Elon Musk has now directed his attention to OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, and claims that it is betraying what it was originally intended to be.
According to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, OpenAI was based on a lie, and he was robbed of its leading technology.
Whenever Musk posted on Twitter (since then renamed X), he criticized the leadership of OpenAI and noted the company was meant to be open source and non-profit, dedicated to assistance to humanity.
Musk says that now OpenAI is a profitable business, which only brings good to its investors, such as Microsoft.
OpenAI is an open source nonprofit company that was founded to serve humanity.
However, as of today, it is a profit making, closed source company that is acquired by Microsoft. It is the contrary to what I wanted, Musk wrote.
This is not the last occasion on which Musk has aired his frustrations. He was a co founder of OpenAI in 2015 and resigned in 2018 because of conflicts over the future direction of the company.
He has since made many subsequent accusations of OpenAI shifting towards a lack of transparency and becoming what he describes as a closed system.
Historically lengthy AI creation controversy
The recent remarks made by Musk have triggered his old dispute with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.
Musk also started his own AI based company based in Los Angeles, called xAI, which, according to him, should be devoted to producing artificial intelligence systems that, in his words, tell the truth.
According to industry observers, the competition between Musk and OpenAI has increased since the colossal success of ChatGPT.
The emergence of the chatbot has affected the world of technology, with some of the most prominent companies, such as Google, Meta, and Anthropic, developing their own chatbots.
The xAI of Musk can be regarded as his answer to such AI boom.
In March 2024, Musk went so far as to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, asserting that they had breached the agreement they had struck together to create beneficial projects for society by prioritizing profit.
The case was, however, dropped later, with Musk saying that he would rather concentrate on creating a better alternative.
Open AI’s Response
OpenAI has not made a direct reply to the latest statement of Musk. But during previous interviews, Sam Altman has indicated that the firm is still striving to achieve safe and responsible development of AI.
He further added that OpenAI requires capital to sustain widespread AI research and architecture, by which it is a capped profit entity.
Altman has stated earlier that we are still dedicated to making sure that artificial general intelligence is beneficial to all, but we also require long-term funding in order to carry it out.
The Bigger Picture
The controversy surrounding AI related advances and ethical accountability commonly prompts debate in the technology sector, a topic that Musk keeps criticizing.
With the development of increasingly sophisticated and more powerful AI models, concerns regarding transparency, control, and the ability to access such models are becoming increasingly loud.
