Elon Musk Vs OpenAI: Here's All You Need To KnowThe tech world is witnessing an intense legal battle between Sam Altman-led OpenAI and billionaire Elon Musk. The ChatGPT maker and the Tesla boss are currently lobbing allegations at each other. It is worth mentioning that Elon Musk founded and funded the AI startup, but he has severely criticised the company in recent years.
On February 29, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. In the lawsuit filed with a San Francisco court, the SpaceX founder alleged that OpenAI has diverged from its original, nonprofit mission by partnering with tech giant Microsoft. Elon Musk alleged that OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman originally approached him to make an open-source, non-profit company, but the company is now focused on making money.
In November 2023, during an event, Elon Musk reportedly told the audience that the ChatGPT maker had deviated from its original mission. “In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” said Elon Musk in the lawsuit, as quoted by CNBC.
According to Elon Musk, OpenAI’s founding mission was to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly.” OpenAI was founded in 2015. However, Elon Musk left OpenAI in February 2018. The company became the market leader in artificial intelligence technology by unveiling the AI chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022. The tech world was surprised by the popularity of ChatGPT.
On March 5, OpenAI responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit and dismissed all of Musk’s claims. OpenAI has also released certain private emails from Elon Musk sent between 2015 and 2018. “As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” said OpenAI in a crucial blog post. In 2017, when the OpenAI team decided to create a for-profit entity, Elon claimed majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO.
The blog post authored by Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba also claimed that Elon Musk forwarded an email to OpenAI in 2018 suggesting that the company should “attach to Tesla as its cash cow.”
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” added the company in the post.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024
At the same time, Elon Musk shared an image on his X handle on March 6, indicating the changes that have happened to OpenAI in recent years. It is worth mentioning that the battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI comes at a time when discussions are emerging among people about the potential impact of AI and what lies ahead.