An unsettling read.
The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAITHE SCOOP
After three years, Elon Musk was ready to give up on the artificial intelligence research firm he helped found, OpenAI.
The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great
fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1 billion. It had lured some of the top minds in the field to leave big tech companies and academia.
But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.
And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.
Altman and OpenAI's other founders rejected Musk's proposal. Musk, in turn,
walked away from the company and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk's departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that's changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.
Musk then stepped down from OpenAI's board of directors. Publicly, he and OpenAI said the reason for his departure was a conflict of interest. Tesla, which was developing its own artificial intelligence for autonomous driving, would be competing for talent with OpenAI.
There was some truth to that rivalry. Tesla had already
poached one of OpenAI's best minds, Andrej Karpathy, who became the architect of Tesla's autonomous driving program.
But few people at OpenAI believed Musk was leaving for that reason, and a speech he gave at OpenAI's offices at the time of his departure, which focused mainly on the potential conflict of interest, was not received well by most employees, who didn't entirely buy the story.
An OpenAI
announcement said Musk would continue to fund the organization, but Musk did not, according to people familiar with the matter. He had promised to donate roughly $1 billion over a period of years (he had already contributed $100 million), but his payments stopped after his departure, people familiar with the matter said. That left the nonprofit with no ability to pay the
astronomical fees associated with training AI models on supercomputers.
The conflict would also create a public rift between the two most important players in technology today, Musk and Altman. Semafor spoke to eight people familiar with the inside story, and is revealing the details here for the first time.
Less than six months later, OpenAI took
$1 billion from Microsoft, which could provide not just funding but infrastructure know-how. Together they built a supercomputer to train massive models that eventually created ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E. The latest language model, GPT-4, has 1 trillion parameters.
When ChatGPT
launched in November, OpenAI instantly became the hottest new tech startup, forcing Google to scramble to play catchup. Musk was furious, according to people familiar with the matter.
In December, a month after the launch of ChatGPT, Musk
pulled OpenAI's access to the Twitter "fire hose" of data a contract that was signed before Musk acquired Twitter.
On Feb. 17, he
tweeted "OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it "Open" AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft."
On March 15, he
tweeted, "I'm still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn't everyone do it?"
OpenAI declined to comment.
Musk didn't respond to a request for comment but on Friday, he tweeted "I'm sure it will be fine" and a meme of Elmo with the words: "Me realizing AI, the most powerful tool that mankind has ever created, is now in the hands of a ruthless corporate monopoly." 
