Sam Altman's AI company shared emails from Musk as it fired back at the Tesla CEO's lawsuit
OpenAI fired back at Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company by releasing screenshots of emails from Musk during his time at OpenAI that show he supported making it a for-profit company and said a merger with Tesla $TSLA was the only way to compete with Google $GOOGL.
“Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post published late Tuesday. “He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path.”
Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, sued the company and CEO Sam Altman last week, alleging that its multi-billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft $MSFT betrays its founding commitment to benefiting humanity over making profit. The lawsuit has a sparked debate among Musk’s fellow Silicon Valley billionaires about the future of AI.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawsuit says. “Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an [artificial general intelligence] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”
OpenAI said in its response Tuesday that Musk wanted to start with a $1 billion funding commitment “to avoid sounding hopeless,” after Altman and their other co-founder Greg Brockman initially planned to raise $100 million.
By 2017, OpenAI said, the company realized building AGI, or artificial general intelligence, would require billions of dollars per year — far more than the company and Musk thought it would be able to raise as a nonprofit.
OpenAI said Musk wanted majority equity, board control, and the CEO position after the team discussed creating a for-profit entity that year — and withheld his funding during those discussions. But OpenAI said it couldn’t agree to Musk’s terms because it would have been “against the mission” for one person to have absolute control over the company.
In 2018, OpenAI said, Musk suggested merging the company with Tesla, which Musk said in one of the emails could serve “as its cash cow” to compete with Google.
Musk decided to leave OpenAI that year, the company said, adding that he had warned that “our probability of success was 0.” Musk planned to build his own AGI competitor within Tesla, OpenAI said.
“When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars,” OpenAI said. The company included a screenshot of an email from December 2018, in which Musk wrote: “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”
Musk’s lawsuit also seeks an order for OpenAI to open its research and technology to the public. OpenAI said Tuesday that it provides “broad access” to its AI models, including free versions, and that Musk “understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI.”
In one email, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever wrote to Musk, saying “it will make sense to start being less open” as the company continued developing its AI, and that “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.”
Musk responded to that, “Yup.”
“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,” OpenAI said.
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