OpenAI was founded on December 11, 2015, by eleven people, including Sam Altman (CEO), Elon Musk (initially a co-chair), Greg Brockman (President), Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, and Pamela Vagata. The organization started as a nonprofit with the goal of developing artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. It received a commitment of $1 billion, but it collected only $130 million by 2019. Key investors included Sam Altman, Elon Musk (the largest donor), Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, and Infosys. OpenAI initially operated from Brockman’s living room before moving to its headquarters in San Francisco.
In 2016, Microsoft showed interest in OpenAI. They proposed a $60 million computing deal. Musk opposed this because he felt it would make OpenAI too dependent on Microsoft. Sam Altman changed the proposal to $50 million, removing the requirement for OpenAI to promote Microsoft’s products, and Musk agreed but wanted Microsoft not to mention the deal in their marketing.
Elon Musk’s vision for OpenAI differed from Sam Altman’s. Musk wanted to lead the organization, focusing on transparency and open-source principles.
By 2018, Musk proposed that Tesla buy OpenAI to integrate its work with Tesla’s technology. Other board members rejected this idea, believing it would hurt OpenAI’s independence. Afterward, Musk distanced himself and resigned from the board in 2018 but continued to donate until 2020.
Under Sam Altman’s leadership, OpenAI shifted away from being a nonprofit. They said they needed more funding to compete with companies like Google DeepMind and Microsoft. In 2019, OpenAI became a “capped-profit” entity, OpenAI LP, which allowed it to attract investors while limiting their profits to 100 times their investment. Musk saw this change as a betrayal of OpenAI’s original mission.
In 2024, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the organization deviated from its original nonprofit mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Musk contended that OpenAI’s transition to a “capped-profit” model and its exclusive licensing agreement with Microsoft prioritized profit over public good, contrary to the principles established at its founding.
Questions
- What do you think about Elon Musk’s original vision for Open AI?
- What does Elon Musk want to achieve with the lawsuit he brought? What are the main arguments?
- What are the ethical implications of transitioning from open-source AI development to proprietary models, as seen with OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft?
- Should governments play a more active role in regulating the operations of organizations like OpenAI to ensure their technologies remain aligned with the public interest? If so, how?
Resources:
Robison, K. (2024, November 18). Inside Elon Musk’s messy breakup with OpenAI: Emails in Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI expose the startup’s rocky origins. The Verge. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/18/24299787/elon-musk-openai-lawsuit-sam-altman-xai-google-deepmind