‘Is that legal?’ — Elon Musk chides OpenAI's for-profit pivot after $50M investment
Billionaire Elon Musk has queried whether it's legal for OpenAI — the firm behind ChatGPT — to become a for-profit business after he invested approximately $50 million into it.
On May 16, Musk spoke with CNBC during Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting and claimed he “came up with the name” OpenAI, intending for the company to be an open-source alternative to DeepMind after Google purchased the company in 2014.
Musk likened OpenAI’s non-profit to for-profit transition to a “save the Amazon” organization becoming a “lumber company” which logged and sold trees from the rainforest, adding:
OpenAI says it began as a non-profit company so that it was “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” and could focus on its goal of advancing “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.”
But in 2019, OpenAI announced it would create a new company called OpenAI LP, which it called a “hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit,” or “capped-profit” company, which is supposedly still governed by the non-profit entity.
OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.Not what I intended at all.
OpenAI claims this allowed it to attract more capital and scale faster, laying the groundwork for Microsoft’s multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment and other investments such as the $100 million it is reportedly seeking to create a new cryptocurrency called Worldcoin.
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OpenAI might again be releasing an open-source AI model, which it hasn't
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