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OpenAI responds on Elon Musk's lawsuit.
OpenAI and Elon Musk are having a bit of a spat. Elon was involved with OpenAI way back when it started, but things are messy now—including a lawsuit. So, the OpenAI squad is putting out their POV: Elon’s being greedy now as things are going well.
What's going on here?
Elon’s suing OpenAI for betraying their original mission. OpenAI's firing back saying they still want what's best for humanity.
What does this mean?
OpenAI’s early team is calling out Elon in the plain and simple way: Emails. They are sharing exchanges between them. Here’s the quick story according to OpenAI:
Musk set up a goal of raising $1B, instead of $100M with offering to cover “whatever’s left”.
They needed WAY more money to go big. Elon Agreed, but he wanted control of the new for-profit arm. Didn't happen.
Elon suggested a merger with Tesla instead—that fell through too.
He left in 2018, saying we wouldn't succeed and started his own AI thing within Tesla.
OpenAI is also throwing jabs at Elon’s way.
His total investment in OpenAI’s non-profit is only $45M.
He stopped funding in between discussions. Reid Hoffman covered staff salaries.
He’s suing when OpenAI is making meaningful progress without him.
Let’s get to the big question: Openness of AI.
OpenAI shares an email exchange between Ilya Sutskever (founding member of OpenAI) and Elon Musk. The claim is Elon was in on limiting open-source as they proceed.
The article is concerned with a hard takeoff scenario: if a hard takeoff occurs, and a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by opensorucing everything, we make it easy for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff.
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 its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).
Yup.
Well, things get a bit tricky here. Even if Elon was in, this is reducing the trust in OpenAI.
The AI folks are not happy about this exchange. It’s NOT OK to not share the science while calling yourself OpenAI.
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