Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit | OpenAI

December 13, 2024

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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Timeline of events

• November 2015: OpenAI started as a nonprofit, which Elon questioned
• December 2015: OpenAI publicly announced
• Early 2017: Our research progress led us to realize we would need billions of dollars for the compute to build AGI
• Summer 2017: We and Elon agreed that a for-profit was the next step for OpenAI to advance the mission
• Fall 2017: Elon demanded majority equity, absolute control, and to be CEO of the for-profit
• September 2017: Elon created the public benefit corporation called “Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc.”
• September 2017: We rejected Elon's terms because giving him unilateral control of OpenAI and its technology would be contrary to the mission
• January 2018: Elon said OpenAI was on a path for certain failure unless we merged into Tesla.
• February 2018: Elon resigned as co-chair of OpenAI
• December 2018: Elon told us to raise “billions per year immediately or forget it”
• March 2019: We announced the capped-profit OpenAI LP, within the non-profit
• March 2023: Elon started his OpenAI competitor, xAI

Elon Musk’s latest legal filing against OpenAI marks his fourth attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims. However, his own words and actions speak for themselves—in 2017, Elon not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit as OpenAI’s proposed new structure. When he didn’t get majority equity and full control, he walked away and told us we would fail. Now that OpenAI is the leading AI research lab and Elon runs a competing AI company, he’s asking the court to stop us from effectively pursuing our mission.

The public benefit corporation created by Elon Musk on September 15, 2017, as the proposed future structure of OpenAI.

You can’t sue your way to AGI. We have great respect for Elon’s accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom. It is critical for the U.S. to remain the global leader in AI. Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, and we have been and will remain a mission-driven organization. We hope Elon shares that goal, and will uphold the values of innovation and free market competition that have driven his own success.

November 2015: OpenAI started as a nonprofit, which Elon questioned

On November 20, 2015, Elon said: “Also, the structure doesn't seem optimal…. Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit.” We felt a nonprofit was the right path at the time, but later came to realize that our structure would have to evolve to attract the capital necessary for the mission.

Re: AI docs

––––– Forwarded message –––––

From: Elon Musk

Date: Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 12:29 PM

To: Sam Altman

I think this should be independent from (but supported by) YC, not what sounds like a subsidiary.

Also, the structure doesn’t seem optimal. In particular, the YC stock along with a salary from the nonprofit muddies the alignment of incentives. Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit.

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On Nov 20, 2015, at 11:48 AM, Sam Altman wrote:

Elon–

Plan is to have you, me, and Ilya on the Board of Directors for YC AI, which will be a Delaware non-profit. We will also state that we plan to elect two other outsiders by majority vote of the Board.

We will write into the bylaws that any technology that potentially compromises the safety of humanity has to get consent of the Board to be released, and we will reference this in the researchers’ employment contracts.

At a high level, does that work for you?

I’m cc’ing our GC here–is there someone in your office he can work with on the details?

Sam

December 2015: OpenAI publicly announced

OpenAI was introduced to the world.

Early 2017: Our research progress led us to realize we would need billions of dollars for the compute to build AGI.

In 2017, we made progress on building an AI for the competitive video game, Dota⁠. We discovered we would need far more compute than we initially imagined.

On June 13, 2017, Elon responded to an email, saying, “Ok. Let’s figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint…”

Ilya reiterated on July 12, 2017, “Each year, we'll need to exponentially increase our hardware spend, but we have reason to believe AGI can ultimately be built with less than $10B in hardware.”

Re: Followup thoughts

From: Elon Musk

Date: Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 12:05 AM

To: Ilya Sutskever

Cc: Greg Brockman, Sam Altman

Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach. █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​ █​

The probability of DeepMind creating a deep mind increases every year. Maybe it doesn’t get past 50% in 2 to 3 years, but it likely moves past 10%. That doesn’t sound crazy to me, given their resources.

In any event, I have found that it is far better to overestimate than underestimate competitors.

This doesn’t mean we should rush out and hire weak talent. I agree that nothing good would be achieved by that. What we need to do is redouble our efforts to seek out the best people in the world, do whatever it takes to bring them on board and imbue the company with a high sense of urgency.

It will be important for OpenAI to achieve something significant in the next 6 to 9 months to show that we are for real. Doesn’t need to be a whopper breakthrough, but it should be enough for key talent around the world to sit up and take notice.

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From: Ilya Sutskever

Date: Fri, Feb 19, 2016, at 10:28 AM

To: Elon Musk

Cc: Greg Brockman, Sam Altman

Several points:

• It is not the case that once we solve “concepts,” we get AI. Other problems that will have to be solved include unsupervised learning, transfer learning, and lifetime learning. We’re also doing pretty badly…