Elon Musk, the leading tech-billionaire and cofounder of OpenAI, the lab behind the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, had expressed his disagreement with OpenAI since he stepped down from its board in 2018. However, a recent report has discovered that the Tesla CEO had reportedly donated only around $15 million of his total claimed $100 million to the AI lab.
In a tweet posted by Musk in March, he expressed surprise as to how a non-profit to which he donated around $100 million became a for-profit company worth $30 billion. He further clarified in a follow-up tweet that he only had donated the first $100 million to OpenAI when it initially started as a non-profit but now has no ownership or control.
Musk’s claims regarding his donation were further lowered in a CNBC interview, when he said that the amount of money donated was “some number on the order of $50 million”. However, documents that were filed with the IRS and a state regulator shows that Musk could not have donated the initial $100 million he claimed to have donated.
OpenAI is currently backed by Microsoft and was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever. Initially, OpenAI was set up as a non-profit research laboratory but then transitioned into a for-profit company in 2019. As per reports, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has denied Elon Musk’s claims that Microsoft has control over OpenAI.
OpenAI is a pioneer in the arena of artificial intelligence and robotics, focused on making sure that the increasingly powerful technology is developed in a responsible manner and for the benefit of society. They have created various products and platforms around the world to promote open-source technology, accelerate economic growth, and enhance population well-being. OpenAI also is focused on advancing the state of machine intelligence through research and the development of both hardware and software projects. Their progress and products have stirred up a lot of interest and debate within the tech industry.