Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and X, has long been critical of OpenAI despite being closely involved with its founding. Now, he’s suing the company.
Tesla chief Elon Musk recently sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, citing breach of contract and “betrayal,” demanding a return of profits from its key founding members. Targeting the generative AI pioneer for abandoning its non-profit mission, the dramatic legal challenge also took aim at Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment in the company and the recent leadership turmoil that led to CEO Sam Altman’s theatrical ouster and quick return. OpenAI has now published a bombshell post that dismisses Musk’s claims and contains a trove of emailed conversations between him and OpenAI leadership.
The issues are said to have started when OpenAI realized it would require a massive amount of computing power to build a safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI), a yet-to-be-realized hypothetical form of AI at the same cognition level as human beings. At that juncture, Musk — who is among OpenAI’s founding figures — and other top minds at the company decided to explore a for-profit future, in contrast to their open-source roots.
“Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding,” says the blog post authored jointly by Altman and other high-ranking executives, including Greg Brockman and science chief Ilya Sutskever. The computing power in question here is mostly tied to GPUs, and to such an extent that it has propelled Nvidia into the trillion-dollar valuation class and pushed Musk’s Tesla to build Dojo, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
