Elon Musk said control of OpenAI should go to his children, Sam Altman tells jury
Sam Altman said on Tuesday that Elon Musk is trying to take control of OpenAI, even suggesting it could be passed on to his children when he dies.
Altman is the co-founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence (AI) company behind ChatGPT. it happens A lawsuit was filed against Muskaccuses him of “plundering a charity” that OpenAI started as a non-profit organization.
Appearing before a federal grand jury in Oakland, California, Altman said Musk not only supported the idea of OpenAI becoming a for-profit business, but wanted control of it in the long term.
“I remember my co-founders asking, ‘If you’re in control, what happens when you die?’ It was a goosebump-inducing moment when he asked. “He said something like ‘…maybe I should pass it on to my kids.'”
Musk’s alleged comments come as the billionaire seeks to gain more control over OpenAI after it was founded in 2015, and has suggested various ways to achieve it.
In addition to asking for more seats on OpenAI’s board and asking to be its CEO, Altman said Musk suggested OpenAI become a subsidiary of electric vehicle company Tesla.
On Tuesday, Altman said OpenAI’s overall goal is to “get more money faster,” echoing Musk’s talk of restructuring the company into a more traditional for-profit organization.
Musk allegedly thought he should be in charge of such a company, in part because of his reputation as a businessman, which could help OpenAI get financial backing.
Altman recalled Musk saying, “If I just tweet about this, it’ll instantly be worth a ton.”
But Altman says he and his OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever decided that giving such control to Musk in exchange for more or easier funding would not help OpenAI’s mission or the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
“I was extremely disturbed by this,” Altman said. “One of the reasons we started OpenAI was because we thought AGI should not be under the control of a single person.”
AGI is loosely defined in the technology and artificial intelligence community as an artificial intelligence tool or model that has become so capable and “smart” that it outperforms humans at most tasks.
Ultimately, Musk left OpenAI in early 2018, halting his $5 million quarterly donation to the company.
Altman described as “etched in my memory” an email from Musk in which he said OpenAI’s “chance of success” without him “is zero percent, not one percent.”
When Altman offered Musk the option of investing in OpenAI when it formed a for-profit subsidiary in 2019, Musk declined.
