OpenAI responded to Musk’s lawsuit: he wanted full control of the company and to merge it with Tesla
OpenAI denied the claims of Elon Musk, who accused the company of abandoning its original mission to create AI for the benefit of humanity. On its blog, the tech giant focused on the development of safe and useful technology and shared details of cooperation with the billionaire.
According to OpenAI, when it was founded in 2015, CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman planned to raise $100 million in investment. However, Elon Musk considered it necessary to deal with a larger amount.
“We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless… I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment… I will cover whatever anyone else doesn’t provide,” OpenAI quotes one of the billionaire’s letters.
However, the company ultimately received less than $45 million from Elon Musk. Other donors provided OpenAI with more than $90 million.
OpenAI also talked about how they assessed the realistic path to creating general artificial intelligence (AGI). In early 2017, they concluded that such a project would require huge amounts of computing. And with it, much more capital.
Potentially, we were talking about billions of dollars a year. According to OpenAI, this is much more “than any of us, especially Elon, thought we could raise as a nonprofit organization.” Therefore, OpenAI and Elon Musk recognized that a commercial structure was needed to obtain resources.
According to the company, Elon Musk sought a majority stake, the position of CEO, and initial control of the board of directors. However, OpenAI could not agree to the businessman’s commercial terms, believing that “absolute control over OpenAI by one person is contrary to the mission.”
After that, Elon Musk proposed to merge OpenAI with Tesla. In his letter, the billionaire claimed that this decision would be the right one.
“Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero,” Elon Musk assured in the letter.
OpenAI reported that shortly afterwards, the billionaire decided to leave the company and said that the probability of its success was zero. He also said that he planned to create a competitor to AGI within Tesla.
When Elon Musk left at the end of February 2018, he told the OpenAI team that he would support them in finding their own way to raise billions of dollars. But already in December of that year, he sent a letter in which he wrote that even “raising a few hundred million will not be enough. We need billions a year immediately or forget it.”
Among other things, OpenAI explained its decision not to post open source code. The company noted that Elon Musk “understood that the mission does not include open-sourcing AGI.”
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” the company added.
Recently, Elon Musk sued OpenAI. In the lawsuit, the billionaire accused the company of abandoning its mission to develop AI that would benefit humanity. He also accused OpenAI of turning its partnership with Microsoft into a subsidiary aimed at increasing profits.