- Elon Musk said OpenAI has become a "maximum-profit," closed-source firm "effectively controlled by Microsoft."
- The billionaire said this is not what he "intended" when he co-founded the company in 2015.
OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk took to Twitter to defend his early involvement in the company that created ChatCPT, saying it has become a "maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," which was not what he "intended at all."
The billionaire was responding to a tweet questioning why he co-founded OpenAI when he considers artificial intelligence "one of the biggest risks" to civilization and needs further regulation.
Musk has long advocated for proactive regulation in the AI space, famously saying in 2018 that the tech has the potential to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He said in 2020 that he feared Google's Deepmind could one day effectively takeover the world.
Musk wrote in response: "OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it "Open" AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all."
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on Musk's remarks.
Musk, who is the CEO of five different companies, co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside prominent Silicon Valley figures like Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Peter Theil, and others. They all pledged $1 billion to the project at the time.
It was initially a non-profit dedicated to developing digital intelligence "in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole," it wrote on its website in 2015, Insider's Grace Kay recently reported.
But it shed its non-profit status in 2019 and became a "capped-profit" company to "raise investment capital and attract employees," the company announced in a blog post.
The company announced a partnership with Microsoft the same year and welcomed a $1 billion investment from the tech giant.
After launching publicly in November, ChatGPT attracted 100 million users in just two months. Microsoft then increased its investment, reportedly pouring a further $10 billion into the AI firm in January.
Musk resigned from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018 to "eliminate a potential future conflict" with Tesla, because of his plans to create autonomous self-driving cars.
He clarified in 2019 that he parted ways with the company because "Tesla was competing for some of same people as OpenAI & I didn't agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do."
Speaking at the 2023 World Government Summit in Dubai this week Musk said "we need to regulate AI Safety."
He added: "It is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine."