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Recently, a new legal conflict has pushed the conflict between Musk and OpenAI to the forefront.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk's accusation that OpenAI and its current CEO Sam Altman have gone against the non-profit, open-source vision of the original OpenAI and instead pursued commercial profits has sparked widespread concern in the industry.
In his complaint filed with the San Francisco Superior Court, Musk pointed out that OpenAI's commercialization transformation went against its original intention and became an entity that ran counter to its founding principles.
In response, OpenAI was quick to respond, emphasizing that the shift in its business model was in response to the growing challenges of R&D costs and complexity, and reiterating that the company would remain independent and compete with tech giant Microsoft, rather than succumb to personal self-interest.
OpenAI has released an article titled "OpenAI and Elon Musk", in which OpenAI reveals a little-known history to the public, laying out its intricate relationship with one of its founders, Elon Musk, and its shared vision for building a safe, rewarding AGI.
A detailed analysis of the intrinsic motivation behind Musk's breakup with OpenAI exposes Musk's deep intentions in pursuing OpenAI's dominance, and why his integration proposal failed to gain support from other co-founders and the board.
This journey reveals the different strategies and ultimate differences between the two sides on the path of pursuing the same goal, and also depicts a magnificent picture of how OpenAI sticks to its original intention, moves forward independently, and promotes AGI to benefit human society with practical actions.
At the beginning of its establishment at the end of 2015, OpenAI shouldered a grand mission - not only to build a safe and effective AGI, but also to ensure the wide distribution of its benefits. However, with the deepening of the knowledge of the resources required by AGI, OpenAI gradually realized that the computing power and capital required to build such a superintelligence far exceeded expectations.
According to public email records, Musk has proposed that OpenAI should announce an initial funding commitment of $1 billion and is willing to fill the funding gap that others have not provided. However, in the actual operation, OpenAI only raised less than $45 million from Musk, and the rest of the funds came from other donors. Faced with the astronomical amount of investment required for AGI research and development, both Musk and the OpenAI team recognize that it is difficult to raise enough billions of dollars in annual funding in the form of a nonprofit.
In early 2017, both sides** turned to for-profit structures to obtain the necessary resources. Musk has proposed a merger between OpenAI and Tesla, and is seeking to acquire a majority stake and the CEO position. After failing to reach an agreement on this, Musk proposed the idea of OpenAI merging with Tesla, claiming that Tesla is the only platform that has the potential to rival Google's Deepmind, and expressed his willingness to support OpenAI's self-financing.
However, OpenAI rejected Musk's proposal by insisting that any individual having absolute control over the organization would be contrary to its mission. Subsequently, Musk chose to leave OpenAI and set out to create an AGI competitor within Tesla, while the likelihood of OpenAI's success is extremely low.
Despite the challenges, OpenAI has not given up on its original purpose, but has taken a different path to develop widely available and beneficial AI tools.
Powerful technologies such as GPT-4 are being used around the world, such as accelerating Albania's accession to the European Union, helping farmers in Kenya and India increase their incomes, improving the readability of surgical consent forms in U.S. health facilities, and even preserving endangered languages such as Icelandic.
Regarding the issue of open source, Musk understands and accepts that OpenAI does not mean to open source AGI itself, but to ensure that everyone can benefit from the completion of AGI. Despite the differences, Musk has affirmed OpenAI's strategy of gradually reducing openness in the conversation.
Today, OpenAI, with its outstanding technical achievements and extensive influence, has forcefully refuted the outside world's doubts about its development, and also expressed deep regret for Musk, a former partner.
Whether it is in terms of huge R&D investment, organizational structure transformation or adherence to core values, OpenAI has shown a tenacious spirit and a far-sighted strategic vision, which is the key to promoting the healthy development of the field of artificial intelligence.
The story of Musk and OpenAI is not only a journey of separation between leaders in the tech world, but also a deep reflection on the direction of AI development, ethical boundaries, and how tech giants strike a balance between ideals and reality.
This controversy over the future control and development path of artificial intelligence is destined to have a profound impact on the pattern of the global AI industry.
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