Elon Musk tried to convince Sam Altman to fold OpenAI into Tesla before he left the AI company in 2018, biographer says

• Elon Musk tried to incorporate OpenAI into Tesla before he left the AI firm, his biographer said.
• An excerpt from an upcoming biography that was published in Time detailed the incident.

Elon Musk attempted to incorporate OpenAI into Tesla before he parted ways with the company in 2018, an excerpt of a biography about the billionaire said.

The excerpt, which was published in Time, said Musk tried to convince Sam Altman, who later became OpenAI's CEO, to fold the AI lab into Tesla before Musk stepped down from the company.

Tesla had been ramping up its own AI development during a period when Musk was a cofounder and board member of OpenAI.

OpenAI rejected the idea, the excerpt said, and Altman stepped up as president of the company. Altman went on to start a for-profit arm of the company, which pulled in major investors, including Microsoft. Musk later criticized OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft.

Four years after Musk's departure, the AI company released ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that took the world by storm and sparked an AI arms race between some of Big Tech's major players.

The unprecedented popularity of the chatbot sparked another major Microsoft investment and several copycats, including an offering from Google.

The excerpt said Musk resented being "left out of the fray" after the release of GPT-4 and Google's rival chatbot Bard. The billionaire has been vocal about his concerns about AI safety for some time. After the release of GPT-4, he signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI development.

In July, Musk launched his own AI venture, xAI, with a mission to "understand the true nature of the universe."

Representatives for Musk and Altman did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.