OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that Elon Musk co-founded in 2015, has published a series of emails from the billionaire to counter his lawsuit against them.
Musk, who left the company in 2018, is suing them for allegedly abandoning its original vision of creating a benevolent and open-source AI, and instead becoming a profit-driven and secretive subsidiary of Microsoft.
His lawsuit which was filed in a San Francisco court on Thursday last week argues that,
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an [artificial general intelligence] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”
However, the AI company claims that Musk was the one who supported the idea of a for-profit structure and even proposed a merger with his own company, Tesla.
In a blog post published on Tuesday, OpenAI wrote that it was “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.”
The company also maintained that it had not deviated from its mission of ensuring that AI is aligned with human values and can benefit “all of humanity”.
“The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits. We are now sharing what we’ve learned about achieving our mission, and some facts about our relationship with Elon. We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”
To back up its claims, OpenAI released several emails that Musk had sent to the other co-founders and executives of the company over the years.
In one of the emails he sent to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman, he had endorsed the idea of creating a for-profit entity within OpenAI, which would allow the company to raise more funds and compete with other AI giants, such as Google and Facebook.
Musk had also suggested that OpenAI should merge with Tesla, his electric car company, or that he should have full control of the company. He had written:
“****** is exactly right. We may wish it otherwise, but, in my and ******’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero..”
The blog post was written by the co-founders and executives of the company, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever, who are also named as defendants in Musk’s lawsuit.
Elon Musk, who is known for his visionary and controversial projects, such as SpaceX, Neuralink, and Hyperloop, has not yet responded to OpenAI’s blog post.
