Encouraging “for-profit” emails from Elon Musk are released by OpenAI in the midst of a lawsuit.
As the two parties’ litigation drags on, OpenAI has made public emails exchanged between Elon Musk and its board members about discussions about converting the organization into a for-profit business.
The creator of ChatGPT, one of the most well-known artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots in the world, OpenAI, has made public a series of emails exchanged between Elon Musk and its board members about the latter’s intention to convert the business into a “for-profit” enterprise.
Leaders of OpenAI, including Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, co-wrote a blog post that was published on March 5.
This comes after Musk launched a lawsuit against OpenAI.
In his lawsuit, Musk calls on OpenAI to return to its founding ideals as an open-source business and asks for an injunction to stop the commercial use of artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology.
The executives of OpenAI, however, said in their blog post that they “intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims” and claimed that Musk was leading the first attempts to get further funding from investors.
“Elon said in an email: ‘We need to go with a much bigger number than $100mn to avoid sounding hopeless…'” Greg and Sam wrote it when they first started OpenAI in late 2015. We need to declare up front that we are committing $1 billion in money, in my opinion.
When the firm first began out, being a charity prevented it from raising money from investors. Thus, Musk and the OpenAI founders made the decision to establish a “for-profit” company, with Musk requesting “majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO.”
The blog post claims that Musk blocked any more money from the business while negotiations were ongoing:
“We believed it was against the objective for any person to have ultimate control of OpenAI, thus we were unable to come to an agreement with Elon on a for-profit. Then he recommended that OpenAI and Tesla be combined instead.
According to OpenAI, creating broadly accessible “beneficial tools” is “advancing its mission.” According to the report, Musk was aware that the goal would not “imply open-sourcing AGI.”
It released an email exchange between Musk and Sutskever, where the latter said, “It will make sense to start being less open as we get closer to building AI.” Elon said, “Yeah,” to the statement that “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.”
Due to Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, industry analysts are concerned about the company’s possible collapse. Some have even gone so far as to call it a “precarious position,” speculating that it would end up like WeWork, the once-unicorn business that was valued at almost $50 billion before going bankrupt.
