OpenAI has published emails exchanged with Elon Musk in response to the billionaire's lawsuit against the company. The legal dispute stems from Musk's allegations of a breach of contract, claiming the company is no longer developing AI for the "benefit of humanity."
Yahoo Finance's Tech Editor Dan Howley breaks down the details.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: OpenAI is on the offense here on the attack, firing back at founder Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, who last week announced that he is suing the maker of ChatGPT for diverging from its original nonprofit mission for a for-profit organization.
OpenAI responding to the lawsuit in a blog post last night on Tuesday night saying, that the company intends to dismiss all of Musk's claims from the lawsuit and to bolster its case. OpenAI is publishing some telling emails from Musk himself.
"Yahoo Finance's" Dan Howley has the latest on that story for us. Dan.
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. Seana, basically, OpenAI is coming back or fighting back with the receipts for the various conversations they've had with Elon Musk over the years. This is from everybody from Greg Brockman to Sam Altman.
They're essentially throwing his own words back at him. And at one point, they say, Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of discussions, he withheld funding. There was supposed to be funding that he was providing.
And that Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn had to bridge the gap in funding that was left when Elon was holding that back. , Essentially what the initial lawsuit says that Elon Musk filed is that they're in breach of contract, breach of a founding agreement between OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Elon Musk, basically, talking about how the technology was supposed to be all open to the public. And that it was supposed to benefit humanity and not be a for-profit.
And so in some of these emails what they go over, in particular, an email from Greg Brockman, is, essentially, I'm sorry-- from Ilya Sutskever, one of the major players at OpenAI, one of the head AI scientists. He, essentially, says to Musk, look, obviously, this is supposed to benefit all mankind. But we don't have to be open as we grow our capabilities.
We can start closing those off a little bit. And Elon Musk essentially replies, yeah to that. Saying, sure, he agrees with that. So it looks as though OpenAI is just firing back at all the claims that Musk has with his own words included.
SEANA SMITH: And poking holes that some of those claims. All right. Dan Howley, thanks so much for breaking down that here for us.