OpenAI on Tuesday responded publicly to a lawsuit filed by co-founder Elon Musk, highlighting apparent hypocrisy on the part of the current billionaire and early backer of the company.
In its response, OpenAI reproduced old emails from Musk containing… Tesla SpaceX's CEO encouraged the startup to raise at least $1 billion in funding, and they agreed that it should “start being less open” over time and “not share” the company's science with the public.
The reproduced messages follow a very different view represented by Musk last week, when he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and President Greg Brockman, alleging breach of contract and unfair competition.
In the lawsuit, Musk's lawyers claim that the inner workings of OpenAI's GPT-4 AI model are “completely confidential except to OpenAI — and Microsoft, as to information and beliefs,” and that the secrecy is driven by commercial purpose, not safety. . “We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims,” OpenAI said.
In November, Musk told an audience at the New York Times' DealBook conference that OpenAI had deviated from its original mission in his view.
“OpenAI should be renamed ‘Super Closed Source Profit Maximizing AI,’ because that is what it is,” Musk said on stage at the event. He pointed out that it has transformed from an “open source organization” to a “billion-dollar closed source, for-profit company.”
By contrast, Musk appears to be discouraging OpenAI's founders from taking a too-soft approach to fundraising, according to emails the company returned in December 2018. He wrote that OpenAI has a zero percent chance of becoming a viable competitor to Google's DeepMind sometime. The startup has “radically changed its implementation and resources.”
“My probabilistic assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a radical change in implementation and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise,” Musk wrote in an email to fellow OpenAI co-founders Sutskever and Brockman. And Altman. “Even raising several hundred million will not be enough. This needs billions a year immediately or forget about it.”
Musk is now CEO of automaker Tesla, defense contractor SpaceX and owner of X Corp, as well as founder of brain-computer interface startup Neuralink, and a potential competitor to OpenAI, which he calls xAI.
Before he left OpenAI, the company said in its response to his lawsuit: “Elon wanted to acquire a majority stake, initial control of the board, and become CEO” of the AI project. The startup also said in its blog post that Musk sought to become CEO of OpenAI in 2017 as it was changing its structure.
At times, Musk's companies have lured talent away from OpenAI. In the case of xAI, Musk is positioning the company's first product, Grok, to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT software.
In emails from January 2018 returned by OpenAI, Musk agrees with an unnamed sender who encouraged the startup's founders to rely on Tesla as a “cash cow.” Entering the first quarter of 2018, Tesla reported a cash balance of $3.4 billion, after reporting a net loss of $2.24 billion for the full year in 2017 on revenue that year of $11.8 billion.
CNBC has not independently verified the authenticity of the emails included in OpenAI's response on Tuesday, some of which contained partial redactions.
The “contract” at the heart of Musk’s recent lawsuit against OpenAI is not a formal written agreement signed by all parties involved in creating the company.
Instead, Musk argues through his lawyers that the early OpenAI team entered into agreements to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, “for the benefit of humanity” as a nonprofit. However, the project has been spun off into a company with a complex corporate structure that includes a for-profit entity that Musk says is largely controlled by the company. Microsoft.
Musk has used much of his legal complaint to remind the world of his central position in creating OpenAI, which has become one of the hottest startups on the planet, thanks in large part to the viral spread of ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator.
OpenAI's public response Tuesday night mirrors executive memos sent to employees at the company last week.
Musk's lawsuit and OpenAI's response come after a few months of turmoil for the company, including boardroom drama, a board reshuffle, and an investigation by financial regulators.
Elon Musk's lawyers were not available for comment Tuesday night after OpenAI published its response.
– CNBC's Jordan Novet contributed reporting.
