OpenAI has responded to Elon Muskâs lawsuit by saying that he at one point wanted âabsolute controlâ of the company by merging it with Tesla.
Technology
OpenAI says Elon Musk wanted ‘absolute control’ of the company
OpenAI has responded to a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, saying Musk supported a closed-source, for-profit venture but wanted total control over it.
In a blog post published on Tuesday, OpenAI said it will move to dismiss âall of Elonâs claimsâ and offered its own counter-narrative to his account of the company abandoning its original mission as a nonprofit.
âAs we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,â including âmajority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO,â according to the post, which is authored by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. âWe couldnât agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.â
Musk alleged in his suit that OpenAI has become âa closed-source de facto subsidiaryâ of Microsoft that is focused on making money instead of benefitting humanity. In so doing, his suit claims that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission that he helped fund.
In Muskâs view, this constitutes a breach of a contract. While Muskâs complaint mentions an OpenAI âfounding agreement,â no formal agreement has been made public yet, and OpenAIâs post did not directly address the question of whether one existed.
OpenAI also defended its decision to not open-source its work: âElon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI,â the post says, referring to artificial general intelligence. The company published a January 2016 email conversation in which Sutskever said, âas we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open,â and that âitâs totally OK to not share the science.â Musk replied: âYup.â
There are some other puzzling allegations in Muskâs suit, like the one that GPT-4 is âa de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithmâ that represents artificial general intelligence. OpenAI had already rejected those claims in a staff memo but didnât address them in its public blog post on Tuesday.