OpenAI responded to Elon Musk in a blog post published Tuesday on its site, responding to a lawsuit filed by one of its co-founders and former benefactors.
Musk filed a lawsuit last week in San Francisco against the company, CEO Sam Altman and Chairman Greg Brockman, alleging it had strayed from its mission of building responsible artificial intelligence. In the post, OpenAI said Musk was lashing out after trying and failing to make the company part of Tesla Inc.
“We are sad that it came to this with someone we deeply admired,” OpenAI wrote, “someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then told us he sued when we began to make significant progress toward OpenAI’s mission without him.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO, an OpenAI co-founder who is no longer involved with the company, argues in his lawsuit that the startup’s close relationship with Microsoft Corp. has undermined its original mission of creating open source technology free from undue corporate influence.
“To this day, OpenAI Inc.’s website continues to state that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all humanity,’” the lawsuit reads. “In reality, however, OpenAI Inc. has been transformed into a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a type of artificial intelligence that does not yet exist but which, in theory, could perform a number of tasks better than humans.
Musk is suing for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and allegations of unfair trade practices, among other complaints. He is pursuing the cause as a donor to the nonprofit parent organization in 2019 and is trying to force San Francisco-based OpenAI to stop personally benefiting Microsoft and Altman.
OpenAI did not publicly comment on Musk’s lawsuit when it was originally filed on February 29. But in an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg, the company said it “categorically disagrees” with the lawsuit.