OpenAI said in its first public comments about the lawsuit against Elon Musk’s influential artificial intelligence research lab that Mr. Musk turned the lab from a nonprofit to a for-profit operation before leaving the organization in early 2018. Tried to do.
The comments, made in a blog post published Tuesday evening, are part of a growing feud between Mr. Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of an industry-wide AI boom. The company said it plans to move to dismiss all claims in Mr. Musk’s lawsuit.
Mr. Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, accusing them of breaching an agreement by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of building AI for the public good. When AI Lab entered into a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, it abandoned its founding commitment to carefully develop AI and share it freely with the public, he said.
(The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement for news content about AI systems.)
Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI as a nonprofit with Mr. Altman in 2015. Greg Brockman, former chief technology officer of payments company Stripe. And several AI researchers. Before the lab was announced, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman planned to raise about $100 million, but Mr. Musk said he should tell the press and the public that he was raising $1 billion and that additional funds would be needed. will provide Contemporaneous email is included in the blog post.
Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We need to go with a much larger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless,” he wrote in an email. “I will cover what no one else provides.”
The nonprofit raised less than $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 OpenAI’s leaders who realized in early 2017 that if the lab remained a nonprofit, it would not be able to achieve its lofty goal of creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine. cannot raise the funds required to reach Anything the human mind can do.
“We all understood that we needed a lot of capital to succeed in our mission — billions of dollars per year, which was more than any of us, especially Alvin, thought we could do as a nonprofit. will be able to collect.” said the blog post.
OpenAI said that when Mr. Musk and OpenAI’s other founders agreed to create a profitable company, Mr. Musk said he wanted a majority of the equity in the company, initial board control and to become chief executive. OpenAI said that during the negotiations, it withheld funding from the nonprofit.
OpenAI said that the other founders could not agree to its terms because they believed that giving one person complete control of the organization was against its mission. According to another email included in the blog post, Mr Musk then suggested that OpenAI be linked to his electric car company, Tesla.
“Tesla is the only way that can even hope to hold a candle to Google,” the email reads. “Still, the odds against Google are slim. It’s just not zero.”
With his suit, Mr. Musk argued that OpenAI has violated its original mission because it is no longer sharing its core technology with the public, known as “open sourcing.”
OpenAI’s blog post also included an email in which Mr. Musk appeared to acknowledge that, as the company neared the creation of AGI, it would have to start blocking the technology to prevent it from causing harm.