Recently, Elon Musk, who participated in the formation of the OpenAI startup, filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging its deviation from the principles of a non-profit organisation. The company disputes these allegations in an open letter to Musk, in which they accuse the billionaire of hypocrisy.
A corporate blog post by OpenAI, confirms Bloomberg which was signed by CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and even Chief Researcher Ilya Sutskever. The OpenAI founders plan to assert their rights in court, challenging Musk’s claims and lawsuit.
In their open letter, the OpenAI executives expressed regret over Musk’s change of heart, whom they once admired. Elon Musk first claimed that the startup would fail, then founded a competing company xAI and finally, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI – this sequence of actions has left the OpenAI founders unenthused.
The OpenAI leadership highlighted, once again, Musk’s correspondence where he supported the startup’s efforts to attract investor funding. Specifically, he underscored that planned $100 million wouldn’t be sufficient to challenge Google in AI, suggesting starting at $1 billion. He even offered to provide the deficit from personal assets. In practice, Musk invested slightly less than $45 million in OpenAI, which at one point was the largest capital investment in the startup from a single source.
Responding to the accusations of alignment with Microsoft, OpenAI representatives argued that at one point, Musk wanted to incorporate the startup into Tesla and lead it himself. Musk allegedly didn’t object against deviating from the free software distribution principle, as indicated by his correspondence with Ilya Sutskever in 2016. Sutskever explained that as they neared the goal of developing artificial intelligence, it would make sense to become less of an open company, especially in terms of protecting fundamental developments. According to the correspondence, Musk shared and supported this viewpoint at that time.
