OpenAI fires back at Elon Musk lawsuit with trove of emails

OpenAI has hit back at a lawsuit issued by Elon Musk, alleging he walked away from the ChatGPT maker after he tried and failed to take control of the company.

The artificial intelligence business has published a cache of emails from the billionaire that appear to show he backed the company’s strategy to make money.

On Friday Musk sued the ChatGPT maker he co-founded, claiming that the organisation had departed from its original promise to help humanity and that it was instead “driven by commercial considerations”.

In a blog post, OpenAI said it planned to “dismiss all of Elon’s claims”, arguing that Musk supported its pivot to generate revenue because of the massive cost of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the most sophisticated form of the technology.

“This needs billions per year immediately or forget it,” read an email from Musk.

OpenAI said: “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.”

The statement claims that Musk wanted to merge OpenAI with Tesla, or take control, and that he withheld funding while discussions were continuing over the “for-profit” structure, demanding a majority stake, control of the board, as well as the job of chief executive. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, stepped in and “bridged the gap” to cover salaries and operations while this was going on.

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Not getting what he wanted, the Tesla entrepreneur apparently moved on. The OpenAI statement said: “Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla. When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars”.

Musk appeared to push the company to aim for more investment. “Elon said we should announce an initial $1 billion funding commitment to OpenAI. In total, the non-profit has raised less than $45 million from Elon and more than $90 million from other donors.”

While Musk and Sam Altman, the chief executive and co-founder of OpenAI, used to be close, their relationship is understood to have blown hot and cold over the past year. Supporters of Altman have argued that Musk’s reaction in suing the company was triggered by jealousy over the huge success of ChatGPT and other products launched by OpenAI, such as Sora, the video generation tool.

The question of OpenAI’s mission has loomed large over the company this year since the runaway success of ChatGPT. Altman was abruptly pushed out of the business over a fraught weekend in November 2023 — only to swiftly rejoin — over what appeared to be a clash between the company’s board and its management about the issue. The reasons have never been disclosed but those close to the situation said it was more a question of individuals who did not get along.

In this latest blog post OpenAI said its mission “is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits”. It argued this included offering its products for free: “Albania is using OpenAI’s tools to accelerate its EU accession by as much as 5.5 years,” it said.

OpenAI disputed Musk’s argument that the organisation was not transparent enough about its technology: “Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI.” OpenAI said that Ilya Sutskever, its chief scientist, told Musk: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it’s built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science,” to which Musk replied: “Yup.”

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Microsoft has made a $13 billion investment in OpenAI, giving it a 49 per cent profit share. The partnership has given the AI company access to the technology giant’s computing infrastructure, including its cloud services, on which it is developing AGI.

Temasek, Singapore’s state-backed fund, is also in talks about investing, according to recent reports.

Musk’s lawsuit alleged “OpenAI Inc has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft”.

Microsoft has a board seat but it does not have voting rights.

Microsoft’s AI advances helped to lift the group’s second-quarter revenues to $62 billion. The group has been rolling out an AI tool that sits inside its suite of products, such as Excel and Powerpoint, and can draft emails, make presentations and write meeting summaries. It has investments in other AI companies.

The Competition and Markets Authority in Britain is looking at whether Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI means a merger has taken place by stealth. American and European regulators are conducting a similar investigation.