Elon Musk hates OpenAI now, but he was the one who named it
OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk has become a vocal critic of the organization’s current direction and has accused the organization of abandoning its founding principles.
Elon Musk is currently one of the biggest critics of OpenAI and its functioning. He has been heavily criticizing the organization for straying from its original mission and adopting a profit-driven and closed-source approach to AI development. Recently, he also announced that if Apple uses OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to operate the iPhone’s AI features, he will ban the use of iPhones in his offices. According to him, Apple’s decision to add ChatGPT to the Apple ecosystem is “an unacceptable security breach,” and he says that his companies, including X, will have to “check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.” However, this criticism from Musk is not just due to rivalry, but against the organization he co-founded.
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman with the ambition of ensuring the safe and transparent advancement of artificial intelligence. Its founders envisioned OpenAI as a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the safe and open development of artificial general intelligence “in a way that is most likely to benefit all of humanity,” following concerns for the ethical implications of AI. “It is difficult to comprehend how much human-level AI could benefit society, and equally hard to imagine how much harm it could cause to society if it is created or used incorrectly,” OpenAI said in announcing the platform.
According to Musk, he named the company “OpenAI” to emphasize his commitment to open-source development, “The ‘Open’ in OpenAI meant ‘open source… made with the very best intentions,'” he said while speaking to WPP CEO Mark Read during the Cannes Lions festival. However, according to Musk, the organization has now derailed and moved away from its fundamental principles to a “maximize-profit” model. “It’s closed-source AI for maximum profit, which is different from the intended purpose… I don’t know how it got there,” Musk said.
Musk departed OpenAI in 2018, reportedly following longstanding differences over the organization’s strategic direction and concerns about potential conflicts with his other ventures, particularly Tesla and SpaceX. “As Tesla continues to focus more on AI, this will eliminate potential future conflicts for Elon,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post during Musk’s departure. The company, however, assured that Musk would continue to provide guidance and donations to the platform.
Nevertheless, Musk has now frequently clashed with OpenAI’s current CEO Sam Altman over the company’s trajectory and the decision to shift to a “capped-profit” model in 2019. Notably, OpenAI’s decision regarding partnerships led to a significant partnership with Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI and later increased its investment to $10 billion. However, this move has been a sore point for Musk, who believes it contradicts the non-profit and open-source ethos that originally defined OpenAI.
But, despite his criticisms towards OpenAI and its development around artificial intelligence, Musk remains optimistic about the potential benefits of AI if it is developed responsibly. “In the positive scenario, AI will try its best to make you happy. So it can do a fairly good job,” he said during his conversation with Reed.
