About a week ago, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company had violated its founding principles by becoming a closed-source ally of Microsoft and had abandoned its original goal of serving the public good.
OpenAI, however, announced on Wednesday that it plans to reject Elon Musk’s assertions in a recent lawsuit, implying that despite Musk’s involvement in the company’s co-founding, his influence on its growth and achievements was minimal.
The company disclosed in a blog post written by Wojciech Zaremba, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and OpenAI that, since it was founded in 2015, it has raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his initial pledge to provide as much as $1 billion in funding. According to the company, it has received more than $90 million from other donors to help fund its research.
Elon wrote in an email: “I think we should say that we are starting with a $1bn funding commitment.”
As the Microsoft-backed company advanced its development of artificial generative intelligence (AGI), it argues that Musk was aware of and consented to the final move away from total transparency.
Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI. As Ilya told Elon: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science…”, to which Elon replied: “Yup”.
According to OpenAI, the billionaire entrepreneur pressed for the CEO position, initial board control, and majority ownership. After that failed, Musk proposed combining OpenAI with Tesla, but that too wasn’t successful.
