OpenAI shares Elon Musk emails urging startup to raise $1 billion, see Tesla as a cash cow in its early years

OpenAI on Tuesday publicly responded to a lawsuit brought by co-founder Elon Musk, highlighting apparent hypocrisy on the part of the now-billionaire and early backer of the company.

In its response, OpenAI reproduced old emails from Musk in which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO encouraged the rising startup to raise at least $1 billion in funding, and agreed that it should "start being less open" over time and "not share" the company's science with the public.

The reproduced messages follow a starkly different point of view Musk represented last week, when he sued OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, alleging breach of contract and unfair competition.

In the suit, Musk's attorneys allege that the inner workings of OpenAI's GPT-4 AI model are "a complete secret except to OpenAI—and, on information and belief, Microsoft," and that the secrecy is driven by commercial purpose rather than safety. OpenAI said, "We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon's claims."

In November, Musk told an audience at the The New York Times' DealBook conference that OpenAI had deviated from its original mission in his view.

"OpenAI should be renamed 'super closed source for maximum profit AI,' because this is what it actually is," Musk said onstage at the event. He noted that it's transformed from an "open source foundation" to multibillion-dollar "for-profit corporation with closed source."

By contrast, Musk appeared to discourage OpenAI co-founders from taking a too-lean approach to fundraising, according to emails the company reproduced from December 2018. He wrote that OpenAI had a zero-percent chance of becoming a relevant competitor to Google's DeepMind unless the startup made a "dramatic change in execution and resources."

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