OpenAI says Elon Musk tried to integrate it with Tesla

OpenAI, in its first public comments on Elon Musk's lawsuit against the influential AI research lab, said Mr. Musk had tried to transform the lab from a nonprofit into 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 an escalating dispute between Mr Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of the industry-wide AI boom. The company said it intends to move to dismiss all claims in Mr. Musk's lawsuit.

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 public 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 nonprofit in 2015 with Mr. Altman; Greg Brockman, who was the former CTO of payments company Stripe; And many researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. Before announcing the lab, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman intended 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 he would provide the additional money, according to a contemporaneous report. Email included in 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.”

OpenAI said in its blog post that the nonprofit had raised just under $45 million from Mr. Musk and more than $90 million from other donors.

The company said that Mr. Musk was among the OpenAI leaders who realized in early 2017 that if the lab remained a nonprofit, it would not 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 any… Something the human mind can do.

“We all realized that we would need much more capital to succeed in our mission — billions of dollars annually, which was far greater 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, Mr. Musk said he wanted a majority stake in the company, initial control of the board 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 the electric car company Tesla, according to another email included in the blog post.

“Tesla is the only way it can 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.

In his suit, Mr. Musk said OpenAI had violated its original mission because it was no longer sharing its underlying technology with the public, which is called “open source.”

The OpenAI blog post also included an email in which Mr. Musk appeared to admit that as the company gets closer to creating artificial general intelligence, it will have to start holding back the technology to prevent it from causing harm.