OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, published the private emails of Elon Musk on Tuesday amid the ongoing lawsuit between the billionaire and the tech giant.
Musk, who helped found the company as a nonprofit in 2015 before leaving in 2018, filed suit against OpenAI last month over its alleged transformation “into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft.”
OpenAI recently entered into a $13 billion partnership with Microsoft and opted to keep its latest source code secret. Musk argued that the company is no longer developing AI tools for the benefit of humanity, but purely for the sake of profit.
But in a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI suggested that Musk whitewashed his initial vision for the company and that it did focus largely on profit.
“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,” the company wrote.
Numerous emails written by Musk during his time at OpenAI were published in an effort to have the lawsuit thrown out of court. The emails show Musk admitting that OpenAI would need much more funding than initially thought in order to succeed.
In an email from late 2018, Musk told OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that the company would need “billions per year immediately” to remain afloat. Musk even attempted to buy the company outright, but was denied.
“As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” OpenAI wrote. “Elon 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.”
Yet OpenAI eventually took Musk’s advice regarding its funding by launching a for-profit entity within the company known as OpenAI LP, causing its value to skyrocket to roughly $90 billion.
“In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity,” the company added. “Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding.”
OpenAI has refuted the claims that its primary mission has changed from when Musk was still on board.
“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,” the company added.
Musk has responded to the release of the emails by sharing memes mocking OpenAI to his social media platform X.
Musk also pledged to drop the lawsuit if OpenAI changed its name to ClosedAI.
