Drumil Modi, Pune
OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit by stating that at one point Elon Musk wanted to have complete control of OpenAI by merging it with his company, Tesla.
OpenAI stated that it would move to dismiss all of Musk’s claims. OpenAI offered its counter-narrative to its claims of the company moving away from its original nonprofit mission.
The blog post by OpenAI stated that as they move forward with a for-profit structure to further develop AI, Musk wanted to merge OpenAI with Tesla. He demanded full control, majority equity, and initial board control and wanted to be the CEO of OpenAI. The blog post was authored by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba. They also stated that they could not agree with Musk’s demand as it would give too much power to a single individual and absolute control over OpenAI.
Musk said that due to Microsoft’s involvement, OpenAI has now become “a closed-source de facto subsidiary”. He also stated how OpenAI has now become more focused on making money, shifting away from its initial goal of benefiting humanity, a mission that Musk helped by funding.
This, in Musk’s opinion, was a breach of contract. The complaint by Musk mentions the OpenAI “funding agreement,” but no official agreement has been made public as of yet. OpenAI’s blog post did not mention if such an agreement existed.
OpenAI defended its decision on how it cannot open-source its wor. The post stated that Musk understood the mission but did not imply open-source AGI, referring to artificial general intelligence. The company also published an email conversation where Sutskever stated that as they get closer to building AI, it will be in their interest to make things less public so that other companies do not copy OpenAI’s model, to which Musk replied “Yup.”
Musk’s lawsuit has some more allegations, one being that GPT-4 is “a de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm” that represents AGI. OpenAI has rejected a lot of these claims in a staff memo but they were not addressed in the blog post published by OpenAI on Tuesday.