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OpenAI, in its first public comments on Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the influential artificial intelligence research lab, said Musk had attempted to transform the lab from a nonprofit to a for-profit operation before leaving the organization. at the beginning of 2018.
The comments, made in a blog post released Tuesday night, are part of a growing dispute between Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of an industry-wide AI boom. The company said it intended to take steps to dismiss all claims in Musk’s lawsuit.
Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman on Friday, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and business interests ahead of building AI for the public good. He said that when the AI Lab entered into a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, he abandoned his founding promise to carefully develop AI and share it freely with the public.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
Musk helped found OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 with Altman; Greg Brockman, former chief technology officer at payments company Stripe; and several AI researchers. Before the lab was announced, Altman and Brockman intended to raise around $100 million, but Musk said he should tell the press and public that he was raising $1 billion and that he would provide the additional funds. according to a report. Contemporary email included in blog post.
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We need to go for a figure much higher than $100 million to avoid appearing desperate,” he wrote in the email. “I’ll cover anything the others don’t provide.”
The nonprofit raised less than $45 million from Musk and more than $90 million from other donors, OpenAI said in its blog post.
The company said Musk had been among OpenAI leaders who realized in early 2017 that if the lab remained a nonprofit, it would not be able to raise the money it would need to achieve its lofty goal of building artificial intelligence. general, or AGI, a machine. It can do anything the human brain can do.
“We all understood that we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed in our mission: billions of dollars per year, which was much more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we could raise as a nonprofit.” . the blog post said.
When Musk and the other founders of OpenAI agreed to create a for-profit company, Musk said he wanted a majority of the company’s equity, initial control of the board of directors and to be the CEO, OpenAI said. Amid the discussions, he withheld funds from the nonprofit, OpenAI said.
The other founders could not agree to its terms because they believed that giving one person complete control of the organization went against its mission, OpenAI said. Musk then suggested that OpenAI be attached to his electric car company, Tesla, according to another email included in the blog post.
“Tesla is the only way to go that could even compare to Google,” the email said. “Even so, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It’s just not zero.”
In his lawsuit, Musk argued that OpenAI had breached its original mission because it was no longer sharing its underlying technology with the public, called “open source.”
The OpenAI blog post also included an email in which Musk appears to acknowledge that as the company gets closer to creating AGI, it would have to start putting the brakes on the technology to prevent it from causing harm.