OpenAI Has Receipts: Elon Musk Wanted OpenAI to Merge With Tesla

OpenAI’s founders published a scathing response to Elon Musk’s lawsuit Tuesday night, claiming that Musk made a power grab to achieve “absolute control” of the AI startup in 2017. The emails reveal Musk was originally on board with making the startup less open-sourced and profitable, even though he is now suing OpenAI for those reasons. The key difference is that Musk is no longer in charge.

“In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity,” OpenAI’s founders said in a blog post. “Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding.”

The response was filled with juicy details and made several internal emails public. As early as 2016, Musk was fully aware of OpenAI’s intentions to raise capital and become less open as the startup matured, according to the emails. Musk was on board at the time, even attempting to merge OpenAI into Tesla, noting how it would need billions of dollars in funding to compete with Google. When OpenAI rejected the offer, Musk left, saying OpenAI had a zero percent chance of success and that he would start an AI competitor within Tesla.

“My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise,” said Musk in an email to OpenAI founders.

One internal email reveals that the word “open” in OpenAI never meant open-sourced at all. Musk responded “yup” to an email from OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever in 2016, which described the true meaning of the name, and noted that open-sourcing AI models early on was just a recruiting tactic.

“As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open,” said Sutskever in the email. “The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it’s built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science.”

The response was authored by OpenAI founders Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and most notably, Ilya Sutskever. The Chief Scientist’s status at the company has been up in the air since he led the movement to fire Sam Altman back in November, and this is the first sign of life from Sutskever in nearly four months. Altman has refused to answer if he’s still with the company in multiple interviews.

Another detail tucked into this blog post is that ChatGPT has now achieved over 100 million daily active users. OpenAI reached 100 million weekly active users back in Nov. 2023, but now OpenAI’s founders say “hundreds of millions of people use [the free version of ChatGPT] every day.”

For at least eight years, OpenAI has had internal plans to become profitable and conceal its best AI models. Musk appears to have known about them all along. These plans were not explicitly made public until now, which perhaps was the goal of Musk with this lawsuit altogether. These emails show how Musk’s real gripe is that he’s not running OpenAI anymore.