New emails shared by ChatGPT-maker revealed that CEO Elon Musk once said that only OpenAI’s merger with Tesla could help the AI startup compete with Alphabet Inc.’s Google properly.
What Happened: On Tuesday, OpenAI shared a blog post in response to Musk’s lawsuit against the company he co-founded in 2015 and left in 2018.
In the post, they also shared some old emails, in one of which dated Feb. 1 2018, Musk forwarded an email from an unknown person to Ilya Sutskever saying, “Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.”
In the email, Musk also said that “the probability of being a counterweight to Google” is still low even with the merger. However, with Tesla, it won’t be “zero.”
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The name on the email forwarded by Musk to Sutskever, chief scientist and OpenAI who voted to oust Sam Altman from the company he co-founded in November last year, was redacted.
In the email, the person said, “OpenAI today is burning cash and that the funding model cannot reach the scale to seriously compete with Google (an 800B company).”
They went on to highlight that if OpenAI continued to do research in the open, the company might end up helping out Google “for free.” “Any advances are fairly easy for them to copy and immediately incorporate, at scale.”
The person then recommended “OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow.”
“I believe attachments to other large suspects (e.g. Apple? Amazon?) would fail due to an incompatible company DNA,” the email read, with the concluding statement reading, “I cannot see anything else that has the potential to reach sustainable Google-scale capital within a decade.”
Why It’s Important: These emails were revealed after Musk sued Microsoft Corporation-backed OpenAI in the San Francisco Superior Court, alleging that the ChatGPT-maker had betrayed the “Founding Agreement” of the AI startup.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the lawsuit read.
OpenAI in response has suggested that the tech mogul’s claims stem from his regret over not being part of its current success.
Photo courtesy: TED Conference on Flickr
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