OpenAI publicly responded to a lawsuit filed by co-founder Elon Musk on Tuesday, highlighting the apparent hypocrisy of the now billionaire and early backer of the company.
In response, OpenAI reprinted an old email from Musk in which Tesla The SpaceX chief has encouraged the fledgling startup to raise at least $1 billion, agreeing that over time it should “start to be less open” and “not share” the company’s science with the public.
The reposted information is in stark contrast to the views Musk represented last week, when he sued OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and President Gregg Brockman, alleging breach of contract and unfair competition.
In the lawsuit, Musk’s lawyers claim that the inner workings of OpenAI’s GPT-4 artificial intelligence model are “completely secret from OpenAI and, from information and belief, completely secret from Microsoft,” and This secrecy is for business purposes rather than security. OpenAI said, “We intend to reject all of Elon’s claims.”
In November, Musk told an audience at the New York Times DealBook conference that, in his view, OpenAI had strayed from its original mission.
“OpenAI should be renamed ‘profit-maximizing super closed-source artificial intelligence,’ because that’s exactly what it is,” Musk said onstage at the event. He noted that it has transformed from an “open source foundation” to a “closed source for-profit company” worth billions of dollars.
In contrast, Musk appeared to discourage OpenAI co-founders from taking an overly streamlined approach to financing, according to emails copied by the company in December 2018. He wrote that the chance of OpenAI becoming a relevant competitor to Google’s DeepMind is zero unless the startup “makes a dramatic change in execution and resources.”
Musk is giving OpenAI co-founders Sutskever, Brockman and Altman. “Even raising a few hundred million won’t be enough. It needs billions a year, otherwise forget it.”
Musk is now CEO of automaker Tesla, owner of defense contractor SpaceX and X Corp., and founder of brain-computer interface startup Neuralink and a potential competitor to OpenAI, which he named for xAI.
Before he left OpenAI, “Elon wanted to have a majority stake in the artificial intelligence business, initial board control, and serve as CEO,” the company said in a response to his lawsuit. The startup also said in its blog post that Musk sought to become OpenAI’s CEO in 2017 as OpenAI was changing its structure.
Musk’s companies sometimes attract talent from OpenAI. In the case of xAI, Musk positioned the company’s first product, Grok, to compete with OpenAI’s software ChatGPT.
In a January 2018 email reprinted by OpenAI, Musk agreed with an unnamed sender when he encouraged the startup’s co-founders to rely on Tesla as their “cash cow.” Entering the first quarter of 2018, Tesla reported a cash balance of $3.4 billion, after reporting a full-year net loss of $2.24 billion in 2017 on revenue of $11.8 billion.
CNBC has not independently verified the authenticity of the emails included in OpenAI’s response on Tuesday, some of which contained partial redactions.
The “contract” at the heart of Musk’s recent lawsuit against OpenAI is not a formal written agreement signed by all parties who founded the company.
Instead, Musk argued through his lawyers that the early OpenAI team had reached an agreement to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) as a nonprofit organization “for the benefit of humanity.”However, the project has transformed into a company with a complex corporate structure, including a for-profit entity that Musk believes is mainly composed of Microsoft.
Musk has spent much of his legal proceedings reminding the world of his central role in the creation of OpenAI. OpenAI has become one of the hottest new startups on the planet, thanks in large part to the viral popularity of ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E.
OpenAI’s public response Tuesday night mirrored a memo senior executives sent to the company’s employees last week.
Musk’s lawsuit and OpenAI’s response come after a rollercoaster few months for the company that included boardroom drama, a board shakeup and investigations by financial regulators.
Musk’s attorney could not be reached for comment late Tuesday after OpenAI issued a response.
—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting.
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