On Tuesday, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, refuted Elon Musk’s claims of “betrayal” of its original mission and said it would seek to have them dismissed in court.
The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X was a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015 alongside Sam Altman, but he quit the company in 2018 and is now one of its most vociferous opponents.
Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week, claiming that the company was always supposed to be a nonprofit.
“We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims,” OpenAI’s executives stated in a blog post.
OpenAI gained the public’s attention in late 2022 with the debut of their chatbot ChatGPT, which can generate poems, essays, and even pass tests.
The company began as a non-profit dedicated to developing “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), which is informally defined as a type of AI that can outperform humans on all intelligence measurements.
The goal was for OpenAI to ensure that such technology is safe for humans.
In recent years, Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, and both businesses promote AI services to developers and users.
On Tuesday, Altman and other executives from the Silicon Valley start-up disclosed their counter-arguments, including supporting emails.
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” they wrote in a post on their blog.
At that point, “we all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission — billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit” , it was said.
The following year, Musk proposed in an email that OpenAI be tied “to Tesla as its cash cow”.
Despite the team’s refusal, Musk “soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0,” adding that he planned to establish an AGI competitor within Tesla.
“When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars,” according to the post on the OpenAI website.
Altman and his colleagues also stated that their business offers free AI access to organizations and countries, such as Albania, which “is using OpenAI’s tools to accelerate its EU accession by as much as 5.5 years.”