OpenAI fires back at Musk lawsuit with 'facts' showing he 'told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress'

This week saw the news that Elon Musk, everyone's favourite tech billionaire, was suing OpenAI and two of his fellow co-founders for departing from the company's original non-profit mission to benefit humanity. The suit unsurprisingly casts Musk as the last action hero, the man who sees the dangers of artificial general intelligence (AGI), out to stop those cash-crazed boffins from creating Skynet in an effort to please its biggest investor Microsoft. OpenAI's co-founders have now responded and, equally unsurprisingly, have tried to poke some massive holes in Musk's version of events.

This comes in a letter posted to the OpenAI website, credited to co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. Both Altman and Brockman have been targeted as part of Musk's action. It begins with some verbiage about the mission to create «safe and beneficial AGI» before getting to the meat with «some facts about our relationship with Elon.» Lest there be any doubt, it adds at the outset: «We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.»

The letter says that OpenAI's senior figures realised fairly early on that the company would require more resources to develop AGI than it had access to. It says Altman and Brockman had started in late 2015 with the goal of raising $100 million, but Musk, still involved with OpenAI at that point, said in an email that «we need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless… I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment. This is real. I will cover whatever anyone else doesn't provide.» This email, as with all others cited by OpenAI, is provided with redactions at the end of the letter.

In reality Musk provided «less than» $45 million, while other donors stumped up a combined $90 million. We're obviously in the realm of silly money here, because $45 million is a huge investment in anything, but I guess when you've promised to help hit the $1 billion mark it