Elon Musk on Sam Altman and ChatGPT: I am the reason OpenAI exists

Open AI I mean, you seem kind of frustrated with them, you were one of the big contributors from the beginning, the

reason

I'm the recent Open AI

exists

, how much money did you give them? So I'm not sure of the exact number, but it's some number on the order of 50 million dollars uh so man fate loves next level irony um so I used to be close friends with Larry Page and he used to say at his house and we would have these conversations for a long time at night about Ai and I would be constantly urging him to be careful about the danger of AI and um and he just wasn't really worried about the danger of AI and he was quite arrogant about it um and um and and at the same time, uh, Google, especially after their deepmind acquisition, had three quarters of the world's AI talent, obviously they had a lot of computers and a lot of money, so it was a unipolar world four four Ai and to go to the unipolar world, but the person controlling that is not, or at least did not seem, concerned about the safety of the AI.

That sounded like a real problem, so, and then the last straw was, Larry, calling me a speciesist, for being a pro-human conscience. instead of Machine Consciousness and I say, well, yes, I guess I am, I am a speciesist and, very true, you helped the creation of open AI and you put up to 50 million dollars more of the aid, without which it would not exist. it wouldn't exist without you um I came up with a name uh the name open AI refers to open source um so the intention was what's okay so what was the opposite what's the opposite of um from Google which would be an open source non-profit because Google is closed Source for profit um and that profit motivation can be financially dangerous um so you should have gotten governance for that money you should have gotten some level of control maybe in retrospect yeah I fully admit I'm a big idiot here, um, um, anyway, open AI was meant to be open AI, open like open source, uh, it was created like 51c3 um and um, but part of it is too at the beginning, I thought, look, this is This is probably a desperate effort.

How could we compete with? How could open AI compete with Google Deepmind? I was instrumental in recruiting the key scientists and engineers, more specifically, most notably Ilya soskire um actually um ILY went back and forth several times because he said he was going to join

openai

and then Demus would talk him out of it and then I would. would convince to do it and then and this went back and forth several times and finally he decided to join Ai open and really, uh, Ilia Jordan was the lynchpin, open his eyes and finally succeed. You are very disappointed with what happened there.

In terms of becoming a for-profit organization in some way, I think there's some semblance, it seems strange that something can be a nonprofit, open source, and somehow become closed source for profit. profit, um, I mean, this would be like, let's say you funded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, instead they became a logging company, they cut down the forest and sold it for money and so they would say which we'll wait a second, that's the exact opposite of what I gave the money to yeah, uh, that's legal, that doesn't seem legal and, yes it is, and in general, if it's legal to start a nonprofit business and then take the intellectual property and transfer it to a for-profit organization that then makes tons. of money um, shouldn't everyone start?

Shouldn't that be the default? um and then I also think it's important to understand what happens when the going gets tough, let's say they create some digital super intelligence, almost godlike intelligence, well, who? in control, yes, and what exactly is the relationship between Open AI and Microsoft, and I'm concerned that Microsoft may actually have more control than, say, the Open AI leadership team realizes, I mean, Microsoft as part of Microsoft's investment. They have rights to all the software, all the model weights, and everything needed to run the inference system, so they essentially have a lot of control at any point Microsoft could cut open AI.