You may have heard about the recent lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI, but the details of the power struggle have now been revealed by the company itself. In response to Musk's allegations, OpenAI has come forward with a counter-narrative, shedding light on the disagreements that led to this legal battle.
According to a blog post published by OpenAI, Musk at one point desired "absolute control" of the company by merging it with Tesla. The post, written by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba, stated that Musk wanted "full control," including majority equity, initial board control, and the CEO position. However, OpenAI could not agree to these terms as they believed it went against their mission for any individual to have complete authority over the organization.
Musk's lawsuit alleged that OpenAI has shifted its focus towards profitability and has become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft, deviating from its original nonprofit mission that he had financially supported. While Musk claims a breach of contract, OpenAI has not directly addressed the existence of a formal agreement, although they maintain that their decision to not open-source their work was understood by Musk.
One of the contentious points in the lawsuit is Musk's assertion that GPT-4, a language model developed by OpenAI, is a "de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm" representing artificial general intelligence. OpenAI had previously refuted these claims internally but did not specifically address them in their public response on Tuesday.
Furthermore, OpenAI emphasized in their post that as they moved towards developing artificial general intelligence, it made sense to be less transparent about their scientific work. They cited an email exchange from 2016 where Musk agreed that it was acceptable not to share all scientific advancements in this field.
As the legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI continues, the revelations about Musk's desire for control and OpenAI's stance on their mission and transparency highlight the complexities of the situation. With both sides presenting conflicting narratives, it remains to be seen how the lawsuit will unfold and what implications it may have for the future of OpenAI and its work in the field of artificial intelligence.
