Elon Musk sued OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman last week, accusing them of “blatant violations” The trio initially struck a deal that the company would develop artificial intelligence openly and not pursue profits. Late Tuesday, OpenAI released partially redacted emails between Musk, Altman, Brockman and others offering a contrary account.
The emails suggest Musk was open to OpenAI becoming more profit-focused relatively early on, potentially undermining his own claims that OpenAI has strayed from its original mission. In one message, Musk proposed folding OpenAI into his electric car company Tesla to provide more resources, an idea that first emerged in an email he forwarded from an unnamed outside source Proposed.
The newly released emails also suggest that Musk is not dogmatic about the need for OpenAI to make its developments freely available to everyone. Chief scientist Ilya Sutskevar warned that open-sourcing powerful AI advances could be risky as the technology advances, to which Musk wrote: “Yes.” This appears to contradict arguments made in last week’s lawsuit that It was agreed from the beginning that OpenAI should make its innovations free.
Legal disputes aside, emails released by OpenAI show a group of powerful tech entrepreneurs creating an organization that has grown to immense power. Tellingly, while OpenAI likes to describe its mission as focused on creating general artificial intelligence (i.e., machines that are smarter than humans), its founders spend more time discussing the growing interest in Google and other deep-pocketed giants. concerns about the power of AGI rather than excitement about AGI.
“I think we should say we’re starting with a $1 billion capital commitment. That’s true. I’ll cover what others haven’t,” Musk wrote in a letter discussing how to introduce OpenAI to the world. He dismissed the proposal to announce $100 million in funding, citing the vast resources of Google and Facebook.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman, Brockman and others in 2015, during another Google-centered artificial intelligence boom. The nonprofit’s launch comes a month after AlphaGo, Google’s artificial intelligence program, learned how to play the extremely tricky board game Go and beat a champion human player for the first time. This feat shocked many artificial intelligence experts, who believed that Go was too complex for computers to master quickly. It also shows the potential of artificial intelligence to accomplish many seemingly impossible tasks.
The text of Musk’s lawsuit confirms some details of previously reported OpenAI’s backstory, including that Musk first became aware of the possible dangers of artificial intelligence during a 2012 meeting with DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis. The company developed AlphaGo and was acquired by Google in 2014. The lawsuit also confirms that Musk had serious differences with Google co-founder Larry Page over the future risks of artificial intelligence, which apparently led to a rift between the two as friends. Musk eventually parted ways with OpenAI in 2018, and his attitude toward the project has apparently soured further since ChatGPT became a huge success.
Since OpenAI released emails with Musk this week, speculation has swirled about the names and other details that were redacted from the messages.Some Turning to artificial intelligence As a way to fill in the gaps with statistically sound text.
“It’s going to take billions of dollars a year, or forget it,” Musk wrote in an email about the OpenAI project. “Unfortunately, the future of humanity depends on [redacted]”, he added, perhaps a reference to Google co-founder Page.
Elsewhere in the email change, AI software — like some commentators on Twitter — speculated that Musk had retweeted Hassabis’ view that Google has a strong edge in AI.
Whoever it was, the relationship shown in the emails between the OpenAI co-founders has since broken down. Musk’s lawsuit seeks to force the company to stop licensing technology to Microsoft, its main backer. In a blog post accompanying the email published this week, OpenAI’s other co-founders expressed sadness at how things had deteriorated.
“We are saddened that something like this has happened to someone we deeply admire,” they wrote. “Someone inspires us to set higher goals, then tells us we will fail, creates a competitor, and then when we Sue us when we begin to make meaningful progress on OpenAI’s mission without him.”