OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit from last week, stating that at one point he wanted to have “absolute control” of the company by merging it with Tesla. What goes around, comes around, Elon.
In a blog post published yesterday, OpenAI said it will ask for “all of Elon’s allegations to be dismissed” and offered its version that the company departed from its original mission as a non-profit organization.
“While discussing a for-profit structure to promote the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or wanted full control“, including “majority ownership, initial control of the board, and being CEO”, explain the authors of the post, OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba.
OpenAI responds to Elon Musk and awaits the next move
“We couldn’t reach an agreement with Elon to obtain benefits because we believed it went against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” they explain in the public letter.
Elon Musk claimed in his lawsuit that OpenAI has become a “de facto closed-source subsidiary” of Microsoft that focuses on making money instead of benefiting humanity. In doing so, his lawsuit claims that OpenAI abandoned its original non-profit mission that he helped finance.
In Musk’s opinion, this constitutes a breach of contract. Although Musk’s lawsuit mentions a “foundational agreement” from OpenAI, no formal agreement has been made public yet, and OpenAI’s post did not directly address the issue of whether one exists.
OpenAI also defends its decision not to open source its work: “Elon understood that the mission did not involve open-sourcing AGI,” says the post, referring to artificial general intelligence. The company published an email conversation from January 2016 in which Sutskever said, “as we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open,” and that “it’s totally fine not to share the science.” Elon Musk responded to that email with a brief “Yes.”
There are other puzzling allegations in Musk’s lawsuit, such as the claim that GPT-4 is “a de facto proprietary algorithm of Microsoft” representing general artificial intelligence. OpenAI had already rejected those claims in a memorandum from its staff, but did not address them in its public blog post on Tuesday.
