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."
