Elon Musk suggested in an email that OpenAI “serves as a cash cow for Tesla.”
San Francisco, U.S:
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on Tuesday denied Elon Musk’s accusations of “betraying” its original mission and said it would push to have the claims dismissed in court.
The boss of Tesla, SpaceX and X was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015, along with Sam Altman, but left the organization in 2018 and is now one of its most vocal critics.
Musk launched legal action against OpenAI last week, arguing in documents filed in a San Francisco court that the company has always been a nonprofit entity.
“We intend to dismiss all of Elon’s allegations,” OpenAI and its executives said in a blog post.
OpenAI captured the public imagination in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate poems and essays and even succeed on exams.
The company began as a nonprofit dedicated to developing “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a term loosely defined as an artificial intelligence that surpasses human capabilities on all measures of intelligence.
OpenAI’s goal is to ensure that such technology is safe for humans.
OpenAI has received about $13 billion in investment from Microsoft in recent years, and both companies market artificial intelligence services to developers and individuals.
Altman and other executives at the Silicon Valley startup detailed their counterarguments on Tuesday, along with supporting emails.
“We’re sad that a guy we admire so much has come to this point – who inspired us to set higher goals, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then when we started making meaningful gains on our goals sued us when progress was made. Without him, OpenAI’s mission would be over,” they said in a blog post.
In 2017, “We all understood that we were going to need more funding to successfully complete our mission—billions of dollars a year, far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we could raise Non-profit organization,” they said.
The next year, Musk suggested in an email that OpenAI “serve as a cash cow for Tesla.”
But faced with the team’s rejection, Musk “quickly chose to leave OpenAI, saying our probability of success was 0,” adding that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.
“When he left in late February 2018, he told our team that he supported us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars,” the OpenAI blog post said.
Altman and his colleagues also said that their company is providing free access to artificial intelligence to organizations and countries, including Albania, which “is using OpenAI’s tools to accelerate its EU membership by up to 5.5 years.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
