Elon Musk resented being 'left out of the fray' during the AI boom despite cofounding OpenAI, biographer says
- Elon Musk felt left out when generative AI started to gather steam, his biographer said.
- Musk was one of the cofounders and main investors in OpenAI.
Elon Musk resented being "left out of the fray" when it came to generative AI despite cofounding and investing in OpenAI, an excerpt from Walter Isaacson's upcoming biography about the billionaire said.
In the excerpt, which was published in Time, Musk felt he'd been left out of the AI boom after OpenAI released GPT-4 to the public and Google launched its Bard chatbot.
Representatives for Musk did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.
Musk was one of the cofounders and main investors in OpenAI in 2015. He served as a board member at the company until parting ways with the venture in 2018. Reports at the time cited a conflict of interest with Tesla's AI development.
OpenAI later set up a for-profit arm of the company that pulled in major investors, including Microsoft. Musk has since criticized OpenAI's for-profit business model and its relationship with the tech giant.
The Tesla CEO also hurled several public jibes at the company and its leading product, the AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT. These included repeated accusations that the chatbot's responses were biased and left-leaning. The billionaire has been historically skeptical of AI and expressed concerns over the tech's safety.
Despite this, Musk officially launched his own AI venture, xAI, in July this year. Musk had publically called for a pause on advanced AI development earlier that year and put his name to an open letter alongside other industry heavyweights.
However, an August report in The New Yorker said, the Tesla CEO was building his own AI venture at a similar time.