OpenAI was supposed to be open source and non-profit. That’s not how it turned out.
Musk explains the history (transcribed by Eva Fox on X).
“I am the reason OpenAI exists.”
“I used to be a close friend with Larry Page, and I was staying at his house, and we’d have these conversations long into the evening about AI, and I would be constantly urging him to be careful about the danger of AI. And he was really not concerned about the danger of AI and was quite cavalier about it. And at the time, Google, especially after the acquisition of DeepMind, had three-quarters of the world’s AI talent; they had a lot of computers, a lot of money, so it was a unipolar world for AI. And we got a unipolar world, but the person who controls that does not, or at least did not seem to be concerned about AI safety. That sounded like a real problem.
The final straw was Larry calling me a speciest for being a pro-human consciousness instead of machine consciousness, and I like, ‘Well, yes, I guess I am a speciest.’
I came up with the name [OpenAI], which refers to open source. The intent was to what is the opposite of Google, would be an open source non-profit, because Google is closed source profit, and that profit motivation could be dangerous…
It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open source, and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source. I mean, this would be like, let’s say you founded the organization to save the Amazon rainforest, but instead, they became a lumber company and chopped down the forest and sold it for money. And you’d be, therefore, like, ‘Wait a second, that’s the exact opposite of what I gave the money for. Is that legal?’ That doesn’t seem legal. And if, in general, it is legal to start a company as a non-profit and then take the IP and transfer it to a for-profit that then makes tons of money, shouldn’t everyone start? Shouldn’t that be the default?
And I also think it is important to understand, like when push comes to shove, let’s say they do create some digital super intelligence, almost Godlike intelligence, well, who is in control, and what is exactly the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft? And I do worry that Microsoft actually may be more in control than the leadership team at OpenAI realizes. I mean, Microsoft, as part of Microsoft Investment, has rights to all of the software, all of the model weights, and everything necessary to run the inference system. At any point, Microsoft could cut off OpenAI.”
