TECH NEWS – Sam Altman’s company says Musk told them they would fail, started a competing company, and then sued them when they started to make meaningful progress.
We’ve written before about Elon Musk suing OpenAI and two of its co-founders for turning it into a for-profit company. OpenAI responded with an open letter to the owner of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX. The letter was written by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba. The letter attempts to refute Elon Musk’s claims. Altman and Brockman launched the effort in late 2015, with the goal of raising $100 million. Musk said that would make them look too desperate and that they should aim for a larger amount, with a goal of $1 billion; he would make up the shortfall. Only Musk gave less than $45 million, while the others together gave OpenAI $90 million.
In 2017, the funding case looked bad because building general artificial intelligence (AGI) would have required massive computing power (billions of dollars per year), which seemed impossible to assemble as a nonprofit. Musk also agreed that some sort of for-profit company needed to be created, and he wanted full control and the role of CEO over it. During the negotiations, he began to withhold his money, but others felt that it would not be good to have one person in control of OpenAI. Then, in early 2018, Musk suggested that the company merge with Tesla because he thought it was the only way to compete with Google. In early February, OpenAI rejected this, and Musk left the company at the end of the month.
Change your name
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024
Governments will attempt to seize power over AGI, which may be worse.
But it is increasingly coming down to a choice of what company do you trust most to develop AGI.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024
OpenAI then talked about using ChatGPT, but not about tangible things like claiming that Albania’s accession to the EU was accelerated by as much as 5.5 years; that the US state of Rhode Island made it easier to interpret a consent document for surgery; or that Iceland archives its language using GPT-4. Musk doesn’t trust Google (and that’s why he started his AI-focused company, which we now know is called xAI), and there were some censored comments, and we wish we knew who was being discussed here: “Unfortunately, the future of humanity is in the hands of [redacted].” Perhaps OpenAI doesn’t want to publish Musk’s conspiracy theories. Musk says OpenAI has a 0% chance of beating Google/Deepmind, and he has a 1% chance.
Sutskever told Elon: “As we get closer to building AI, it makes sense to start being less open. The open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it’s [sic] built, but it’s perfectly fine not to share the science…” And Musk responded with a world (yup). OpenAI says they still have a long way to go and hope that these systems can eventually empower all individuals. Musk’s response on Twitter was to change the name to ClosedAI and withdraw the lawsuit.
Musk has been tweeting ClosedAI memes lately, and he thinks it would be worse if governments took over AGI, but it’s increasingly about which company we trust to develop AGI…
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