OpenAI says Elon Musk wanted 'complete control' over company

OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk's lawsuit, saying he wanted "complete control" of the company once it merged with Tesla.

In a blog post published Tuesday, OpenAI said it would reject "all of Elon's claims" and offered its own counter-statement about the company abandoning its core mission as a nonprofit.

According to the post, "As we discussed a for-profit structure to carry the mission forward, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control," which included "majority equity, initial board control, and becoming CEO." Included." "Written by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Shulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. "We couldn't agree on benefits terms with Elon because we felt it was too much of a mission for any one person. Is against. Full control over OpenAI."

Musk alleges in his lawsuit that OpenAI has become "a closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft that is focused on making money rather than benefiting humanity. In doing so, their lawsuit claims OpenAI abandoned its original non-profit mission, which they helped fund.

In Musk's view this is a breach of contract. While Musk's complaint mentions an OpenAI "founder agreement", no formal agreement has yet been made public, and OpenAI's post did not directly address the question of whether one exists.

OpenAI also defended its decision not to open-source its work: "Elon understood that the mission did not mean open-sourcing AGI," the post said, referring to artificial general intelligence. The company published a January 2016 email conversation in which Sutskever said, "As we get closer to building AI, it would be appropriate to start being less open," and "It's completely OK not to share science." " Yes." Musk replied: "Yes."

Musk's lawsuit also makes some other puzzling allegations, such as that GPT-4 is "a genuine Microsoft proprietary algorithm" that represents artificial general intelligence. OpenAI had already rejected those claims in a staff memo, but did not address them in its public blog post Tuesday.