OpenAI openly retaliated against Elon Musk's lawsuit on Tuesday by disclosing information about Musk's connection to the business in a blog post.
"With someone we have deeply admired, 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," the blog post stated, along with a series of internal emails between Musk and OpenAI executives from 2015 to 2018.
Musk accused OpenAI and its executives of betraying their open-source ideals by collaborating with Microsoft in a lawsuit he filed on Friday. It said that the business violated its initial 2015 nonprofit contract when it changed course in 2019 and created a "capped-profit" segment.
Although Musk's attorneys claimed in the lawsuit that he continued to contribute to OpenAI until 2020, the CEO of Tesla departed the board of directors in 2018.
Musk informed OpenAI president Greg Brockman and CEO Sam Altman in the first of the emails that the company made public in November 2015 that the company needed to raise money equivalent to a "much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless relative to what Google or Facebook are spending."
"I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment," Musk said in a tweet. "This is true. Anything that someone else does not supply, I will cover."
According to the commentary in the blog post by Altman, Brockman, and other OpenAI executives, in late 2017 it became evident to all concerned parties that a for-profit structure was the only way to guarantee the company could ensure sufficient funding for its pursuit of the development of artificial general intelligence. Musk was then a member of the company's board.
Elon wanted to be the CEO, have majority ownership, and have early board control. He withheld financing in the midst of these talks. According to the article, Reid Hoffman filled the shortfall by paying for operations and payroll. We believed it was against the goal for any one person to have complete control of OpenAI, hence we were unable to come to an agreement with Elon on a for-profit. Then he recommended that OpenAI and Tesla be combined instead."
The article included an email exchange from February 2018 that Musk provided to Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the head scientist and cofounder of OpenAI. In the exchange, an unidentified third person said that the best course of action for OpenAI would be to "attach to Tesla as its cash cow."
The anonymous author of the idea was "exactly right," Musk said in the email he sent, adding, "Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google." Even in that case, there is little chance of opposing Google. It is just not zero."
"Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla," the article said. "He informed our team that he was okay with us figuring out how to raise billions of dollars on our own when he departed in late February 2018." 'Even collecting several hundred million would not be enough,' Elon said us in an email in December 2018. This need billions annually right now, or else forget it."
A few weeks after OpenAI closed a transaction that valued the business at $80 billion, the current drama between Musk and Altman, et al. began.
Musk recently stepped up his public criticism of the ethics and legality of OpenAI's financial structure, despite the fact that he has made several jabs at the company since departing. In a mid-February post on X, Musk stated that he was offered shares at "various points, but it seemed unethical/illegal to accept them." He has said in interviews that OpenAI "would not exist without me."
The blog post concluded by assuring readers that, in spite of Musk's charges, OpenAI was "focused on advancing our mission" and still had "a long way to go." It also said that OpenAI planned to act to deny all of Musk's assertions.
"As we continue to make our tools better and better," it said, "we are excited to deploy these systems so they empower every individual."
"With someone we have deeply admired, 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," the blog post stated, along with a series of internal emails between Musk and OpenAI executives from 2015 to 2018.
Musk accused OpenAI and its executives of betraying their open-source ideals by collaborating with Microsoft in a lawsuit he filed on Friday. It said that the business violated its initial 2015 nonprofit contract when it changed course in 2019 and created a "capped-profit" segment.
Although Musk's attorneys claimed in the lawsuit that he continued to contribute to OpenAI until 2020, the CEO of Tesla departed the board of directors in 2018.
Musk informed OpenAI president Greg Brockman and CEO Sam Altman in the first of the emails that the company made public in November 2015 that the company needed to raise money equivalent to a "much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless relative to what Google or Facebook are spending."
"I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment," Musk said in a tweet. "This is true. Anything that someone else does not supply, I will cover."
According to the commentary in the blog post by Altman, Brockman, and other OpenAI executives, in late 2017 it became evident to all concerned parties that a for-profit structure was the only way to guarantee the company could ensure sufficient funding for its pursuit of the development of artificial general intelligence. Musk was then a member of the company's board.
Elon wanted to be the CEO, have majority ownership, and have early board control. He withheld financing in the midst of these talks. According to the article, Reid Hoffman filled the shortfall by paying for operations and payroll. We believed it was against the goal for any one person to have complete control of OpenAI, hence we were unable to come to an agreement with Elon on a for-profit. Then he recommended that OpenAI and Tesla be combined instead."
The article included an email exchange from February 2018 that Musk provided to Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the head scientist and cofounder of OpenAI. In the exchange, an unidentified third person said that the best course of action for OpenAI would be to "attach to Tesla as its cash cow."
The anonymous author of the idea was "exactly right," Musk said in the email he sent, adding, "Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google." Even in that case, there is little chance of opposing Google. It is just not zero."
"Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla," the article said. "He informed our team that he was okay with us figuring out how to raise billions of dollars on our own when he departed in late February 2018." 'Even collecting several hundred million would not be enough,' Elon said us in an email in December 2018. This need billions annually right now, or else forget it."
A few weeks after OpenAI closed a transaction that valued the business at $80 billion, the current drama between Musk and Altman, et al. began.
Musk recently stepped up his public criticism of the ethics and legality of OpenAI's financial structure, despite the fact that he has made several jabs at the company since departing. In a mid-February post on X, Musk stated that he was offered shares at "various points, but it seemed unethical/illegal to accept them." He has said in interviews that OpenAI "would not exist without me."
The blog post concluded by assuring readers that, in spite of Musk's charges, OpenAI was "focused on advancing our mission" and still had "a long way to go." It also said that OpenAI planned to act to deny all of Musk's assertions.
"As we continue to make our tools better and better," it said, "we are excited to deploy these systems so they empower every individual."
