OpenAI says Elon Musk tried to merge it with Tesla
OpenAI, in its first public comments on Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the influential artificial intelligence research lab, said Mr. Musk attempted to transform the lab from a nonprofit to a for-profit venture before leaving the company in early 2018.
The comments, made in a blog post published on Tuesday evening are part of an escalating feud between Mr Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of an industry-wide AI boom. The company said it planned to dismiss all claims in Mr Musk’s lawsuit.
Mr Musk on Friday filed the suit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of building AI for the public good. He said that when the AI Lab entered into a multi-billion dollar partnership with tech giant Microsoft, it abandoned its promise to carefully develop AI and share it freely with the public.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI as a nonprofit with Mr. Altman in 2015; Greg Brockman, the former Chief Technology Officer of the payments company Stripe; and several AI researchers. Before the lab was announced, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman planned to raise about $100 million, but Mr. Musk said he had to tell the press and public that it was raising $1 billion and that he would pay for the additional funds would provide, according to a concurrent researcher. email address included in the blog post.
Mr Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We need to go with a much larger amount than $100 million to avoid sounding hopeless,” he wrote in the email. “I will reimburse anything that someone else does not provide.”
The nonprofit has raised less than $45 million from Mr. Musk and more than $90 million from other donors, OpenAI said in its blog post.
The company said Mr. Musk was among the OpenAI leaders who realized in early 2017 that if the lab remained a nonprofit, it would not be able to raise the money it would need to achieve its lofty goal: building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
“We all understood that we needed much more capital to succeed in our mission – billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we could raise as a nonprofit,” the blog post said .
When Mr. Musk and the other founders of OpenAI agreed to form a for-profit company, Mr. Musk said he wanted a majority equity in the company, initial control of the board and to become CEO, OpenAI said . Amid the discussions, he withheld funding from the nonprofit, OpenAI said.
The other founders could not agree to his terms because they believed that giving one person absolute control over the organization was contrary to its mission, OpenAI said. Mr Musk then proposed linking OpenAI to his electric car company Tesla, according to another email in the blog post.
“Tesla is the only path that could even hold a candle to Google. Even then, it’s unlikely to counterbalance Google. It’s just not zero,” the email said.
With his lawsuit, Mr. Musk argued that OpenAI had violated its original mission because it no longer shared the underlying technology with the public, which is called “open sourcing.”
OpenAI’s blog post also included an email in which Mr Musk appears to acknowledge that as the company nears the creation of AGI, it would have to hold back the technology to prevent it from causing harm.