OpenAI Responds to Elon Musk Lawsuit, Intends to Dismiss All Claims

OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, plans to dismiss all the claims in Elon Musk’s recent lawsuit, stating that Musk did not have much impact on the company’s success. In an official blog post published on Tuesday, which contained early emails between Musk and OpenAI executives, the company accused Elon of misdeeds, including investing a lot less than promised.

Last week, Musk sued OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and its President Greg Brockman, for allegedly breaching its original principle which required the company to remain nonprofit. Essentially, Musk sued OpenAI for moving to a for-profit model. To him, launching ChatGPT-4, which is a closed model, significantly deviates from OpenAI’s core nonprofit principle.

The blogpost was signed by OpenAI executives, including Brockman, Altman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. In the publication, OpenAI says that Musk has supported the company with less than $45 million since inception in 2015. The company noted that Musk did not provide any more funds despite his initial promise to provide up to $1 billion in funding. According to the blog post, OpenAI execs planned to raise $100 million in funding when the company started. Musk allegedly asked them to go bigger:

“We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless…I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment… I will cover whatever anyone else doesn’t provide.”

Despite the commitment, OpenAI said it received over $90 million from other donors but below $45 million from Musk.

Elon Musk Knew OpenAI Wanted to Be For-Profit

On the for-profit allegation, the blog post claims Musk agreed with early execs that creating a for-profit entity was the next step after they realized the company would need billions of dollars per year to build and maintain artificial general intelligence (AGI). Unfortunately, “Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding”. When they couldn’t agree to his terms, Musk then suggested merging OpenAI into Tesla,to use the EV company as their “cash cow”. Eventually, Musk left the company, stating that OpenAI’s probability of success was zero.

“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone who 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,” OpenAI wrote.

The blog post also notes that Elon understood that open-sourcing AGI was not a part of the company’s core principle. In one of the emails, Musk responded “Yup” to a message from Sutskever, which specified that “it’s totally OK to not share the science”.

With a more than $80 billion valuation, OpenAI is the world’s most valued artificial intelligence startup. This means that the resolution of the case between both parties could have significant and long-term effects on artificial intelligence in general. A ruling in Musk’s favor could force AI startups to reconsider for-profit models, which could be detrimental to companies without the much-needed funding.