Musk's suit, filed last week in San Francisco Superior Court, alleges that OpenAI violated its founding agreement by becoming a for-profit company, taking funding from Microsoft and becoming secretive.
The message OpenAI shared sheds light on one of the most closely scrutinized founding stories in Silicon Valley history. Industry insiders quickly took a closer look at the company's early emails, with some attempting to use modern AI tools to unredact the texts.
In addition to the emails, OpenAI suggests that Musk left OpenAI after his bid to take control failed, rather than over an ideological dispute over openness. “Elon wanted to acquire a majority stake, gain initial control of the board of directors, and become CEO,” the blog post said. “During these discussions, he withheld funding.” According to OpenAI, venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman “bridged the gap to cover his salary and operations.” ”.
OpenAI said it would move to dismiss Musk's claims following the recent escalation of feuds involving some of Silicon Valley's most talked about figures. Musk helped found OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, but last March he founded his own AI company called X.AI, which is now a direct competitor. Musk also complained that OpenAI and its investor Microsoft collected data for his social media company X to train AI models.
OpenAI declined to comment on its response to the lawsuit. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
OpenAI said in its response that Musk was one of the people the company recognized would have difficulty pursuing its mission to develop artificial general intelligence without significant funding. In a message shared by ChatGPT's developers, Musk pushed OpenAI toward a commercial model and called on the company to “start being open” about the science behind its products. In a 2015 article, he argued that the company should say, “We're starting with a $1 billion commitment…We'll cover anything others don't.”
OpenAI said Musk failed to fulfill all of his promises, ultimately delivering less than $45 million, but continued to assert control of the company, which underwent a restructuring in 2017.
“We were unable to reach a commercial agreement with Elon because we felt it would be inconsistent with our mission for individuals to have complete control over OpenAI,” the company said in its response. “He then suggested integrating his OpenAI into his Tesla instead.”
In an email from early 2018, around the time Musk left OpenAI, he made this claim: Still, it's unlikely you can compete with Google. ”
Musk is no stranger to legal battles. He has said in the past that he would fight a legal battle if he believed it was right, even if the chances of success were slim.
OpenAI's success in building more powerful AI tools has propelled it to the top of the technology industry, and Google is scrambling to catch up. However, OpenAI is facing numerous lawsuits from authors and media outlets for using their copyrighted works to train AI without permission or payment.
Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report.