It seems like Elon Musk has a habit of wanting to be the biggest guy in the room, from firing someone for not liking their response, to reportedly building a city where he could watch over his employees. However, this was not tolerated by the executives in OpenAI.
Musk's Rejected Plan to Take Over
The Tesla CEO was one of the financiers of OpenAI in 2015 before it caught the attention of the world. The company's work has propelled AI technology beyond what most believe could be possible. Seeing its potential, it's no mystery why Musk wanted it for himself.
Along with big players like Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, OpenAI had plenty of resources with a pooled $1 billion to kickstart its project. As Elon Musk took on the role of co-chair, reports claim that the tech billionaire proposed to take over the AI research lab back in 2018.
Although, this idea was not tolerated by the people inside the company such as its co-founder Greg Brockman and CEO Sam Altman. Based on Musk's actions in the past few months, the reports of him leaving due to the rejection are entirely plausible.
According to Gizmodo, Musk's reason for leaving OpenAI was said to be his shift in focus toward Tesla, and that the company would financially support the project, pouring in $1 billion over time. However, reports say that his payments stopped as soon as he left OpenAI.
This left the nonprofit AI research lab with no choice but to open its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Limited Partnership Program in 2019 in order to garner enough funding to continue with its project. Thai eventually led to a $1 billion partnership with Microsoft.
The software giant decided to invest more and extend its partnership with OpenAI, to which they added $10 billion more into the deal. As others would see it, it was a gold mine for Microsoft and a missed opportunity for Musk.
The Aftermath
As OpenAI starts to dominate the tech industry with headlines about ChatGPT and GPT-4 seen throughout social media, Musk may be starting to see his mistake of leaving the company and is "furious" with the success of the AI research company.
The Twitter CEO expressed his frustration predictably by restricting OpenAI's access to Twitter's database, as mentioned in Business Insider. Musk agreed to the restriction before he even acquired Twitter after learning that it was used to train OpenAI's language model.
He even went on to criticize the AI company by saying that he was confused about how a nonprofit, to which he donated $100 million, somehow became a $30 billion market cap for-profit. Altman responded to Musk's tweets directed at OpenAI.
The OpenAI CEO expressed in a podcast that Musk was a "jerk," and that he had a style that isn't what he wanted to have for himself. Although, he went on to say that Musk really does care and is just stressed about "what the future's going to look like for humanity."
