KEY TAKEAWAYS
- OpenAI hit back in a blog post against Elon Musk’s lawsuit, alleging the billionaire had backed its plans to pursue profits.
- OpenAI included a slew of emails from Musk over the years to prove its point and said it intended to “move to dismiss all of Musk’s legal claims.”
- Musk last week sued OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman, among others, alleging they breached the company’s founding mission in 2015 by prioritizing commercial needs over benefits for humanity.
OpenAI hit back at a lawsuit filed against it by Elon Musk in a blog post Tuesday, alleging that the billionaire had backed the startup’s plans to pursue profits.
OpenAI included a slew of emails from Musk over the years allegedly showing he backed its move to become a commercial business and also said it intended to “move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.” OpenAI is the artificial intelligence (AI) behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT.
Musk sued OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman, among others, last week, alleging they breached the company’s founding mission in 2015 by putting profits over seeking benefits for humanity.
The Tesla Inc. (TSLA) CEO said OpenAI’s close relationship with Microsoft (MSFT), the startup’s largest investor, had led it to abandon its original principles of creating an open-source technology not beholden to profits.
The blog post was co-authored by several of OpenAI’s co-founders, including Altman, Greg Brockman, and IIya Sutskever.
OpenAI said in the blog post that Musk “wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO” in late 2017 and withheld funding while the discussions were ongoing. Musk then suggested that OpenAI merge with Tesla.
“In early 2017, we came to the realization that building AGI will require vast quantities of compute,” OpenAI said in the post. “We all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission—billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit.”
Separately, in an internal memo to employees last Friday cited by CNBC, top OpenAI executives reportedly pushed back against Musk’s claims. “We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not being involved with the company today,” OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon wrote in the memo.
Musk, who launched his own AI company, xAI, in 2023, left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018. The company launched its AI flagship tool Grok in November, around the same time OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, its AI model’s latest generation.
At the moment, however, Grok is available only to users who pay for a subscription on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.