OpenAI has responded to Elon Musks lawsuit by saying that he at one point wanted absolute control of the company by merging it with Tesla.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, OpenAI said it will move to dismiss all of Elons claims and offered its own counter-narrative to his account of the company abandoning its original mission as a nonprofit.

As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,including majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO, according to the post, which is authored by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. We couldnt agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.

Musk alleged in his suit that OpenAI has become a closed-source de facto subsidiary of Microsoft that is focused on making money instead of benefitting humanity. In so doing, his suit claims that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission that he helped fund.

In Musks view, this constitutes a breach of a contract. While Musks complaint mentions an OpenAI founding agreement, no formal agreement has been made public yet, and OpenAIs post did not directly address the question of whether one existed.

OpenAI also defended its decision to not open-source its work: Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI, the post says, referring to artificial general intelligence. The company published a January 2016 email conversation in which Sutskever said, as we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open, and that its totally OK to not share the science. Musk replied: Yup.

There are some other puzzling allegations in Musks suit, like the one that GPT-4 is a de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm that represents artificial general intelligence. OpenAI had already rejected those claims in a staff memo but didnt address them in its public blog post on Tuesday.

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OpenAI says Elon Musk wanted 'absolute control' of the company - The Verge