How to Ensure You're Not an AGI Dictator? Why Did Musk Leave OpenAI? Early Emails Revealed
Discover the dramatic clashes between Elon Musk and OpenAI: lawsuits, leaked emails, and the shift from nonprofit to powerhouse. Explore the untold story!
This year, OpenAI has been making headlines with a series of major events, including internal conflicts and departures.
One of the most closely followed topics has been the legal disputes and controversies between OpenAI and Elon Musk.
In March, Elon Musk, a former co-founder of OpenAI, filed a 46-page, 14,000-word lawsuit accusing OpenAI of recklessly developing human-level artificial intelligence.
Later, OpenAI published an extensive article titled "OpenAI and Elon Musk," refuting Musk's claims by releasing screenshots of email exchanges spanning eight years.
OpenAI countered that while Musk had promised a $1 billion investment, he contributed less than $45 million. Both sides agreed that a for-profit entity was necessary to support the costly AI training, but Musk's desire to fully control OpenAI or integrate it into Tesla was rejected.
Months passed, and the public believed the controversy had subsided.
Unexpectedly, the drama escalated.
On November 14, Musk intensified his lawsuit against OpenAI, adding new plaintiffs and defendants.
As part of the updated legal proceedings, email exchanges between Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman were made public.
These emails, exposed to substantiate Musk’s antitrust law claims, also highlighted his sense of betrayal toward OpenAI for deviating from its original vision of being a non-profit organization led by Tesla's CEO.
The forum LessWrong compiled approximately 50 emails exchanged between May 25, 2015, and March 11, 2019.
These emails reveal early cracks and divisions within a nonprofit organization that claimed to safeguard humanity’s welfare.
A Common "Enemy" and a Shared Goal
Among the initial batch of leaked emails, one from Musk to Ilya and Greg drew the most attention.
In this email, titled "I feel the need to reiterate," Musk wrote:
"I assess the likelihood of OpenAI competing with DeepMind/Google under unchanged resources as 0%. Not 1%.
Even raising a few hundred million dollars won’t suffice. This requires tens of billions annually; otherwise, forget it.
Unfortunately, humanity's future rests in the hands of [REDACTED]."
Speculation arose among netizens about who [REDACTED] referred to—Google, perhaps?