In a recent interview on CNBC, Elon Musk, Tesla founder, CEO, and billionaire entrepreneur, said he invested $50 million into OpenAI and is ultimately the reason that the company exists.
If you haven't heard of OpenAI, you may have heard of the company's flagship product, ChatGPT, which is a generative artificial intelligence tool that can create a wide range of content, including conversations that are strikingly accurate and resemble normal human behavior.
Musk alleges that he came up with OpenAI's name and recruited key engineers but ultimately ended up leaving the company in 2018 due to a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla. There have also been reports that Musk didn't like the direction the company was going in. Here are two glaring concerns Musk has now with OpenAI.
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1. Safety is not enough of a priority
One of Musk's primary concerns about OpenAI and its artificial intelligence product ChatGPT is that the company did not prioritize the safe development of the technology.
There are many reasons why people are concerned about generative AI technology. For one, there's a real question about what guardrails are in place to prevent ChatGPT from producing harmful content that is used to commit fraud, gather data, and generate code that could be used by hackers or people with ill intent. The incredible capabilities of ChatGPT are also expected to lead to the automation of many jobs, potentially as many as 300 million, according to economists at Goldman Sachs.
Musk, along with many other tech leaders, signed an open letter written by the Future of Life Institute that called for a pause on technology like ChatGPT that can mimic human behavior and intelligence. The letter stated: "Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?"
Musk has also claimed that Microsoft, an investor in the company, has too much control over OpenAI. According to Musk, the company has rights to all the software and model weights, which he believes is a real issue, especially if ChatGPT creates some kind of digital superintelligence technology.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has denied Musk's assertions and said Microsoft owns a noncontrolling interest.
2. Questionable "capped-profit" model
OpenAI initially started as a nonprofit but in 2019 transitioned into a "capped-profit" company, where investor returns are capped after a certain point. In OpenAI's case, returns are limited to 100x. Returns over that amount are sent to the nonprofit arm of the company to manage.
When it initially made the move in 2019, OpenAI said in a blog post:
We'll need to invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud computing, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers. We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no preexisting legal structure we know of strikes the right balance.
Musk essentially believes that this is disingenuous and really not in the spirit of the company's initial mission when it first formed as a nonprofit. If you can start as a nonprofit and then take the intellectual property and transfer it to a for-profit and make money off of it, why wouldn't everyone do this, Musk argues, adding that he's not even sure this is legal.
Recently, OpenAI closed a new funding round from some of the biggest names in venture capital, which valued the company between $27 billion and $29 billion.
