Sam Altman with moderator Kim-Mai Cutler at TechCrunch Disrupt 2015. Image: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
OpenAI claims Musk supported a for-profit model in 2017, wanted to take full control of the company and suggested attaching the business to Tesla ‘as its cash cow’.
OpenAI has shared details about its history with Elon Musk in response to the billionaire’s lawsuit against the AI company.
Musk recently sued OpenAI for allegedly not sticking to its original objective of developing AI for the benefit of humanity. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 when it was a non-profit entity but left in 2018.
In response to this lawsuit, OpenAI said it intends to “move to dismiss” all of Musk’s legal claims. But the AI company also claims that Musk was previously supportive of OpenAI’s plans to become a for-profit entity and that he also wanted to take full control of the company before he left in 2018.
OpenAI claims that Musk’s total contribution to the company was less than $45m and that he “withheld funding” in the middle of discussions in 2017.
“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,” the company said.
Musk and OpenAI
In a blogpost detailing its history with Musk, OpenAI claims the company initially planned to raise $100m when it began in 2015, but that Musk urged them to go for a bigger number to “avoid sounding hopeless”.
“We all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission – billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit,” the company said.
By 2017, OpenAI claims the team and Musk decided the next step was to become a for-profit entity, but that Musk wanted “majority equity, initial board control and to be CEO”.
“In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding,” the company claims. “Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations.”
OpenAI claims terms could not be agreed as it didn’t want any one individual to have “absolute control”. In early 2018, the company claims Musk sent an email suggesting that OpenAI should “attach to Tesla as its cash cow” and that he could not see any other way for the company to “reach sustainable Google-scale capital within a decade”.
“Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was zero and that he planned to build an AGI [artificial general intelligence] competitor within Tesla,” OpenAI said. “When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars.
“In December 2018, Elon sent us an email saying ‘Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it’.”
Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI claims that the company is focused on refining AI to “maximise profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity”. Microsoft has been the biggest backer of OpenAI since ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2022.
There are also criticisms that Musk’s lawsuit is lacking in merit, as it claims OpenAI breached a contract that does not exist.
Meanwhile, Musk is also working on his own AI start-up that he launched last year called xAI, which has its own AI chatbot called Grok that appears to be a challenger to OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT product.
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Sam Altman with moderator Kim-Mai Cutler at TechCrunch Disrupt 2015. Image: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
