Elon Musk supported making OpenAI a for-profit company, the ChatGPT maker said, attacking a lawsuit from the wealthy investor who has accused the artificial intelligence business of betraying its founding goal to benefit humanity as it pursued profits instead.
In its first response since the Tesla CEO sued last week, OpenAI vowed to get the claim thrown out and released emails from Musk, escalating the feud between the San Francisco-based company and the billionaire that bankrolled its creation years ago.
“The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits,” OpenAI said in a blog post late Tuesday from five company executives and computer scientists, including CEO Sam Altman. “We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”
AGI refers to artificial general intelligence, which are general purpose AI systems that can perform just as well as — or even better than — humans in a wide variety of tasks.
The lawsuit from Musk, who now has his own AI startup, says that when he funded OpenAI as it was launching, he secured an agreement that the research lab would remain a nonprofit to develop technology for the public’s benefit.