OpenAI has struck back at industrialist Elon Musk’s accusations that it abandoned its original plans to be an open-source developer, releasing reproduced emails that allegedly show the billionaire entrepreneur’s early support of creating a for-profit AI company and merging it with Tesla.
Mr. Musk helped launch and fund OpenAI in its early years. In last month’s lawsuit against the company and its leaders, he argued that he invested time and resources to get the AI start-up off the ground, on the condition that it would remain a nonprofit “dedicated to creating safe, open-source AGI [artificial general intelligence] for public benefit.”
The suit, filed in a San Fransisco court, accused that OpenAI’s co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of having breached their agreement with Mr. Musk by abandoning the nonprofit commitment over the years. The Tesla CEO is asking the court to order OpenAI, which is now backed by Microsoft, to make its works “freely available to the public,” as well as prohibit anyone including Microsoft from making profit from its AI technology.
“OpenAI Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Mr. Musk’s lawsuit alleged.
In response, OpenAI on March 5 published in a blog post a series of what seems to be private emails from Mr. Musk, highlighting apparent hypocrisy arising from what he purportedly had envisioned for the company.
According to the emails, OpenAI needed more funding than originally planned, prompting Mr. Musk to encourage the startup to raise $1 billion instead of the initial $100 million. Mr. Musk also suggested that it “makes sense” for the company to “start being less open” over time and “not share” the company’s works with the public.
“The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes),” a reproduced email dated to Jan. 2, 2016, reads.
OpenAI also claimed that Mr. Musk wanted “majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO” in the for-profit venture, and withheld funding during these negotiations. While the reproduced emails posted on Tuesday don’t appear to substantiate those claims, one does show that Mr. Musk proposed a merge with Tesla at a time when OpenAI was “burning cash” but still struggling to “seriously compete” with Google’s Deep Mind.
“If you can’t seriously compete but continue to do research in open, you might in fact be making things worse and helping them out ‘for free,’ because any advances are fairly easy for them to copy and immediately incorporate, at scale,” reads the reproduced email, dated Jan. 31, 2018.
“A for-profit pivot might create a more sustainable revenue stream over time and would, with the current team, likely bring in a lot of investment. However, building out a product from scratch would steal focus from AI research, it would take a long time and it’s unclear if a company could catch up to Google scale, and the investors might exert too much pressure in the wrong directions,” it continues.
“The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow.”
Mr. Musk walked away from OpenAI’s board in February 2018, a month after this merger offer was supposedly made. Upon his departure, OpenAI said he would continue to provide funding and advice to the company.
“As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon,” OpenAI said in a blog post at that time.
Since leaving OpenAI, Mr. Musk has become an outspoken critic of the company, advising U.S. Senators to establish a federal department to act as a “referee” in the AI industry. He is also raising money for his own AI project, dubbed XAI.
In Tuesday’s blog post, OpenAI said it was “sad” to see the dispute over the company’s future devolved into a court battle.
“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 toward OpenAI’s mission without him,” OpenAI said.
In March 2019, a year after parting with Mr. Musk, OpenAI transformed itself into OpenAI LP, a “capped-profit” entity. Specifically, this means that profits for investors in this venture are capped at 100 times their original investment, and that the amount in excess will be passed on to an overarching nonprofit company, called OpenAI Inc, to spend as it sees fit.
In other words, an investor who invested $1 million will see the profit cap come into play only after that $1 million has generated $100 million in returns.
“We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance,” the company explained.
