Elon Musk recently filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging that they violated their original contractual agreements related to AI. The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco court, focuses on OpenAI's latest natural language model, GPT-4.
Now, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman opened up about the lawsuit and said that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk thought that the ChatGPT-maker company would fail, and "he chose to part ways".
Altman was speaking in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman. Altman said "Musk thought OpenAI was going to fail. He wanted total control to turn it around. We wanted to keep going in the direction that now has become OpenAI. He also wanted Tesla to be able to build an AGI effort".
"At various times, he wanted to make OpenAI into a for-profit company that he could have control of or have it merge with Tesla. We didn't want to do that, and he decided to leave, which is fine," he added.
The owner of X has accused OpenAI and Microsoft, which has invested billions in the Sam Altman-led company, of improperly licensing GPT-4. This is despite an agreement that the artificial general intelligence capabilities would remain non-profit and dedicated to humanity.
Altman suggested that the company is still committed to its original cause as it is putting powerful technology in the hands of people for free, as a public good.
"We don't run ads on our free version. We don't monetise it in other ways. We just say it's part of our mission. We want to put increasingly powerful tools in the hands of people for free and get them to use them," Altman said.
OpenAI then hit back at Musk's lawsuit, saying as the company discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, "Musk wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control".
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Inputs from IANS
