OpenAI Fires At Elon Musk With A Blog Post; Shares Emails That Reveal Musk Wanted An OpenAI For Profit
Back in November, Elon Musk filed a case in a federal court against OpenAI to stop the ChatGPT maker from converting from a non-profit business to a fully for-profit business. Well, defending itself OpenAI yesterday released a blog post that revealed various emails and messages between Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and former board member Shivon Zills proving that it was Musk who wanted an OpenAI for profit initially. He even created a public benefit corporation on September 15, 20,17 as the proposed future structure of OpenAI.
It is revealed that Musk not only wanted but created a for-profit as OpenAI’s proposed new structure. When he didn’t get majority equity and full control, he walked away and also started his competing AI company, xAI.
OpenAI has shared details in a proper year-wise manner which shows how Musk was persuaded for the CEO position and even shared the idea of merging OpenAI with Tesla. Elon stated in an email, “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google.” Further, he mentioned, “The only paths I can think of are a major expansion of OpenAI and a major expansion of Tesla AI.”
The post also mentions that on one call Musk also said that he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $808 for a city on Mars. When the negotiations were rejected by OpenAI’s cofounders, Musk decided to resign as a co-chair of OpenAI.
Then in March 2019, OpenAI public announced capped-profit OpenAI LP that was governed by the non-profit and also sent an advance copy of the announcement blog post to Elon Musk. To this Musk replied, Please be explicit that I have no financial interest in the for-profit arm of OpenAI.
Meanwhile, in March 2023, Musk formed xAI- a public benefit corporation and a direct competitor to OpenAI. And now Musk decided to file a lawsuit against OpenAI to stop the company from its mission of converting to a for-profit business.
In the blog post, Open AI referred to Musk saying, “You can’t sue your way to AGI. We have great respect for Elon’s accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom. It is critical for the U.S. to remain the global leader in AI. Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, and we have been and will remain a mission-driven organization. We hope Elon shares that goal, and will uphold the values of innovation and free market competition that have driven his own success.”
