The Battle for AGI: OpenAI’s love letters to Elon Musk

Why this is important:

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are arguably the most important people in the quest for AGI as this stand. AI holds the key to unlocking significant parts of our future and events like these can shape the course of history! 

The Context:

On the 2nd of March, Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and a host of other companies) filed a suit against OpenAI (another company Elon Musk co-founded) and its CEO, Sam Altman. The grounds for filing the lawsuit were that OpenAI had abandoned its original mission. He alleged that OpenAI had gone from being a non-profit to pushing the needle on AI to essentially selling out to Microsoft. 

The Response:

On the 5th of March, OpenAI responded to the suit via a blog post – which you can read here: OpenAI an Elon Musk. But the jist of it is that none of what Elon is accusing OpenAI of doing is either new or wasn’t essentially endorsed by Musk to begin with. OpenAI continues to maintain that they respect and admire Musk – but it was important for them to clarify the situation.

Elon always knew that getting to AGI wouldn’t be cheap:

“We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless relative to what Google or Facebook are spending. I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment. This is real. I will cover whatever anyone else doesn’t provide.”

https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk

“Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”

https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk

On the For-Profit Model:

“(Redacted) may wish it otherwise, but, in my and (Redacted)’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero.”

https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk

All in all, OpenAI is alleging that Elon knew full well that the path to AGI is definitely a for-profit path and so this whole lawsuit is a only a distraction. 

The key part of the blog that stood out to us was something that Ilya Sutskever wrote to Elon:

“As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).”

To which Elon’s response was just a “Yup.”

The big question is how much of the this is true and if it is true, what would prompt Elon to sue OpenAI and Sam. One could always assume that since Elon is now pursing his own path to AGI via Grok, this is a just a business tactic. In which case, we’re all the worse for it.