Elon Musk called OpenAI “evil” after the tech giant asked investors for exclusive arrangements that would prevent them from investing in competitors such as Musk’s xAI.
OpenAI, makers of generative artificial intelligence ChatGPT, have just secured a further $6.6 billion in funding from companies such as Microsoft, Nvidia, and Thrive Capital, among others.
Speaking to Reuters, an insider stated that OpenAI requested that its investors not also invest in five rival companies: Anthropic, who recently announced a new enterprise feature for their LLM Claude; Glean, an AI org specifically targeting enterprise users; Perplexity, who have developed a new tool to turn research into content; Safe Superintelligence, which was founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever; and xAI, owned by Elon Musk and which recently launched one of the world’s most powerful training clusters.
After this request (which was not legally binding) was reported, Elon Musk took to social media platform X to call the company “evil”.
OpenAI is evil
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 2, 2024
This is not the first time Musk and OpenAI have clashed. There is a long-standing feud between the entrepreneur and the AI company.
Elon Musk’s feud with OpenAI and Sam Altman
When OpenAI launched in 2015, it was co-chaired by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Musk put in $45 million dollars of initial funding for the AI company he and Altman believed was necessary to act as opposition to Google’s apparent dominance in the AI space.
In 2018 as the company started to explore a for-profit shift to ensure the continued investment into AI research, Musk proposed two options – OpenAI merge with Tesla (which he owns) or he would receive full control of the company. When no agreement could be reached, Musk left OpenAI with the intention of setting up his own AI company as a competitor.
After the OpenAI board tried and failed to remove Sam Altman in November 2023, Musk initiated a lawsuit that claimed the company’s shift towards profit-oriented objectives went against the original agreement when the company was founded. The lawsuit was raised in March 2024 and then later dropped in June 2024 by Musk, who has not revealed why he dropped the suit. OpenAI maintained that Musk’s suit was frivolous and “revisionary”.
However, in early August 2024, Musk filed a new lawsuit against Altman, which claimed he was manipulated into co-founding OpenAI.
Outside the lawsuits, there has been a significant quantity of minor bickering, much of it originating with Musk. He raised salaries at Tesla specifically due to concerns that OpenAI was attempting to poach the self-driving car company’s AI staff with inflated salaries in a talent war.
Musk also threatened to ban all Apple devices after Apple announced their partnership with OpenAI. Musk said all visitors to his sites would have to leave their Apple devices locked in a Faraday cage until they left. Apple recently chose not to participate in a recent round of investment for OpenAI and has not commented on the issue.
Featured image: Midjourney
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