology.
However, the blog post from OpenAI leaders said they “intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims” and claimed that Musk was spearheading early efforts to raise additional funds from investors.
“When starting OpenAI in late 2015, Greg and Sam had initially planned to raise $100mn,” they wrote, but “Elon said in an email: ‘We need to go with a much bigger number than $100mn to avoid sounding hopeless... I think we should say that we are starting with a $1bn funding commitment.’”
Initially, when the company started, its status as a nonprofit was a roadblock to being able to fundraise from investors. Therefore, the OpenAI founders and Musk decided to create a “for-profit” entity, through which Musk wanted “majority equity, initial board control and to be CEO.”
According to the blog post, Musk withheld any further funding from the company while discussions were still on the table:
“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. He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla.”
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OpenAI said it is “advancing its mission” by building its “beneficial tools” that are widely available to the public. It claimed that Musk understood that the mission did not “imply open-sourcing AGI.”
It shared an email between Sutskever and Musk, in which the former said, “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it’s built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science…,” to which Elon replied, “Yup”.
Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI has prompted experts in the industry to fear for the company’s potential demise. Some have gone so far as to say that it is in a “precarious position” and that it may follow other companies like WeWork — a once unicorn startup that had a value of almost $50 billion and ultimately declared bankruptcy.
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