In the first public comments on Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, the influential artificial intelligence research lab, Mr. Musk said he tried to turn the lab into a nonprofit before leaving the company in early 2018.
Comments, a Blog Published on Tuesday evening, Mr. It's part of an escalating battle between Musk and OpenAI, which is now leading the industry-wide AI boom. Mr. The company said it plans to dismiss all claims in Musk's lawsuit.
Mr. Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, accusing them of breaching the contract by advancing profits and commercial interests to develop AI for the public good. When the AI lab entered into a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, he said, it abandoned its founding promise to carefully develop AI and share it freely with the public.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
Mr. Mr. Altman co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015. Musk helped; Greg Brockman, former chief technology officer of payments company Stripe; And many other AI researchers. Before the lab was announced, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman intended to raise about $100 million, but Mr. Musk said it would tell the press and the public that it was raising $1 billion, and that it would provide additional funding. A contemporary email is included in the blog post.
For comment, Mr. Musk did not immediately respond.
“To avoid appearing pessimistic, we need to go with a much larger number than $100M,” he wrote in an email. “I will hide what no one offers.”
Non-profit Mr. It raised less than $45 million from Musk and more than $90 million from other donors, OpenAI said in its blog post.
In early 2017, OpenAI leaders included Mr. The company said Musk was the one who could do anything with the human brain.
“We all understood that we would need a lot of capital to succeed in our mission—billions of dollars a year, which was more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we could raise as a nonprofit.” The blog post said.
Mr. When Musk and the other OpenAI founders agreed to form a non-profit organization, Mr. Musk said he wanted a majority stake in the company, initial board control, and being chief executive, OpenAI said. Amid the controversy, he suspended funding from the nonprofit, OpenAI said.
The other founders could not agree to his terms because they believed that giving one person complete control of the company would go against its mission, OpenAI said. Mr. Musk, according to another email in the blog post, suggested that OpenAI be linked to his electric car company, Tesla.
“Tesla is the only route that can hope to hold a candle to Google,” the email said. “Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It is not null.
By no longer sharing its underlying technology with the public, Mr. Musk argued through his case.
OpenAI's blog post also included an email in which Mr. Musk seems to acknowledge that as the company gets closer to developing AGI, it needs to start blocking the technology to prevent it from causing harm.
