OpenAI Shares Correspondence on Musk's For-Profit Ambitions Amid Lawsuit Controversy
Summary:
OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has disclosed a number of emails between its board members and Elon Musk, discussing Musk's plans to make the company for-profit. This follows a lawsuit from Musk against OpenAI over alleged breach of the initial agreement to make AI advancements public. Musk hopes to prevent commercial profiting from AGI tech, while OpenAI plans to dismiss his claims. The situation has led to industry concerns over the future stability of the company.
OpenAI, the creator of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, recently shared a string of emails that reveal discussions with board members and Elon Musk concerning Musk's ambitions to shift the company towards for-profit operations. On March 5, several OpenAI executives, including Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba co-published a blog, detailing certain company data and examining the relationship with Musk. This comes after Musk sued OpenAI on February 29 citing a violation of the initial pact that AI advancements would be made publicly available under a sizeable partnership with Microsoft.
Musk is advocating for OpenAI to return to its roots as an open-source organization, and is seeking a legal injunction to prevent the commercial profiting from AGI technology. However, the OpenAI executives have declared in their blog post that they plan to reject all of Musk's allegations and argued that Musk was initially spearheading efforts to garner extra capital from investors.
"Greg and Sam originally aimed to gather $100mn when OpenAI was launched in late 2015,” they revealed, but “In an email, Elon proposed: ‘the sum we aim at has to be significantly higher than $100mn to avoid appearing desperate… I propose we state that we're starting with a commitment to fund $1bn.’”
The disclosed emails from Musk were shared by OpenAI. OpenAI’s original status as a non-profit presented challenges for raising investment capital. As a result, Musk and the company's founders agreed to establish a “for-profit” entity, Musk taking on the majority equity, control of the board and CEO role was his preference. The blog post indicates that Musk curtailed any further investment in OpenAI as this dialogue continued.
"We opposed Elon's for-profit proposal as we believed it to be contradicting our mission for any single person to maintain absolute control over OpenAI. Consequently, he proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla,” the blog post reads.
OpenAI says its mission is advancing through the development of its “useful tools" that are broadly offered to the public. The company maintains that Musk was aware that the mission did not necessarily entail “open-sourcing AGI”. It highlighted an exchange between Sutskever and Musk, where Sutskever argues that as AI advances, openness should be reduced. In his response, Musk agreed.
Musk’s legal action against OpenAI has stirred anticipation in industry experts towards the possible downfall of the company. Some speculate that the company is in a “fragile position" and may find itself following the path of businesses like WeWork, which went from being valued at almost $50 billion to filing for bankruptcy.
Published At
3/6/2024 3:03:17 PM
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