OpenAI said in its first public comments on Elon Musk's lawsuit against the influential artificial intelligence research lab that Mr. Musk tried to convert the lab from a nonprofit to a for-profit operation before leaving the organization in early 2018.
The comments, in a blog post published Tuesday evening, are part of an escalating feud between Mr. Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of an industry-wide AI boom. The company said it intended to dismiss all claims in Mr. Musk's lawsuit.
Mr. Musk filed a lawsuit on Friday against OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of building AI for the public good. He said that when the AI lab entered into a multibillion-dollar partnership with tech giant Microsoft, it abandoned its founding promise to carefully develop AI and share it freely with the public.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI as a nonprofit organization with Mr. Altman in 2015; Greg Brockman, former chief technology officer of payments company Stripe; and several AI researchers. Before the lab was announced, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman planned to raise about $100 million, but Mr. Musk said they should tell the press and public that it was raising $1 billion and that he would raise the additional funds will provide, according to a contemporary email included in the blog post.
Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We need to set a much larger amount than $100 million to avoid sounding hopeless,” he wrote in the email. “I will cover everything that others don’t.”
The nonprofit has raised less than $45 million from Mr. Musk and more than $90 million from other donors, OpenAI said in its blog post.
The company said that Mr. Musk was among the OpenAI executives who realized in early 2017 that if the lab remained a nonprofit, it would not be able to raise the money needed to achieve its lofty goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI ) to build a machine that can do everything the human brain can do.
“It was clear to all of us that we would need much more capital to succeed in our mission – billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we could raise as a nonprofit .” says the blog post.
When Mr. Musk and the other OpenAI founders agreed to form a for-profit company, Mr. Musk said he wanted a majority of the company's equity, initial control of the board and the chief executive position, OpenAI said. Amid the discussions, he withheld funding from the nonprofit, OpenAI said.
The other founders couldn't agree to his terms because they felt giving one person absolute control of the organization was contrary to their mission, OpenAI said. According to another email included in the blog post, Mr. Musk then suggested connecting OpenAI to his electric car maker Tesla.
“Tesla is the only way that can hold a candle to Google. Even then, the likelihood of counterbalancing Google is slim. It is simply not zero,” the email said.
With his lawsuit, Mr. Musk argued that OpenAI violated its original mission by no longer sharing its underlying technology with the public, known as “open sourcing.”
OpenAI's blog post also included an email in which Mr. Musk appeared to acknowledge that as the company gets closer to launching AGI, it would have to start holding back the technology to prevent it from causing harm.