Elon Musk has expressed that OpenAI, the artificial intelligence firm he co-founded in 2015, isn’t following the path he envisioned for it. Musk told Fox News that he “took [his] eye off the ball,” resulting in OpenAI straying from its open-source, nonprofit beginnings. Microsoft enlisted OpenAI to build its revamped AI-powered Bing search engine and OpenAI announced a shift to a “capped-profit” model in March 2019, evidently making it a hybrid of a non- and for-profit company.
Musk initially planned for OpenAI to serve as a kind of counterweight to Google, but the venture has struggled to meet his expectations. In his interview with Fox News, Musk said that OpenAI was “now closed-source” and “obviously for-profit” and that Microsoft had “a very strong say, if not directly controls, OpenAI at this point.” He has also previously said that OpenAI isn’t what he intended it to be, and that going forward he wants to build a ChatGPT rival, “TruthGPT.”
OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, addressed the shift in their approach towards sharing information about its AI language models in a conversation with The Verge. He said that if we believe that artificial general intelligence will one day become “extremely, unbelievably potent,” then “it just does not make sense to open-source.”
OpenAI said that Musk stepped down from their board in 2018 to avoid a potential conflict of interest with Tesla’s work on self-driving cars. He later mentioned that this wasn’t the only reason, as he did not agree with some of the decisions that the OpenAI team wanted to make. Musk was also motivated by his conversations with Larry Page about AI safety, which he has said is the reason OpenAI exists in the first place.
OpenAI is a Silicon Valley technology research lab focused on artificial intelligence. Founded in 2015 by Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba, the company has since grown to include over 800 people from 45 nations. OpenAI aims to build safe artificial general intelligence, with the long-term goal of looking out for humanity.
Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and business magnate who co-founded OpenAI in 2015. He is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of Tesla and NASA’s commercial space transportation services provider SpaceX. In addition to being tech pioneer, his influence and skills have also allowed him to revolutionize the fields of renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and commercial space travel. Musk has become one of the most recognizable names, and he is regularly credited with playing a key role in the development of modern technologies.
