Right now, and for the fourth time, Elon Musk is dragging OpenAI into court. He’s suing the company for not straying away from its original vision of building AI for people, not profit. In a blog post, OpenAI reveals even more evidence revealing that Elon Musk was on board for OpenAI becoming a for-profit company.
To catch you up
[Skip the recap] OpenAI has always been a non-profit company. It receives its funding from investors like Microsoft in order to pay the bills. Well, the company recently announced that it’s planning to move to a for-profit structure. It won’t happen this year or even next year. In any case, it’s preparing to make the move, and prices for ChatGPT Plus may go up as a result.
Elon Musk has been one of the most vocal people about OpenAI, attempting to sue it multiple times. In August, he started his fourth lawsuit against the company. He wants to sue OpenAI to force it not to become a for-profit company. Musk said that OpenAI has basically become a profit-driven subsidiary of Microsoft. Also, he’s upset that OpenAI aims to become a for-profit company, and he dislikes the fact that it keeps its source code locked behind closed doors.
However
During one of the previous lawsuits, OpenAI revealed that Musk was actually on board with the company keeping its source code locked and being a subsidiary of a larger company.
According to emails shared between people like Musk and OpenAI SEO Sam Altman, Musk planned on having the company be a sub-brand of Tesla. Also, he agreed that the source code should be private.
All of this points to Elon Musk going back on his word and being a massive hypocrite. However, that’s assuming that the evidence presented by OpenAI is accurate.
Text messages show that Elon Musk wanted OpenAI to be a for-profit
A large part of this lawsuit was stopping OpenAI from becoming a for-profit. However, OpenAI revealed some text messages between Altman, Musk, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, and former board member Shivon Zilis.
In the messages, we see that the company becoming a for-profit was in the cards early on. One message that Brockman sent to Musk contained the company’s planned path forward. “1. AI research non-profit (through end of 2017) 2. AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018) 3. Government project (when: ??).
So, we see that the team wanted OpenAI to work for profit at some point. Again, this looks bad on Musk’s part. “You can’t sue your way to AGI,” said an OpenAI blog post. In the post, we get a timeline of events showing Elon Musk’s involvement with OpenAI. It also reveals a ton of the back-and-forth between Musk and the OpenAI team that shows his true motives.
