Elon Musk wanted 'absolute control' of the company: OpenAI
OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba have responded to Elon Musk's lawsuit in a blog post. They said that Musk sought "absolute control" of OpenAI, either through a merger with Tesla or by having complete control as CEO. The co-founders couldn't agree to Musk's terms, as it went against their mission to prevent any individual from having total control over the company.
Musk's allegations of contract breach
Musk's lawsuit claims that OpenAI has become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft, prioritizing profit over humanity's benefit. He alleges that this violated a contract, as OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission that he helped fund. As per Musk, OpenAI co-founder Brockman had initially pitched the idea of a non-profit AI venture to him. While Musk's complaint refers to an OpenAI "founding agreement," no such document has been made public, and the co-founders' blog post doesn't address its existence.
OpenAI defends not open-sourcing its work
In their blog post, OpenAI defended its choice not to open-source its artificial general intelligence (AGI) work. They shared a January 2016 email exchange between Sutskever and Musk, where Sutskever stated, "As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open," and that "it's totally OK to not share the science." Musk responded with "Yup." The co-founders argue that this email demonstrates Musk's agreement with the company becoming less open.
Musk's longstanding issues with OpenAI
Musk was a co-founder of the ChatGPT-maker in 2015 but left the board in 2018 following disagreements with his colleagues. The Tesla boss has often expressed his aversion to OpenAI ever since the ChatGPT started getting popular. But Musk's argument for vouching for an open-source AI-powered chatbot seems to have fallen short of merit. Musk has himself launched his own AI chatbot named xAI Grok, which is a closed-source, profit-making venture.
