OpenAI hit back at Elon Musk’s accusations that the ChatGPT creator betrayed its fundamental goals of benefiting humanity and chose to pursue profit, vowing to have his lawsuit dismissed.
OpenAI’s first comments since Tesla’s CEO filed a lawsuit last week have escalated the feud between the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company and the billionaire who funded its creation years ago.
“OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all humanity, which means both building safe and useful AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits,” OpenAI said late Thursday in a blog post from five business leaders, including CEO Sam Altman. “We intend to deny all of Elon’s claims.”
AGI refers to artificial general intelligence, which are general-purpose AI systems that can perform as well (or better) than humans in a wide range of tasks.
Musk’s lawsuit stated that when he funded OpenAI when it launched, he entered into an agreement that the company would remain a nonprofit organization that develops technology for the benefit of the public.
His lawsuit claims breach of contract and seeks an injunction preventing anyone — including Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI — from benefiting financially from its technology.
OpenAI said both the startup and Musk recognized the need for the company to become a for-profit entity, posting screenshots of emails between Tesla’s CEO and OpenAI leaders in which they discuss the possibility, but do not can agree on the terms.
“Change your name,” Musk responded Wednesday on X, the social media platform he owns and formerly known as Twitter.
He also posted a laughing emoji in response to a user who tweeted that OpenAI should be renamed OpenEmail.
Musk was an early investor in OpenAI when it was founded in 2015 and served as co-chairman of the board alongside Altman. He said in his lawsuit that he had invested “tens of millions” of dollars in OpenAI.
However, the company said that while Musk has invested less than $45 million, it has raised more than $90 million from other donors.
OpenAI said that in 2017, business leaders began to realize that building artificial general intelligence would require enormous amounts of computing power.
“We all understood that we needed a lot more capital to succeed in our mission – billions of dollars a year, which was far more than anyone, especially Elon, thought we could raise as a nonprofit. ,” it said.
