OpenAI fires back at Elon Musk lawsuit with 'facts' showing he 'told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress'

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(Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Elon Musk steepling his hands and looking sombre.

This week saw the news that Elon Musk, everyone’s favourite tech billionaire, wassuing OpenAI and two of his fellow co-foundersfor departing from the company’s original non-profit mission to benefit humanity. The suit unsurprisingly casts Musk as the last action hero, the man who sees the dangers of artificial general intelligence (AGI), out to stop those cash-crazed boffins from creating Skynet in an effort to please its biggest investor Microsoft. OpenAI’s co-founders have now responded and, equally unsurprisingly, have tried to poke some massive holes in Musk’s version of events.

This comes in a letterposted to the OpenAI website, credited to co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. Both Altman and Brockman have been targeted as part of Musk’s action. It begins with some verbiage about the mission to create “safe and beneficial AGI” before getting to the meat with “some facts about our relationship with Elon.” Lest there be any doubt, it adds at the outset: “We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”

In reality Musk provided “less than” $45 million, while other donors stumped up a combined $90 million. We’re obviously in the realm of silly money here, because $45 million is a huge investment in anything, but I guess when you’ve promised to help hit the $1 billion mark it seems like small beer.

Everyone including Musk agreed that OpenAI’s best option was to create some sort of for-profit entity, though there was some disagreement about what the proper path forward would be. Musk had a fairly simple idea of where he wanted to see things go: Musk in full control of the for-profit side. The OpenAI co-founders say “Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO.”

Musk also appears to have thrown a bit of a tantrum over this, beginning to withhold his funding “in the middle of these discussions” and forcing Reid Hoffman to step in to cover staff salaries and operational expenses.

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But it didn’t work. The co-founders felt no one person should have “absolute control over OpenAI,” the letter states. At which point ya boy Musk came up with another wheeze: a merger with Tesla. Musk suggested this in early 2018, saying Tesla could act as a “cash cow” for OpenAI and represented “the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero.”

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman at the recent World Economic Forum.(Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Sam Altman speaking at the World Economic Forum.

The Google problem

“Unfortunately, humanity’s future is in the hands of [redacted].“Elon Musk

“Unfortunately, humanity’s future is in the hands of [redacted].”

Other uses seem of questionable benefit with the potential for disaster, such as a medical provider in Rhode Island using GPT-4 “to simplify its surgical consent forms from a college reading level to a 6th grade one.” Most condescendingly of all, OpenAI claims “Iceland is using GPT-4 to preserve the Icelandic language.” I really think the Icelanders were doing OK with this before the advent of AI.

Among the emails OpenAI cites from Musk during his time with OpenAI is one particularly interesting snippet. It is abundantly clear from all of these communications that Musk does not trust Google and seems to genuinely believe it is dangerous when it comes to AI. The emails are shot-through with comparisons to Google, the dangers of open sourcing work Google could potentially use, the scale of its resource and AI investments, and then this:

“My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%,” says Musk. “Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.

“Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.

“Unfortunately, humanity’s future is in the hands of [redacted].”

Musk doesn’t want Google to be the company that makes the major AI breakthrough/s, but he also doesn’t think OpenAI can overtake it, to the extent he’d rather take the “1%” chance of going up against it with xAI instead.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.(Image credit: WPA Pool via Getty Images)

Demis Hassabis at an AI conference.

The mission and the memes

Finally, there’s time for a rather magnificent backhand towards Musk from people who know him, have worked with him, and clearly see the good and bad in his character. “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.”

“Demis [Hassabis] is mired in a bureaucracy of banal evil that he cannot fix.“Elon Musk

“Demis [Hassabis] is mired in a bureaucracy of banal evil that he cannot fix.”

Over the last day Musk’s been posting memes that run with theClosedAIgag, though there does seem to be a particular animosity between he and Altman. These includedirect digs with ClosedAI logo photoshops,and the claim that,next to Altman, “Machiavelli was an armchair quarterback.”

“Governments will attempt to seize power over AGI, which may be worse,“replies Musk. “But it is increasingly coming down to a choice of what company do you trust most to develop AGI.”

The billionaire troll has also been making comparisons betweenhis own AI tool Grok and ChatGPT, postingjob openings at xAI, and for some reason boasting about the open-source nature of Twitter’s community notes. He also found time to sharemore shots at Google AI,play some Diablo 4, andexpress hope that more peoplelikeex-Bungie composer Marty O’Donnell run for office.

OpenAI is looking for an outright dismissal of Musk’s lawsuit, which doesn’t seem implausible. The company appears to have the goods on Musk, including his agreement that it should have a for-profit arm and that not every aspect of its work should be open-sourced (among the lawsuit’s main complaints). Musk’s arguments are more esoteric and existential in nature, focusing not on what he said then but on what OpenAI has become since: which in his eyes, is a de facto subsidiary of Microsoft. And there’s a case to be made there too.

The only certainty is that both sides in this fight can afford an army of lawyers and, while Musk’s lawsuit seems like a bit of a Hail Mary out of nowhere, the disclosure should this keep running will be delicious. Replying to a post about how DeepMind co-founder and Google AI colossus Demis Hassabis must be enjoying the OpenAI drama,Musk says"Demis is mired in a bureaucracy of banal evil that he cannot fix.”

Well, mired as he may be, I’ll bet Hassabis is enjoying the spectacle anyway.

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