"Elon Wanted Us To Merge With Tesla Or...": OpenAI Reveals
Last week, billionaire Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its co-founders. Elon Musk alleged in the lawsuit that the renowned artificial intelligence (AI) company has compromised its original mission of creating AI systems for the benefit of humanity. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has finally responded to the billionaire”s lawsuit. OpenAI has also released a series of emails to the matter and refuted the claims of Elon Musk.
“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 blog post on March 5. It is to be noted that this blog post was authored by Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. As per the post, the OpenAI team, including Elon Musk, decided to create a for-profit entity in 2017. OpenAI also stated that Musk wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be the CEO. The post mentioned that Elon Musk withheld funding in the middle of these discussions.
OpenAI also noted that they were not able to agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon Musk. This comes because they felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI. On that occasion, Elon Musk also suggested merging OpenAI into Tesla.
In February 2018, Elon Musk forwarded an email to OpenAI suggesting that the company should “attach to Tesla as its cash cow.” The blog post also added, “Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0 and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.” In February 2018, the Tesla boss left OpenAI.
OpenAI said that they are making their technology “broadly usable” in ways that empower people and enhance their daily lives. “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 ChatGPT maker.
