Elon’s Hypocrisy? OpenAI reveals Musk backed for-profit plans, wanted Tesla to take over

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI in which he claims that the makers of ChatGPT veered away from its original goal of being an open-source AI company dedicated to humanity’s welfare may backfire on the tech mogul.

OpenAI has now fired back by revealing emails suggesting that Musk himself supported the idea of transforming OpenAI, the studio behind ChatGPT and DallE into a for-profit venture.

Tesla has been working on developing its own AI for their EV’s FSD feature for years now. Moreover, even though Musk has been very critical of OpenAI ever since ChatGPT was released, he has been developing his own, for-profit AI studio called xAI, and its model Grok.

Moreover, the emails revealed that Musk’s wanted to take control of the for-profit AI studio, gain control over its board, and potentially merge it with Tesla. The emails also revealed that Musk wanted to be appointed as the CEO of the AI development studio, and have a complete say in what direction the development of its GPT LLMs take.

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The OpenAI co-founders have published a blog post refuting Musk’s claims and presenting evidence to support their stance.

“We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” revealed OpenAI in the blog post.

Elon Musk, an early investor in OpenAI, departed from its board in 2018 following disagreements with Sam Altman. Musk has since initiated fundraising efforts for his own AI project known as XAI.

In a lawsuit filed last week, Musk alleges that OpenAI violated an agreement to make AI breakthroughs “freely available to the public” by forming a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, which has injected $13 billion (€12 billion) into the company.

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Musk’s lawsuit contends that OpenAI has effectively become a closed-source subsidiary of Microsoft, constituting a breach of contract, according to the Tesla CEO.

OpenAI, which operates on a closed-source basis, stated in its blog post that the cost of developing AI tools posed a challenge to its original non-profit mission of creating AI beneficial to humanity.

“In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding,” the blog elaborated, explaining how the relationship actually fell apart.

Furthermore, OpenAI clarified in its blog post that “Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI (artificial general intelligence).”

The company also released a 2016 email exchange in which Sutskever told Musk that as their AI models became more and more sophisticated, it should be okay if they stopped sharing their trade secrets so openly. Musk responded with “Yup.”

Since launching ChatGPT in November 2022, OpenAI has been leading the way in AI advancements and is estimated to be valued at $80 billion (€73 billion).

However, last November, the turmoil surrounding Altman’s dismissal and subsequent reinstatement by the OpenAI board raised concerns regarding the company’s internal controls and governance.