Elon Musk said ‘I’m the reason OpenAI exists.’ He also claimed to have come up with the name.

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• Elon Musk claimed credit for OpenAI's existence and claimed to have come up with its name.
• Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI and has invested $50 million in the company. He left the startup company in 2018.
• He criticised OpenAI's current business model, and its relationship to Microsoft, its current investor.

Elon Musk seems to have mixed feelings about OpenAI.

Musk has expressed concern about OpenAI, while at the same time claiming credit for the AI startup ChatGPT.

Musk said in an interview with CNBC's David Faber on Tuesday that he was the reason OpenAI existed.

Musk told CNBC that he had invested $50 million in the company at the time, and played a "key role" in attracting key scientists and engineers. Musk said he was also the man behind its name.

Musk told CNBC that he came up with "the name". Musk added that OpenAI, which began as a nonprofit, is "open source."

Musk was an early OpenAI investor. He and Sam Altman, the current CEO of the startup, were co-founders in 2015.

Tesla and SpaceX's CEO, Elon Musk, left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018, a year before the company became a “capped-profit” company. He is now a vocal opponent of the startup.

Musk criticised OpenAI in February for turning into a "maximum-profit company controlled by Microsoft," something he had "never intended."

"It seems strange that something could be non-profit and open source, but then transform into a closed source, for profit," he said to CNBC's Faber. This would be similar to, say, finding an organization that was going to save the Amazon Rainforest, but instead, they became a lumber company and cut down the forest and sold it for cash.

Microsoft invested $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. It followed up with a "multibillion-dollar" investment in January 2023. Semafor said that the latest investment was around $10 billion.

Musk told CNBC that Microsoft has the power to "cut off OpenAI at any time" and has considerable control over the startup.

I also think it is important to know who will be in charge when the chips are down — let's imagine they create a digital super-intelligence that's almost godlike. What exactly is the relationship between OpenAI, Microsoft?"

Musk has publicly warned about AI technology, stating that it is "a danger to the public." Musk, SpaceX CEO, Steve Wozniak and other AI experts and scientists signed an open-letter in March calling for a 6-month hiatus on the development of advanced AI.

So far, 27,000 people has signed the open message.

The Financial Times reported that Musk, despite his public stances, is setting up a generative AI company named X.AI. This was according to the Financial Times on April 14. Insider's Kali Hays wrote on April 11 that Musk is also working to advance an AI project at Twitter.

Insider sent a comment request to OpenAI, Microsoft and Musk outside of regular business hours. They did not respond immediately.

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By: htan@insider.com (Huileng Tan)
Title: Elon Musk says ‘I am the reason OpenAI exists’ and that he came up with the name
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-openai-reason-exists-artificial-intelligence-ai-microsoft-2023-5
Published Date: Wed, 17 May 2023 06:00:35 +0000

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