- OpenAI announced its intention to refute every claim made by Elon Musk in a recent lawsuit.
- Despite Elon Musk’s initial commitment of up to $1 billion, OpenAI revealed that it has raised under $45 million from him, and suggested his influence on the company’s growth and profitability was minimal.
- OpenAI also allege he once suggested OpenAI could be attached to Tesla as its ‘cash cow’.
The most valuable AI firm, OpenAI, announced on Wednesday that it plans to reject every assertion made by Elon Musk in a recent lawsuit.
OpenAI discloses funding gap from Elon Musk
OpenAI further implied that Musk, a co-founder of the company, didn’t actually have that much of an influence on the growth and profitability of the business.
OpenAI, a startup backed by Microsoft and established in 2015, disclosed in a blog post authored by Wojciech Zaremba, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and the OpenAI team, that it has raised under $45 million from Elon Musk, despite his initial commitment of up to $1 billion.
According to the blog, it has received more than $90 million from additional contributors to support research.
Also read: Elon Musk sues OpenAI over alleged mission drift towards profit
OpenAI counters Musk’s lawsuit
OpenAI’s response follows Musk’s lawsuit against Altman, Brockman, OpenAI, and other business affiliates last week, which claimed that the ChatGPT manufacturer had broken its initial contract by prioritising money over the nonprofit’s primary goal of creating AI to benefit humanity.
Musk said that OpenAI was established as a counterbalance to Google.
In its blog post today, OpenAI stated that it acknowledges the immense computing resources needed to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), which refers to an AI system with an intellect comparable to or surpassing that of humans. Furthermore, the organisation recognised that annual expenditures for this program would amount to billions of dollars.
This blog made it clear that switching to a for-profit organisation was necessary to get the necessary capital and resources.
Also read: OpenAI and Microsoft face lawsuits over AI copyright infringement
OpenAI shared five emails between Musk and the co-founders of the company on its blog, providing further details.
According to OpenAI, “In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should ‘attach to Tesla as its cash cow’, commenting that it was ‘exactly right… Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.”
OpenAI responded to Musk’s accusation of deviating from open-source principles by highlighting that Musk had been informed of and consented to the transition.
