Elon Musk wanted to merge OpenAI into Tesla or gain 'full control' reveals leaked emails

OpenAI has decided to air out some of its dirty laundry in a new blog post that fires back at Elon Musk's recent lawsuit that accused OpenAI of turning against its morals as a company.

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OpenAI has since taken to its blog to post a lengthy article authored by several of the company's top officials, such as Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Within the blog post, OpenAI has leaked email chains with Elon Musk that reveal a plethora of details regarding Elon Musk's intentions and involvement with the company during its infancy. In one message sent in 2018, Musk suggested that OpenAI merge with Tesla and use the electric car company as its "cash cow", even going as far as to say, "Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google."

Elon Musk departed from OpenAI in 2018 when he attempted to gain control of the company and was denied, severing a large portion of the revenue that he was supplying. Since OpenAI's rise in popularity through its creation of ChatGPT, Musk has been accusing the company of betraying its founding principles of staying open-source, hence the name, and being a non-profit company. OpenAI has seemingly reverted on both of those principles, signing a more than $10 billion deal with Microsoft, which spawned Windows Copilot, an AI-powered chatbot powered by OpenAI's underlying GPT technology.

However, OpenAI claims the leaked emails show evidence of Elon Musk steering the company toward for-profit.

"We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless relative to what Google or Facebook are spending," Musk wrote in November 2015 to his fellow co-founders. "I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment."

"This is real," Musk added. "I will cover whatever anyone else doesn't provide."

We couldn't 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. He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should "attach to Tesla as its cash cow", commenting that it was "exactly right... Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn't zero" - reads the OpenAI blogpost