OpenAI, the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup, said Wednesday it plans to reject all of Elon Musk’s claims in a recent lawsuit and shed more light on its relationship with the billionaire entrepreneur who helped found the startup.
In a suspension compiled by the entire OpenAI team – Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, Wojciech Zaremba and OpenAI – the startup revealed that since its inception in 2015, it had raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite the initial its commitment to provide $1 billion in funding. The agency also secured more than $90 million from other donors to support its research efforts.
OpenAI’s response follows Musk’s lawsuit against Altman, Brockman, OpenAI and other company affiliates last week, alleging that the ChatGPT maker violated original contractual agreements by pursuing profits instead of the nonprofit’s founding mission of developing AI that benefits humanity. Musk said the founding agreement required OpenAI to make its technology “freely available” to the public and that the company had changed its mission statement to maximizing Microsoft’s profits.
As OpenAI realized the massive computing resources required to create AI—an AI whose intelligence is equivalent to, if not higher than, human intelligence—estimated to cost billions of dollars annually, the need for a for-profit entity, today’s blog post was assured.
That’s when the disagreements between Musk and other Tesla co-founders began, OpenAI wrote in the blog post, which includes five email exchanges between Musk and OpenAI executives. “As we discussed a for-profit structure to advance the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or wanted full control. Elon left OpenAI, saying there had to be a relevant Google/DeepMind competitor and that he was going to do it himself. He said he would support us in finding our own path.”
OpenAI said Wednesday that it maintains its mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which includes developing safe and useful AGI while promoting broad access to its tools. The startup reported how its tool is being used in places like Kenya and India to empower people and improve their daily lives.
“We’re sorry we’ve come to this with someone we deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we’d fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making significant progress toward the OpenAI mission without him,” he wrote OpenAI in the blog post.
In response to Musk’s charge that OpenAI was abandoning open source principles, the Microsoft-backed firm countered by stressing that Musk was aware of and agreed to the eventual move away from full transparency as the agency made significant progress in AGI development.
“Elon understood that the mission did not involve open source AGI. As Ilya told Elon: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. Open in openAI means everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it’s built, but it’s perfectly fine not to share the science…”, to which Elon replied, “Yes.”
