Elon Musk's Attempt to Take Over OpenAI and Concerns Over its Shift Towards Corporate Interests

According to a recent report from Semafor, Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit AI lab in 2015, reportedly attempted to take over the company. However, other OpenAI founders, including CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, rejected Musk's bid for direct control of the company. Musk had resigned from OpenAI's board in 2018 due to a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla, and Semafor claims that he also failed to provide the promised $1 billion in funding, contributing only $100 million instead. OpenAI announced in 2019 that it was creating a for-profit entity to fund its research, leading to a close partnership with Microsoft, which has since provided billions in funding and exclusive licenses to use OpenAI's technology in its products. This move has raised concerns among many in the AI community, who see it as a betrayal of OpenAI's founding principles and a dangerous precedent for the world.

OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft has changed the way the company shares its research. When OpenAI unveiled its latest AI language model, GPT-4, earlier this month, it did not disclose how it was created or its training data, citing the need to maintain a competitive advantage over rivals and prevent misuse of its technology. However, many AI experts argue that this approach limits the ability of the community to understand potential threats posed by these systems and concentrates power in corporate hands.

Since the partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI and Microsoft have rapidly launched AI services and products. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI's technology into Windows and its Office suite, while OpenAI has expanded the capabilities of its chatbot, ChatGPT, to interface with other sites and services via plug-ins. This move has been compared to giving the bot "eyes and ears," but some experts have raised safety concerns.

Elon Musk has expressed dismay about OpenAI's shift towards corporate interests and Microsoft's control. In a February tweet, Musk stated that OpenAI "has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," and that this was "not what I intended at all."