Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI has opened a can of worms, as emails between OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, and Musk himself have revealed turbulent behind-the-scenes drama. According to the Transformer, an email from Musk in 2016 said, “Deepmind [sic] is causing me extreme mental stress. If they win, it will be really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy.” He further aired concerns that “Demis [Hassabis] could create an AGI dictatorship.”
Demis Hassabis is one of the founders of DeepMind, an artificial intelligence research firm founded in 2010, and acquired by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in 2014. The success of DeepMind is probably one of the major reasons behind the founding of OpenAI.
Altman emailed Musk in May 2015, saying, “Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first. Any thoughts on whether it would be good for YC [Y Combinator] to start a Manhattan Project for AI?” Musk responded with, “Probably worth a conversation.” And, after around six months, the company behind ChatGPT was founded.
Aside from this inter-company rivalry, there’s also some tension going on behind the scenes at OpenAI. Two co-founders — Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever — had concerns about Altman and Musk. In September 2017, they emailed Altman asking him why he wanted to be CEO of the company and mentioned that they didn’t fully trust his judgment. Simultaneously, they were skeptical of Musk’s intentions. They said that even though he (Musk) claims to not want control of the final AGI, the negotiations revealed that absolute control was crucial to him. So, they (Brockman and Sutskever) fear that the OpenAI’s structure could allow Elon Musk to be a dictator in the company, should he decide to become…
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