Elon Musk tried to take over OpenAI in 2018, but failed: report

Though Musk made it clear to Altman that the “venture had fallen fatally behind Google”, it was not enough to convince Altman and other founders.

Musk eventually resigned from OpenAI’s board in 2018 citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla referring to the developments in artificial intelligence being carried out in Tesla’s autonomous driving project.

According to the report, he also reneged on a promise to supply $1 billion in funding, contributing only $100 million before he walked away.

Consequently, OpenAI was left with no money to fuel the resources needed and it became a for-profit firm in 2019. “This left OpenAI with no ability to pay the astronomical fees associated with training AI models on supercomputers,” adds the report.

“We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance,” the company wrote at the time.

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Less than six months after becoming a for-profit entity, Microsoft infused $1 billion in OpenAI propelling it to build a supercomputer to train massive models that eventually created ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E.The latest language model launched recently, GPT-4, has 1 trillion parameters.

However, Musk has now raised questions over how a non-profit has become a $30-billion maximum-profit company for Satya Nadella-run tech giant.

“I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated $100 million somehow became a $30 billion market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he quipped.

On Friday, Musk said that Microsoft was given exclusive and complete access to OpenAI’s codebase as part of its investment in the generative AI firm.

Further, over the last few months, Musk has repeatedly criticised the company for installing safeguards that prevent ChatGPT from producing text that might offend users.

“ChatGPT is entirely housed within Microsoft Azure. When push comes to shove, they have everything, including the model weights,” Musk added.

Countering OpenAI

The Tesla CEO has approached several artificial intelligence researchers to form a new lab that will work on developing an alternative to ChatGPT, according to the US tech publication The Information.

Musk has also reached out to Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit and specialises in the kind of machine-learning models that power chatbots like ChatGPT, as per the report.

Babuschkin added that he has not officially signed onto the Musk initiative, according to the report.

“I’d like to work with Elon on something in the LLM space,” Babuschkin said.