In its first public comments on Elon Musk's lawsuit against the influential artificial intelligence institute, OpenAI said Musk sought to convert the institute from a nonprofit to a for-profit operation before leaving the organization in early 2018. He said he did.
The comments, in a blog post published Tuesday night, are part of an escalating feud between Musk and OpenAI, which is currently at the forefront of an industry-wide AI boom. The company said it would move to dismiss all claims in Musk's lawsuit.
Musk filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of breaching its contract by putting profit and commercial interests ahead of building AI for the public good. He said that when the AI Institute entered into a multibillion-dollar partnership with tech giant Microsoft, it abandoned its founding promise to develop AI carefully and share it freely with the public.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to its AI systems.)
Musk and Altman helped found OpenAI as a nonprofit organization in 2015. Greg Brockman is the former chief technology officer of payments company Stripe. and several AI researchers. Before the institute's launch was announced, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman had hoped to raise about $100 million, according to people familiar with the matter, but Mr. Musk had asked the media and the public to raise $1 billion. He reportedly told them that he was working on a project and said he would provide the additional funds. Emails included in blog posts.
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We need to go with a much larger number than $100 million to avoid seeming hopeless,” he wrote in an email. “We cover anything that others don’t offer.”
OpenAI said in a blog post that the nonprofit raised less than $45 million from Mr. Musk and more than $90 million from other donors.
According to the company, Musk was an OpenAI leader who realized in early 2017 that the institute would not be able to raise the funding needed to achieve its lofty goal of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) if it remained nonprofit. It is said that he was one of the A machine that can do anything that the human brain can do.
“We all understood that we needed more capital to succeed in our mission. That was far more than we thought we could raise,” the blog post said.
OpenAI said that when Musk and the other OpenAI founders agreed to form a commercial company, Musk acquired a majority stake in the company, initially controlling the board of directors and hoping to become chief executive officer. It is said that it was. OpenAI said he withheld funding from nonprofits during the discussion.
OpenAI said the other founders were unable to agree to his terms because they believed giving one person absolute control of the organization was inconsistent with its mission. Musk then proposed bringing OpenAI to his own electric car company, Tesla, according to another email included in his blog post.
“Tesla is the only way to survive against Google. Still, the chances of being able to compete with Google are low, but not zero,” the email said.
Musk argued in his lawsuit that OpenAI violates its original mission because it no longer shares its underlying technology, so-called “open sourcing,” with the public.
OpenAI's blog post also included an email in which Musk appeared to acknowledge that as the company gets closer to creating AGI, it needs to start reining in the technology to prevent it from doing any harm.