FILE – The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston. A barrage of high-profile lawsuits in a New York federal court, including one by the New York Times, will test the future of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence products. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
OpenAI fired back at Elon Musk on Tuesday, after the billionaire sued the ChatGPT developer last week for allegedly straying from its original mission to develop artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
The artificial intelligence (AI) company said in a blog post, accompanied by several emails between Musk and members of OpenAI, that Musk supported turning the company into a for-profit entity.
However, Musk, who helped found OpenAI, “wanted us to merge with Tesla” or “wanted full control” of the new for-profit entity, according to OpenAI.
“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,” the company wrote Tuesday.
“Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI [artificial general intelligence] competitor within Tesla,” it added. “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.”
Musk, who now owns a separate AI company called xAI, sued OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman on Friday, alleging they set the company’s founding agreement “aflame” in partnering with Microsoft.
The billionaire claimed that he, Altman and Brockman agreed in founding OpenAI in 2015 that it would be a nonprofit that developed AGI for the benefit of humanity and would remain open source.
Musk alleged that OpenAI is now developing and refining AGI “to maximize profits for Microsoft” and has opted not to provide details about the internal design of its latest AI model in order “to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft.”
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit says.
The company said in Tuesday’s blog post that it plans to “move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”
“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,” it wrote.
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