Elon Musk previously sued OpenAI over its plans to reorganize into a for-profit company, and now it has cited his own emails, which indicate that he wanted to form, own and operate a commercial arm of OpenAI.
Image source: x.com/elonmusk
In 2015, Elon Musk was among the founders of OpenAI, three years later he left them, and now he has turned into an ardent critic and opponent of the company – today he has a competing startup xAI. Recently, Musk once again tried to prevent OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman from reorganizing the startup into a classic commercial corporation. It is now attracting multi-billion dollar investments.
In response to Musk’s latest lawsuit, the company provided a package of emails – correspondence between Musk and his representatives, as well as other OpenAI co-founders, including Altman and Ilya Sutskever. They discuss the optimal structure of the organization, as well as the need to raise capital to pay for the computing resources needed to continue OpenAI’s work. According to the company, Musk insisted on creating a commercial legal entity in which he should have a controlling stake and which he should solely manage.
In September 2017, he registered the organization Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc. PBC (Public Benefit Corporation) – This type of corporation combines a traditional for-profit, profit-based business model with a public benefit mission. “When he didn’t get a majority stake and full control, he walked away and told us we would fail. Now that OpenAI is a leading AI research lab, and Elon runs a competing AI company, he is asking the court to stop us from effectively carrying out our mission,” OpenAI said. OpenAI published these materials on its corporate blog, but it should be noted that the correspondence is given out of full context.