 "Vantage | Why is OpenAI battling out with Elon Musk?")
A fight has begun between the world’s second richest man, Elon Musk, and a company he helped found, OpenAI.
Musk fired the first salvo a week ago. Last Thursday, he filed a lawsuit in San Francisco. He accused OpenAI of betraying its foundational mission. Musk says OpenAI was supposed to help humanity, but instead, it has become a profit-making subsidiary of Microsoft.
Musk blames the other founders of OpenAI for this. He says they “set the founding agreement aflame.” He is referring to CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman. So, Musk is suing both men and OpenAI itself.
Musk claims he wants to put the “open” back in OpenAI. As in, he wants the technology to be open source. Meaning anyone can legally use the code and go about building their own AI models. He calls OpenAI—Closed AI.
Sam Altman and his gang aren’t amused. They decided to hit back on Wednesday. They’ve released a number of emails, dated between 2015 and 2018. These emails reveal a different story. It seems Musk isn’t upset about OpenAI’s profits, but he is angry that he won’t get a share. It turns out that Musk himself wanted OpenAI to become a for-profit firm.
OpenAI is effectively saying that Musk was trying to blackmail it. He was withholding funding and asking to become CEO. When that failed, he suggested merging OpenAI with Tesla. Which is a bit hypocritical considering that he is crying foul about OpenAI working for Microsoft.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsSome may agree with Musk’s view that, since he was OpenAI’s biggest donor, he had the first rights to all its profits. But the blogpost disputes that when it states, “In total, the non-profit has raised less than $45 million from Elon and more than $90 million from other donors.”
They don’t go into the split. So Musk still could have been the biggest donor, but he didn’t seem to have the controlling share. That may explain why he eventually walked off. Musk left OpenAI in early 2018. To build his own AI start-up within Tesla. He basically founded an OpenAI competitor and used Tesla to bankroll it. It was a smart move. Or it would’ve been if it had worked out.
Today, Musk has an artificial intelligence firm called xAI. It has created a language model called Grok, and it is not really considered pathbreaking. So Musk could be hoping his lawsuit helps his new company too.
Remember, if OpenAI is forced to become open-source, Musk can use its technology to boost his own, for-profit company.
However, the probability of this is low because of the emails OpenAI has just leaked. One is particularly damning. OpenAI’s former chief scientist wrote this: “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 it’s built, but it’s totally ok to not share the science.”
Musk responded positively to this. He said, “Yup.” That proves that either Musk doesn’t really read emails or he knew the “open” part wouldn’t last.
It makes his lawsuit seem disingenuous. Whether courts see it that way is another story, though; we will just have to wait and see how this latest tech feud plays out.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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