Elon Musk Is Right About OpenAI But for the Wrong Reasons

Musk’s complaint centers on the chasm between OpenAI’s image as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to preventing harms caused by artificial intelligence and the reality that it’s also the dominant maker of commercial AI software via a for-profit subsidiary that’s backed by Microsoft Corp. and valued at $86 billion. Musk provided seed funding for the nonprofit in 2016 but broke with the organization around the time it went for-profit, and he’s long professed outrage over this discrepancy. “This would be like, let’s say you funded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest,” Musk said in a television interview last year. “And instead they became a lumber company.” In a blog post OpenAI suggested that Musk’s account was incomplete and that he’d only turned against OpenAI when the nonprofit resisted his effort to take it over. In an internal memo the company also suggested that Musk had picked a fight out of jealousy.