Last week, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, which he co-founded. Now that company is defending itself against Musk’s allegation that it is unfairly pursuing a for-profit model. Indeed, old emails allegedly show that the tech tycoon himself wanted OpenAI to bring in more money to develop AI.
Musk’s lawsuit concluded last week that OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source party that is practically a subsidiary of Microsoft. Meanwhile, numerous parties use OpenAI’s services, which predominantly consist of offering LLMs such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. With that, the company raked in 1.45 billion euros in annual revenue by 2023.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018. Outwardly, he claimed it was because of a possible conflict of interest, as Tesla was working on self-driving AI functions at the time. However, this doesn’t appear to be the case. OpenAI now reveals the steps Musk suggested, which differ greatly from the framing presented by the billionaire himself. Namely, he claims that OpenAI should have made its own technologies available for free so that everyone could benefit from the most advanced form of AI.
OpenAI contradicts Musk with email evidence
In a blog post signed by CEO Sam Altman and co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, among others, OpenAI reveals several emails from Musk. These show that he repeatedly stressed the importance of a huge budget for OpenAI. Musk reminded his associates at the time that Google, with a market value of $800 billion, required an AI counterweight.
So Musk would have emphatically supported OpenAI’s ambitions to raise more money. After initially promising to guarantee $1 billion in funding, he gradually backed off. First, he sought to take full control of OpenAI. Musk wanted to become CEO and later even place the AI initiative under Tesla. Only then would OpenAI have a chance of success that was “more than 0.”
After providing this evidence, OpenAI affirms that it does seek to advance humanity in several ways. For example, it cites that its proprietary technology could accelerate Albania’s attempt at EU membership by about 5.5 years by rapidly searching through relevant documents. It is a continuation of the framing from OpenAI that characterizes its own company as a driver of desirable, secure AI development.
Now Musk’s claim remains intact that the company’s technology is anything but open-source, which contrasts sharply with its pre-stated ambitions that the technology developed should be shared as transparently as possible. Whether the tech billionaire is the right person to bring this up, however, remains to be seen. If the emails are authentic (and we see no reason to doubt this), then Musk himself will at least have a lot of explaining to do in the lawsuit he himself filed.
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