OpenAI hits back at Elon Musk, says billionaire pushed for merger to make Tesla its ‘cash cow’
- OpenAI’s co-founders, including CEO Sam Altman, have published a blog post containing emails they said were sent by Musk
- Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, has sued the start-up for breaching their founding agreement to develop AI for the benefit of humanity
OpenAI on Tuesday hit back at Elon Musk’s claims that the start-up abandoned its original mission with emails that showed the billionaire supported its plan to create a for-profit entity and wanted a merger that would make Tesla its “cash cow”.
OpenAI’s other co-founders including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever said they would move to dismiss all of his claims, in a blog post that contained emails sent by Musk.
“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,” they said.
OpenAI had agreed on the for-profit entity in 2017 after realising its non-profit structure would not be able to able to support the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a concept that machines could handle tasks like humans, according to the post.
“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 said, adding that “we couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI”.