Five days after Musk formally sued OpenAI and its CEO Altman and President Brockman, OpenAI published a blog post on its official website refuting all of Musk's claims. The authors of the article include Brockman, Ilya Sutskevy (chief scientist at OpenAI), and Altman, five co-founders of OpenAI.
Late Finance compares OpenAI's statement and Musk's complaint in detail, and the main contradictions between the two are:
Musk's core accusation is that Altman, Brockman, and others violated the start-up agreement and spirit when OpenAI was established, that is, to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than economic gain, and he believes that OpenAI is aiming to commercialize AI research with the goal of making a profit and maximize Microsoft's profits. He said that he left the board of directors because it was ineffective for OpenAI to turn to a for-profit company, and that he continued to fund OpenAI in accordance with the agreement.
Musk has accordingly demanded that OpenAI be reinstated as open source and asked the court to prohibit OpenAI, Microsoft, Brockman, and Altman from profiting from the company's AI technology.
However, OpenAI countered that Musk actually approved of OpenAI's transformation into a for-profit entity, because everyone knows that the computing resources needed to get to artificial general intelligence (AGI) are far from being raised by non-profit organizations, and Musk is the one who knows this best.
For example, Brockman and Altman originally started OpenAI with the intention of raising $100 million, but Musk emailed him saying "We need a much bigger number than $100 million so that it doesn't sound hopeless," "We should claim that we already have $1 billion in funding," and "I'll fill all the remaining gaps."
According to OpenAI's statement, the real reason for the parting of ways between the two parties is that Musk wants OpenAI to turn profitable, and he will be in control (owning a majority of the shares, controlling the board of directors and serving as CEO), but others do not agree that any individual has absolute control of OpenAI, and Musk then suggested that OpenAI be merged into Tesla, relying on Tesla's profits to fight Google. After these proposals fell through, Musk quickly left OpenAI and planned to form a new competitor within Tesla.
At the end of the article, OpenAI posted the content of five emails sent by Musk to Altman, Brockman, Suzkwe, and others as evidence. In one of the emails, Musk ** the following opinion of someone (whose name was withheld when OpenAI cited) and said that "it is true" and that "this is the only promising path to compete with Google":
A shift to profitability could lead to more sustainable revenues in the long run....The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, is to have OpenAI attached to Tesla as its cash cow. I believe that attaching to other big companies (e.g. Apple, Amazon) will fail because of genetic mismatch......After having a fully functional fully autonomous driving solution in about 2-3 years, we can sell a large number of cars or trucks. If we do a really good job and the transportation industry is big enough, we can increase Tesla's market capitalization to a very large size and use that revenue to fund AI research at the right scale.Perhaps what Musk really cares about is that it is now Microsoft, not Tesla, that benefits from the AI research that he funded heavily in his early days. Ben Thomson, a well-known analyst, believes that it will be difficult for Musk to win this lawsuit because of the lack of any formal contract between the two parties, and from the beginning, OpenAI has made it clear in its internal communication that it does not intend to open source everything. In his opinion, Musk's accusations are more moral than legal.
In its statement, OpenAI avoided its relationship with Microsoft, saying only that it regretted that things had come to this point because a person they once deeply admired and who inspired them to pursue higher goals left telling them to fail, create competitors, and sue them when they began to make meaningful progress toward their mission. (Qiu Hao).