Elon Musk, president of Tesla and SpaceX, left the board of the OpenAI startup he founded in 2018, not because of a conflict of interest with Tesla, as previously claimed, but because of a failed attempt to take full control of the company. company. These release reports semaphore citing sources familiar with the situation.
“Musk told co-founder Sam Altman in early 2018 that he thinks OpenAI, which has since created ChatGPT, is lagging behind Google,” a source said.
According to the publication, Musk offered to lead OpenAI, but when Altman and other co-founders refused, Musk resigned from the board and refused to continue funding the project.
According to the official statement on the OpenAI blog, Musk’s decision to leave the startup was due to Tesla’s desire to eliminate a potential conflict of interest in the future due to its artificial intelligence developments.
Musk has become an outspoken critic of the company since leaving OpenAI. A year after leaving the board, he let it slip that he disagreed with some of the plans the OpenAI team was trying to implement. In 2020, he argued, the firm should be more open.
Shortly after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, the billionaire criticized how the startup, which started as an open and not-for-profit organization, turned into a closed business enterprise.
Musk in February declarationThat Microsoft gradually “catch-up” OpenAI by funding startup projects.