Elon Musk wanted OpenAI to merge with Tesla, say founders

The founders of OpenAI have strongly rebutted claims made by Elon Musk and countered that he wanted the artificial general intelligence (AGI) startup to be part of Tesla.

This response came in the form of a blog post, given that Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI accusing them of steering away from the path of being a non-profit entity. The post also displayed the e-mail exchanges.

The blog post says there was a discussion between Musk and the OpenAI founders on making the startup a for profit enterprise, but could not decide on the terms as the Tesla CEO wanted majority control, which the founders were not comfortable about.

OpenAI was founded in 2015, with Elon Musk being one of the key members with others like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Musk left the company in early 2018.

“We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI. He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla,” the blog said.

It further said Musk had withdrawn funding to OpenAI in 2017 when he could not get majority control of the AGI and it was LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman who gave the money which was required to pay their salaries and invest in other resources.

“In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations,” the post said.

This is the first public battle between the founders of OpenAI and Elon Musk where Vinod Khosla, the famed tech investor, described the lawsuit of Musk as a case of sour grapes.

The blog post also highlighted how Musk, during his time at OpenAI, was not very confident about the success of this startup in competing against Google and felt there was a need for billions of dollars of funding.

“Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla. When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars. In December 2018, Elon sent us an email saying “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it,” the blog post noted.