Musk had accused OpenAI of compromising its initial mission of building AI for the benefit of humanity, citing its partnership with Microsoft as an example of that.
In a blog post, OpenAI’s leadership team has hit back at Musk, claiming that the Tesla owner recognised that a for-profit entity would be needed in order to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) and even sought “absolute control” of the company.
The post is authored by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.
“As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” the joint post wrote.
“We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” the post continued.
“He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should “attach to Tesla as its cash cow”, commenting that it was “exactly right… Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.
OpenAI used the post to outline how several countries are using OpenAI tools, highlighting that as an example that the technology was “broadly usable in ways that empower people”.
The blog post went on to add: “We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him.”
OpenAI, alongside other tech companies have also signed an open letter highlighting “collective responsibility” to maximise AI’s benefits and “mitigate the risks” to society.
