In its first public comments on Elon Musk's lawsuit against the influential AI research lab, OpenAI said that Mr. Musk attempted to transform the lab from a nonprofit to a for-profit operation before leaving the organization in early 2018.
Comments made in A Blog post Published on Tuesday evening, it is part of the escalating dispute between Mr. Musk and OpenAI, which are now at the forefront of the industry-wide AI boom. The company said it intends to move to dismiss all claims in Mr. Musk suit.
Mr. Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, on Friday, accusing them of breach of contract by putting profits and commercial interests before building artificial intelligence for the greater good. He said that when the AI Lab entered into a multibillion-dollar partnership with tech giant Microsoft, it abandoned its founding pledge to carefully develop AI and share it freely with the public.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December, alleging copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems.)
Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI as a non-profit organization in 2015 with Mr. Musk. Altman. Greg Brockman, who was the former CTO of payments company Stripe; And many researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. Before announcing the laboratory, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman intended to raise about $100 million, but Mr. Brockman intended to raise about $100 million. Musk said he should tell the press and public that he is raising $1 billion and will provide the additional money, according to a contemporaneous email included in the blog post.
Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We need to get a number much larger than $100 million to avoid looking hopeless,” he wrote in an email. “I'll cover everything that no one else does.”
The nonprofit has raised just under $45 million from Mr. Musk and more than $90 million from other donors, OpenAI said in its blog post.
The company said that Mr. Musk was among the OpenAI leaders who realized in early 2017 that if the lab remained a nonprofit, it wouldn't be able to raise the money it would need to reach its lofty goal of building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do anything. The human mind can do it.
“We all realized that we would need much more capital to succeed in our mission — billions of dollars annually, a much larger amount than any of us, especially Elon, thought we would be able to raise as a nonprofit.” The blog post said.
when mr. Musk and the other OpenAI founders agreed to create a for-profit company. Musk said he wants a majority stake in the company, initial control of the board of directors, and to be CEO, OpenAI said. In the midst of discussions, OpenAI said, it withheld funding from the nonprofit.
OpenAI said the other founders could not agree to its terms because they believed giving one person absolute control of the organization conflicted with its mission. Mr. Musk then suggested linking OpenAI with electric car company Tesla, according to another email included in the blog post.
“Tesla is the only way we can hope to hold a candle to Google. And even then the likelihood of it becoming a counterweight to Google remains slim. It's not zero,” the email said.
With his suit, mr. Musk said OpenAI has violated its original mission because it no longer shares its core technology with the public, which is called “open sourcing.”
The OpenAI blog post also included an email in which Mr. Musk seems to acknowledge that as the company gets closer to creating AGI, it will have to start holding back the technology to prevent it from causing harm.
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