Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week, claiming the artificial intelligence startup violated its founding agreement by becoming a for-profit company instead of a nonprofit. OpenAI responded to Musk’s lawsuit by saying it wanted “absolute control” of the company or a merger with Tesla at some point.
Written by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba to the blog post According to the artificial intelligence company, it plans to deny all of Musk’s claims. OpenAI says Musk supports its early for-profit plans. The statement reads: “In late 2017, we and Elon decided that the next step in the mission was to create a for-profit organization. Elon wanted majority equality, first board control, and becoming CEO. Amid these controversies, it cut funding. Reid Hoffman closed the gap to cover salaries and operations.”
Elon Musk was one of OpenAI’s first board members and helped the company raise funding. He stepped down from the company’s board in 2018 to avoid potential conflicts of interest between his relationship with OpenAI and his work on autonomous artificial intelligence technology at Tesla.
The blog post also states: “We were unable to reach a for-profit agreement with Elon because we felt it was contrary to the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI. He later suggested merging OpenAI with Tesla instead. In early February 2018, Elon sent us an email suggesting that OpenAI should be “tied to Tesla as a cash cow,” commenting that this was “totally true.” Tesla is the only way that can hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, it’s unlikely to be a counterweight to Google. It’s not just zero.”
OpenAI also claims that it is happy with Elon Musk’s decision not to open source its work. “Elon understands that the mission does not mean open source AGI,” the post says.
OpenAI also allegedly denied Elon Musk’s complaint in an internal memo sent to its current employees. In the e-mail, it is stated that Musk’s reason for filing this lawsuit is due to his regret for not being a part of the company today.
