Elon Musk sure wants people to know he was the one to name OpenAI

• Billionaire Elon Musk spoke to WPP CEO Mark Read in an interview at Cannes Lions on Wednesday.
• On the topic of the future of AI, Musk reminded the audience he cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit.

Elon Musk reminded the audience at Cannes Lions on Wednesday that he was the person to name OpenAI as he made a jab at the direction the company has taken since then.

Musk took to the festival stage as a guest speaker in an interview with WPP CEO Mark Read, where he discussed technical innovation.

During the conversation, Read breached the topic of AI and the future of tech.

Musk, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 but reportedly left the company three years later, has often traded barbs over the future of AI with OpenAI's current CEO, Sam Altman.

He even filed a lawsuit against the company, accusing them of betraying the firm's founding principles, which he has recently dropped.

On the topic of OpenAI, Musk told Read he had started the company, in part to offset Google.

"It was very much a unipolar world where Google was completely dominant in AI," he said.

Musk added that the company was "formed with a lot of good intentions." He said, "The 'open' in OpenAI was meant to stand for 'open source,'" adding, "I named it."

This isn't the first time Musk has alluded to his role in christening the AI company responsible for ChatGPT. In a post on X in 2023, he made a similar comment.

Musk reiterated his ongoing qualms with OpenAI with a final dig: "Now it's closed-source for maximum-profit AI, which is different from what was intended. I don't know how it got there."

This aligns with Musk's remarks about his displeasure with the current direction of OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit.

It shed that status in 2019, to operate as a "capped-profit" company to "raise investment capital and attract employees," per a company blog post at the time.

The company announced a partnership with Microsoft the same year, which initially invested $1 billion into OpenAI.

After launching publicly in November 2022, ChatGPT attracted 100 million users in just two months. Microsoft then increased its investment, reportedly pouring a further $10 billion into the AI firm.

Musk's pessimism about AI is largely directed at its development as a "for-profit" industry. He has been outspoken about the safety issues related to AI in the hands of corporate, for-profit entities. In 2020, Musk said he feared Google's Deepmind could one day effectively take over the world.

But Musk's discussion with Read suggested his opinion could be shifting. He told the executive: "In the positive scenario, the AI will be doing its best to make you happy. So that might work out pretty well."