OpenAI claims that Elon Musk wanted it to team up with Tesla to create a for-profit organisation

Elon Musk has sued OpenAI, claiming that the company has violated its non-profit mission by becoming a subsidiary of Microsoft. In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI published a series of old emails from Musk in which he expressed his plans and suggestions for the future of the company. In these emails, Musk proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla to provide funding and collaboration, or taking a majority stake, control of the board of directors, and the position of CEO of OpenAI.

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OpenAI said these offers were rejected because they conflicted with the company's mission and independence. OpenAI also claimed that Musk did not fulfil his promise to contribute $1bn to the company, and only contributed less than $45m. In addition, OpenAI claims that Musk left the company in 2018 when he was unable to agree on a commercial structure that was necessary to achieve the goal of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is accessible and useful to all people.

Musk has long expressed his concerns about AGI, which he sees as a serious threat to humanity, especially if it ends up in the hands of a closed, for-profit company like Google, which is developing its DeepMind project. Musk claims in the lawsuit that OpenAI develops and improves AGI, which is "Microsoft's de facto proprietary algorithm," and uses it to support its products such as Bing and Copilot. Musk is demanding that the court force OpenAI to follow its original non-profit mission and make its AI technology freely available to the public, and prohibit it from using its technology for the financial gain of Microsoft and other partners.

OpenAI denies Musk's accusations and states that he was aware of their move to for-profit and did not object to it.

There is currently an ongoing legal dispute between OpenAI and Elon Musk. Elon Musk himself has not yet responded in any way to OpenAI's post.

Source: OpenAI