OpenAI releases Elon Musk's emails to show support for for-profit plans

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OpenAI has hit back at Elon Musk, issuing emails to show he supports its plan to create a for-profit entity and raise billions of dollars — decisions that are at the heart of the Tesla chief's lawsuit against the AI ​​startup.

Musk, who was part of OpenAI's founding team, claimed in his lawsuit last week that it violated an agreement to make AI breakthroughs “free to the public” by forming a multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft, which pledged $13. billion for the company.

“OpenAI, Inc. has become a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawsuit said.

In a blog post published late Tuesday, founding members of OpenAI, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever, disputed that claim, claiming instead that Musk led early efforts to raise more money from investors.

“When launching OpenAI in late 2015, Greg and Sam initially planned to raise $100 million, but,” Elon said in an email, “we needed to go with a much larger number than $100 million to avoid looking hopeless.” ..”. . . “I think we should say we started with a $1 billion financing commitment.”

OpenAI's original nonprofit structure hampered its ability to raise money from traditional investors. Given the cost of building AI tools, this has been an obstacle to its stated mission to develop increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity.”

“In late 2017, Elon and I decided that the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted to obtain a majority stake, initial control of the board, and become CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he halted financing “, according to the blog post.

“We could not agree on win-win terms with Elon because we felt it conflicted with the mission of any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI. He then proposed instead that OpenAI be integrated into Tesla.” In early February 2018, Elon sent us an email suggesting that OpenAI should “be tied to Tesla as its cash cow,” Altman and his colleagues wrote Tuesday.

The stock exchange highlights tensions over the direction of Silicon Valley's best-known startup, which sparked an AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and has since set the pace among rivals including Anthropic, Inflection and Google.

The startup has become a commercial juggernaut with revenues of more than $2 billion year-over-year, and has attracted multi-billion-dollar investments from Microsoft and a host of venture capital firms since launching a for-profit entity in 2019. It has been a huge success. The private market is valued at about $80 billion, according to For someone familiar with the matter.

But concerns about governance and safeguards at the company remain, after Altman's dramatic ouster and reinstatement as CEO by board members – including Sutskever – last November.

The internal investigation into the boardroom turmoil is expected to be completed next month, while the US Securities and Exchange Commission has separately investigated some actions taken by the company and its executives over the past year.

Musk — who left OpenAI's board in 2018 after falling out with Altman — is raising money for his own artificial intelligence project, called xAI.

“We are saddened that it has come to this with someone we greatly 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 'mission without him,'” the remaining leadership team wrote. .