[TechWeb] reported on March 6, according to foreign media reports, in a memorandum to employees in response to Musk's lawsuit in San Francisco, after denying his main litigation claims, OpenAI also posted on its official website, responded, and disclosed some past events between Musk and him before he left, and also announced some emails between them and Musk.
On the official website, OpenAI published the article "OpenAI and Elon Musk", which was signed by OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, co-founder and president Greg Brockman, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, as well as John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba.
In the article published on the official website, OpenAI began by saying that their mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all mankind, which means that they want to build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence, but also help create widely distributed benefits.
OpenAI also made it clear that they will share some of the things they have learned in completing their mission, as well as some facts in their relationship with Musk, and they intend to take action to dismiss all of Musk's allegations.
In the lawsuit, Musk accused the $13 billion partnership with Microsoft of deviating from the original purpose of the non-profit. In response to this accusation, OpenAI said in the article that they realized that building general artificial intelligence would require much more resources than they initially expected, and that Musk and they both realized that a for-profit entity was necessary for them to obtain these resources.
OpenAI disclosed in the article that when it launched at the end of 2015, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were planning to raise $100 million in funding, but Musk said that more was needed to avoid sounding hopeless, and he believed that he should start with a $1 billion funding commitment, and if others could not provide it, he would fill the gap. OpenAI also mentioned that Musk has provided less than $45 million in total funding, and other donors have provided more than $90 million.
Judging from the news disclosed by OpenAI in the article, the differences between them and Musk are in the process of forging a for-profit structure to achieve a long-term mission.
In the article, they disclosed that at the end of 2017 and when Musk decided that the next mission was to create a for-profit entity, Musk wanted most of the equity, initially the control of the board of directors, and to serve as CEO, but they felt that they could not agree to these terms because they felt that full control of OpenAI by individuals was contrary to its mission.
In the process of creating a for-profit entity, Musk stopped providing funds, followed by funds provided by others, to meet the needs of wages and operations.
After failing to agree on the creation of a for-profit entity, Musk then proposed to merge OpenAI into Tesla. In February 2018, Musk sent them an email suggesting that Tesla be used as a cash cow, and said that it was completely correct, and that merging Tesla was the only path that could hopefully rival Google, but even so, the possibility of competing with Google was very small, but the possibility was not zero.
And when he chose to leave due to disagreements, Musk was not very decent in words. OpenAI mentioned in the article that when Musk chose to leave, he said that they had zero chance of success, and said that he planned to build a general artificial intelligence competitor within Tesla.
Although he didn't look too optimistic about the future when he left, OpenAI revealed that when Musk left at the end of February 2018, he told the team that he supported them in finding a way to raise billions of dollars. In December of the same year, Musk also said in an email to them that the financing of hundreds of millions of dollars is not enough, and what is needed is billions of dollars every year, otherwise forget it.
Regarding Musk's accusation that OpenAI will keep the latest generative AI products** secret and no longer open source, OpenAI is also involved in the email with Musk that it has released.
In an email sent to Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman on January 2, 2016, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, it makes sense to start less open as they get closer to building AI, and that OpenAI's openness means that everyone should benefit from the results of AI, but it's perfectly fine not to share the science.
OpenAI is also very sorry about the lawsuit that Musk launched against them. In the article, they expressed their regret that they had come this far with people they deeply admired, who had inspired them to move towards higher goals, then told them that they would fail, and formed a competitor, only to sue OpenAI when they started to make meaningful progress towards their mission without him.
Although sued by Musk, OpenAI will remain focused on their mission. On the official website, OpenAI said that it will focus on advancing their mission, and it is well aware that there is still a long way to go. As they continue to improve their tools and make them better, they're also excited to be able to deploy those systems so that they empower everyone.