![Elon Musk is a ‘jerk’ but was a ‘talent magnet’ for OpenAI early on, admits Sam Altman—who now faces direct competition from him Elon Musk is a ‘jerk’ but was a ‘talent magnet’ for OpenAI early on, admits Sam Altman—who now faces direct competition from him](https://i0.wp.com/content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/GettyImages-491588398-e1694301040352.jpg?fit=%2C&ssl=1)
While Elon Musk recently founded an AI startup to compete with OpenAI, not long ago he co-founded the now-famous company (AI chatbots ChatGPT and GPT-4) manufacturer) and helped it in many ways.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describe Musk’s early role in the company came during an appearance good company This week’s podcast.
“There’s no question that Elon is absolutely a talent magnet and an attention magnet, and on top of all of that, he has some real superpowers that were very helpful to us in the early days,” Altman told host Nick Gula Tangen.
He gave no examples of these “superpowers,” but venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently outlined the psychological traits that make Musk “the most important example” of an entrepreneur who “can’t shut it off.”
This year, Musk expressed distaste for the direction OpenAI was taking and launched xAI in July, which he said was “definitely in competition” with Altman’s company. In true Musk fashion, xAI’s lofty goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe.” To do this, he has brought in top AI talent from Google, DeepMind, Microsoft and his own Tesla.
Musk left the OpenAI board of directors in 2018. He offered to lead the organization but quit after being rejected, according to traffic light.
One of his big gripes today is that he co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, but then the company moved to a “profit cap” model in 2019 — the same year it received a $1 billion deal from Microsoft investment, among which Billions of dollars to follow.
Musk’s dissatisfaction with OpenAI became increasingly apparent earlier this year, with the company’s valuation soaring with the launch of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that became one of the fastest-adopting products ever.
he Tweet February: “OpenAI was created as an open source (that’s why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has actually become a closed source, for-profit company Maximized companies are controlled by Microsoft.”
Altman, while acknowledging that OpenAI has taken an unconventional path in many ways, questioned this characterization of the partnership with Microsoft. Same Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.But Musk, in May interview CNBC said, “I do worry that Microsoft may actually have more control than the OpenAI leadership team realizes.”
In March, he also complained that OpenAI only switched from a non-profit model to a non-profit model after he donated millions of dollars to OpenAI.
“I’m still confused how a nonprofit to which I donated about $100M somehow became a for-profit with a market cap of $30B,” he Tweet. “If it’s legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” Questions were later raised about what was really going on. The amount he gavebut apparently he did donate millions of dollars to nonprofits at the time.
Altman has mixed reviews of Musk. Altman said in a speech in London in May that it was “very valuable” to “learn from Elon what is possible.”
but he told with Kara Swisher “I mean, he’s an asshole, and whatever else you want to say about him — his style is not what I want for myself,” he told the podcast in March.
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