OpenAI, the company responsible for developing the widely popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has made public a series of emails exchanged between its board members and Elon Musk regarding his proposal to transform the company into a “for-profit” entity.
On March 5, OpenAI released a blog post authored by its leaders, including Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, to provide insight into the company’s intentions and its relationship with Musk.
This comes after Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on February 29, alleging a breach of the original agreement to make AI advancements “freely available to the public” through a partnership with Microsoft worth billions of dollars.
Musk’s lawsuit urges OpenAI to return to its roots as an open-source company and seeks an injunction to prevent the for-profit exploitation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology.
However, the blog post from OpenAI’s leaders states their intention to dismiss all of Musk’s claims and reveals that Musk himself was leading efforts to secure additional funding from investors.
“When Greg and Sam started OpenAI in late 2015, they initially planned to raise $100 million,” they wrote. “However, Elon suggested in an email: ‘We need to aim for a much larger amount than $100 million to avoid sounding hopeless… I think we should state that we have a $1 billion funding commitment.'”
OpenAI has released emails from Musk. Source: OpenAI
Initially, the nonprofit status of the company posed challenges in attracting investment. Therefore, the founders of OpenAI and Musk decided to create a for-profit entity, with Musk seeking majority equity, board control, and the position of CEO.
According to the blog post, Musk withheld further funding from the company while discussions were ongoing.
OpenAI asserts that it is advancing its mission by developing beneficial tools that are accessible to the public. The company maintains that Musk understood that their mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI.
To support this, OpenAI shared an email exchange between Sutskever and Musk, in which Sutskever stated, “As we come closer to building AI, it will make sense to be less open. The ‘Open’ in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from AI once it’s built, but it’s completely fine to not share the science…,” to which Elon replied, “Yup.”
OpenAI has released emails between Sutskever and Musk. Source: OpenAI
Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI has raised concerns among industry experts, who fear that the company may face a potential downfall. Some even liken it to other companies like WeWork, which was once a unicorn startup valued at nearly $50 billion but eventually filed for bankruptcy.
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