【AI ENTERTAIMNT】The feud between OpenAI and Elon Musk
Currently, OpenAI has become the hottest AI company globally. Three years after Elon Musk helped establish the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, he withdrew from it himself.
◉ THE YEAR 2015
This non-profit organization was established with support from billionaire tech celebrities such as Musk and Reid Hoffman. They invested $1 billion in OpenAI and attracted many top talents from large tech companies and academia. However, insiders revealed that in early 2018, Musk told OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman that he believed the joint venture was already far behind Google. So Musk proposed a solution: to control and personally manage OpenAI himself. Altman and the other co-founders of OpenAI unanimously rejected the proposal, and Musk announced his departure and refused to donate a significant amount as promised.
◉ THE YEAR 2018
On February 20, Musk left OpenAI, causing a huge impact on the industry that was about to change the world and on the company that was caught in the vortex. It also led to a rift between the two most important figures in the tech industry today, Musk and Altman.
Impulsive Musk and quirky yet quiet Altman are well-known in Silicon Valley, but few would have thought they would become the core of a Silicon Valley event.
On the one hand, Musk had other headaches, such as Tesla's ongoing efforts to meet the Model 3 production targets, and the stock price was falling, even threatening the company's future.
On the other hand, Altman was running the powerful venture capital firm YCombinator, and in 2018, he not only joined OpenAI as a director but also served as its president. Like OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and others, the then-Chief Technology Officer also opposed Musk's acquisition. Insiders revealed that there was a power struggle within OpenAI.
Later, Musk resigned from the OpenAI board and publicly stated that the reason for leaving was a conflict of interest: at the time, Tesla was developing autonomous driving AI and needed to compete for talent with OpenAI.
This competition did exist and happened, and Tesla poached one of OpenAI's best talents, Andrej Karpathy, who later became the architect of Tesla's autonomous driving project. But almost no one at OpenAI believed that Musk left because of this. When he left, he gave a speech at the OpenAI office, mainly about potential conflicts of interest, but most employees did not believe it.
According to insiders, OpenAI announced that Musk would continue to fund the company, but in reality, Musk reneged on his promise. He had pledged to donate about $1 billion within a few years (he had already donated $100 million), but the funding stopped after he left, leaving the nonprofit organization unable to pay astronomical fees associated with training AI models on supercomputers.
By the fall of the same year, some at OpenAI had realized that the cost of becoming a cutting-edge AI company would be rising. At that time, Google Brain's Transformer opened up a new field where AI could be constantly improved, which also meant that endless data had to be provided to train the models, a costly task.
So, OpenAI made a major decision to switch to the Transformer model.
◉ THE YEAR 2019
On March 11, OpenAI announced that they were creating a for-profit entity in order to raise enough funds to pay for the computational power needed to train the most advanced AI models.
At the time, OpenAI stated, "We want to continue to pursue the company's mission while increasing our ability to raise funds, and we believe that the current company structure cannot achieve the right balance." OpenAI said that they were limiting investors' profits, and all excess profits would flow back to the initial nonprofit organization.
Insiders revealed that Altman also made an unusual decision for a tech boss: he would not own any shares in this new for-profit entity.
One reason was that Altman was very wealthy and had invested in several highly successful tech startups, so he didn't need the money. Another reason was that Altman pointed out that although OpenAI had to commercialize in order to continue developing its business, the focus of the project was not on making money - he could only stick to the original mission if he was not tied to any ownership interests.
However, this decision indirectly caused some potential investors in OpenAI to stop because they were worried that Altman was not taking shares because he did not see the potential of the project.
However, less than six months later, OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, which also provided infrastructure technology. Together, they built a supercomputer to train large models such as ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E. The latest language model GPT-4 has 100 trillion parameters.
◉ THE YEAR 2022
In November, when ChatGPT was launched, OpenAI immediately became the hottest new technology startup, even putting pressure on Google. Insiders revealed that Musk was very angry about this.
In December, just one month after ChatGPT was launched, Musk canceled OpenAI's authorization to access Twitter data, which was part of a contract signed before Twitter was acquired by Musk.
◉ THE YEAR 2023
On February 17, Musk wrote on Twitter, "OpenAI was founded under the banner of open source (which is why I named it 'Open'AI), and was originally a nonprofit company intended to be a force against Google. But now the company has become a closed source, not only capturing a lot of profits but also controlled by Microsoft."
On March 15th, Musk wrote on Twitter again, "I'm still confused. Why did the non-profit organization that I donated about $100 million become a for-profit organization with a market value of $30 billion today? If this is legal, why doesn't everyone follow suit?"
OpenAI declined to comment on this, and Musk did not respond to our request for comment. However, he posted a message on Twitter: "I believe everything will be okay," along with an emoticon and the following text: "I realize that artificial intelligence is the most powerful tool created by humanity, but now it is in the hands of ruthless monopoly companies."