OpenAI Claims Elon Musk Wanted ‘Absolute Control’ Over Company

File Photo

New Delhi: OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, has responded to Elon Musk's lawsuit by stating that during talks about possibly adopting a for-profit structure to advance their mission, “Musk wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control”.

In a blog post, the creator of ChatGPT claimed that Musk wanted to have the most ownership of the company, control the board right from the start, and be the CEO. In the middle of these discussions, “he withheld funding”.

OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba explained that they couldn't reach an agreement with Elon Musk on transitioning to a for-profit model because they believed it went against the organization's mission for any one person to have complete control over OpenAI.

Musk left OpenAI, “saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself. He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path”. According to OpenAI, they couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Musk because “we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI”.

The billionaire then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. Musk soon chose to leave OpenAI, "saying that our probability of success was zero, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla”.

In December 2018, Musk sent OpenAI an email, saying “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it”. OpenAI said it is focused on “advancing our mission and have a long way to go”. Musk alleged in his lawsuit that OpenAI has become “a closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft.(With Inputs From IANS)