ChatGPT creator OpenAI has declared its intention to refute the claims made in Elon Musk's lawsuit against the company, and published what it clamed to be private emails from the tech billionaire as evidence of its points.
Released on its website, the statement comes in response to a lawsuit from Musk filed February 29, 2024, which alleges "OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft" and is developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the sake of profit and not to benefit humanity.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 by several individuals including CEO Sam Altman and Musk, though the latter left in 2018. The company is seeking a court dismissal of the lawsuit.
"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 towards OpenAI’s mission without him," OpenAI said.
"The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits. We are now sharing what we've learned about achieving our mission, and some facts about our relationship with Elon. We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims."
OpenAI admitted it would need far more resources than it would initially imagine, with Musk declaring $1 billion would be required instead of the initial $100 million target. OpenAI then said the entire company, including Musk, realised a nonprofit therefore would not be able to gather the resources necessary.
Musk wanted majority equity of this for-profit, initial board control, and to be CEO, OpenAI claimed, and witheld funding while these discussions were ongoing. "We felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI," it said. Musk then suggested "the most promising option" would be for "OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow".
Musk later left OpenAI, saying its chance of relevancy to the likes of Google "without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise".
Refuting the lawsuit's claim that OpenAI is now a de facto Microsoft subsiadary, after the tech titan committed $13 billion to it and incorporated its technology into search engine Bing, and is no longer operating "for the benefit of humanity", OpenAI insisted "we provide broad access to today's most powerful AI, including a free version that hundreds of millions of people use every day".
Musk's lawsuit is just the latest in a string of major accusations against OpenAI, though most come from company's and individuals claiming copyright infringement.
Sarah Silverman and three other writers announced they were suing OpenA in July 2023, followed by 17 authors including Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin with a similar lawsuit in September. The New York Times announced it was suing both OpenAI and Microsoft in December for "unauthorised use of published work" to train its AI technologies.
Image Credit: Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
