The artificial intelligence company OpenAI assures that “it is sad” that Elon Musk, one of its co-founders and former directors, has sued it for supposedly moving away from its goal of achieving a benefit for humanity with the development of AI. The company rejects the accusations, assures that it will take measures to dismiss the complaint and in the process dismantles several of Musk’s arguments, ensuring that he was in favor of things for which he is now complaining.
“We are sad to have ended this with someone we have deeply admired,” is stated in a post on the OpenAI blog. “Someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, created a competitor, and sued us when we started making significant progress toward OpenAI’s mission without him,” he concludes.
OpenAI suggests that Musk’s crusade is due to a failed attempt for the company to integrate into Tesla in 2017. For this, it has cited emails from the businessman himself. That year OpenAI, which was a non-profit organization, decided to create a for-profit entity to raise capital and finance its developments in general AI. Musk agreed, but asked to have a majority stake, control over the board and be the CEO. Likewise, he stopped providing financing until it was granted. When the rest of the members rejected the idea, he proposed integrating OpenAI into the Tesla umbrella. With that alternative rejected, Musk walked away from the project and said that he would set up an AI company on his behalf, within Tesla.
For OpenAI, the attempt to integrate it into Tesla or direct it would demonstrate that Musk has not always been in favor of OpenAI being independent of business controls, as he now denounces due to Microsoft’s participation in the company. “Tesla is the only way (OpenAI) could even compare to Google,” he said in one of the emails.
One of the world’s great fortunes, who has not participated in the company since 2019, alleges in his lawsuit that the startup’s close relationship with Microsoft has undermined its original mission of creating open source technology free of corporate influences. She maintains that what moves her today is making money. But the published emails also show that he agreed to limit the idea of ????sharing the progress that was achieved with everyone, retouching OpenAI’s initial mission of creating open source technology free of corporate influences.
Another point that the current management of OpenAI highlights is that in the first rounds Musk pushed to get more money and be on par with the investment efforts of Google or Facebook, which is why he urged them to be much more ambitious when raising capital. Again, it would show that Musk was not closed to deviating from OpenAI’s initial mission.
