OpenAI has continued to litigate in the court of public opinion. It first did so in responding to the New York Times copyright lawsuit in a blog post asserting that the NYT exploited a “rare bug” to regurgitate NYT articles potentially in violation of OpenAI’s terms of use. Later, in its motion to dismiss, OpenAI doubled down on this defense asserting that “that the [New York] Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products” to exploit this glitch and generate the examples of regurgitation in Exhibit J of the New York Times’ complaint.
Elon Musk allegedly wanted to join OpenAI with Tesla
Now, in response to Elon Musk’s lawsuit for OpenAI alleging , OpenAI wrote a response on its blog, including emails from Elon Musk that appear to show that he wanted to take over OpenAI and join it with Tesla, a for-profit company that Musk, of course, runs and is the largest shareholder of (“Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google,” Elon Musk in Feb. 1, 2018, 3:52 AM email to Ilya Sutsekever). Musk had forwarded someone else’s (whose name is redacted) analysis and said this is “exactly right”:
The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for 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. Using a rocket analogy, Tesla already built the “first stage” of the rocket with the whole supply chain of Model 3 and its onboard computer and a persistent internet connection. The “second stage” would be a full self driving solution based on large-scale neural network training, which OpenAI expertise could significantly help accelerate. With a functioning full self-driving solution in ~2-3 years we could sell a lot of cars/trucks. If we do this really well, the transportation industry is large enough that we could increase Tesla’s market cap to high O(~100K), and use that revenue to fund the AI work at the appropriate scale.
Business Insider traces this email back to the time when Musk was facing serious financial challenges at Tesla in 2018, with the production of the new Teslas Model 3, which was anything but smooth.
Elon Musk allegedly agreed that OpenAI should not let its model be open source
Perhaps the biggest “smoking gun” among Musk’s emails to OpenAI was his agreement (“Yup”) that OpenAI should not open source its models for safety reasons:
Also, it’s unclear how serious Musk in filing the lawsuit. On Twitter aka X, he joked that he’d drop the lawsuit if OpenAI changed its name to ClosedAI.
