“I am the reason OpenAI exists”the CEO of Tesla and Twitter said Tuesday, Elon Muskin an interview with CNBC, taking credit for the success of OpenAI and ChatGPT in the AI industry.
As you mention DecryptWhen asked by interviewer David Faber how much he invested in the ChatGPT creator, Musk replied: “I am not sure of the exact amount, but it is an amount of the order of $50 million (…) It would not exist without me”.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba in December 2015: “I was instrumental in recruiting the key scientists and engineers, most notably Ilya Sutskever. The incorporation of Ilya was the axis so that OpenAI was finally a success”.
Almost seven years later, in November 2022, OpenAI released the first version of its ChatGPT chatbot, whose successors have taken the world by storm.
The idea was to create the opposite of Google
The name OpenAI, Musk said, refers to open source software. Open source ideals call for the source code of a program or platform to be freely available and can be redistributed and modified.
Musk said the idea was to create the opposite of Google, which Musk called a closed-source, for-profit company: “That profit motivation can be potentially dangerous.”.
The mogul said that he and Google co-founder Larry Page would have long talks about artificial intelligence: “I would constantly urge you to beware of the danger of AI. He really wasn’t concerned about the nature of the AI and he was quite arrogant about it.”.
In 2014, Google acquired a UK-based artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind Technologies, for $500 million. But while the idea of taking on Google may have been appealing, Musk says he initially thought it was a futile endeavor.
“How could we compete with… how could OpenAI compete with Google DeepMind? This looked like an ant against an elephant, not a contest”.
Musk expressed concern about what he sees as OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit closed-source model like Google: “It seems strange that something can be a nonprofit, open source, and somehow morph into a closed source for profit.”.