OpenAI on Friday responded to Elon Musk's lawsuit saying the billionaire originally wanted the firm to become non-profit and him being appointed as its CEO, but backed out when his proposals were rejected.
The company made the claims publishing a trove of emails exchanged between Musk and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and former executives Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.
"Elon Musk's latest legal filing against OpenAI marks his fourth attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims.
"However, his own words and actions speak for themselves—in 2017, Elon not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit as OpenAI’s proposed new structure.
"When he didn't get majority equity and full control, he walked away and told us we would fail," the company wrote in a long blog on its website.
Musk in March this year filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging the startup departed from its initial purpose of creating artificial intelligence for the betterment of humanity rather than for profit.
A co-founder in the start-up, Musk urged the court to force OpenAI to share its research and technology with the public and stop it from using assets like GPT-4 for Microsoft's or any individual's profit.
Since then, he has made Microsoft, a major funder in OpenAI, a defendant in his court battle against the company that operates at the bleeding edge of AI.
The company emails revealed that Musk in 2017 demanded a majority equity, which in the start-up's view would let the Tesla owner "unequivocally have initial control of the company."
OpenAI rejected the terms, leading to a fallout with Musk, who went on to found xAI, a competitor in the same field.
OpenAI in September announced it was going for restructuring to become a for-profit firm – a development decried by Musk, who said it was not legal to change the governance structure to for-profit for something that started as a non-profit.
He has since approached a court in California to stop the conversion of the company into a for-profit firm.
Image Source: Unsplash
Comments