
OpenAi Has Released Damning Elon Musk Emails
Musk has backed himself into a doozy.
This may shock you, but I am no fan of Elon Musk. If I wanted, I could go on about my misgivings of the arrogant billionaire for hours. But, one recent event sums up my feelings towards him. You see, back in 2015, Musk and a few of his friends founded OpenAI, a non-profit to build pioneering AI systems and one day an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which has human-level cognition and ability. Musk left OpenAI in 2018, citing a conflict of interest, and the non-profit went from strength to strength after that. In 2019, they switched to a capped profit model and secured a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, which paid for the rapid development of ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4, DALL-E, DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3 and Sora, which collectively launched the AI boom. Microsoft has even doubled down on OpenAI, investing a further $10 billion into it in late 2023. You’d think Musk would be happy a company he founded is doing so well, but no. He is suing them for breaching the company’s founding contract. Let me explain why this is such a farce.
Musk’s lawsuit claims that OpenAI has departed from its original non-profit, open-source mission to “benefit humanity” and is instead focusing on “maximising profits” for its major investor, Microsoft. The lawsuit even went as far as to say OpenAI’s “technology, including GPT-4, is closed-source primarily to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft.” According to Musk and his lawyers, this is in breach of the company’s Founding Agreement, and the lawsuit is to “compel OpenAI to adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual Defendants and the largest technology company in the world.”
It’s funny that Musk didn’t sue back in 2019 when OpenAI switched to its capped profit model and had a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. I mean, why else would Microsoft invest if it wasn’t to secure technology for itself or drive profit? Why has Musk waited until now? Also, Musk knows more than anyone how damn expensive developing even simple AI can be. How does he expect OpenAI to meet its targets as a non-profit? It will take hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of development to create an AGI. Where is all that money going to come from?
OpenAI wasn’t going to take these odd accusations lying down, and this Tuesday, they released a blog post with a slew of emails from Musk that tore a gaping hole in his argument. With these emails to back up their claims, the blog post summarised, “In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO”. The reason Elon withheld funding became apparent, as the blog put it, “As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” including “majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO.” Make no mistake here, this is a toxic takeover, as Musk was one of OpenAI’s biggest funders at this point. It also proves that Musk had no qualms about taking the company to a for-profit model as long as he was the one to benefit from it. This moral inconsistency, with the hard evidence to back it up, completely undermines his legal position.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Planet Earth & Beyond to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.