It’s no secret that Elon Musk has been deeply frustrated with OpenAI since stepping down from its board in February 2018, culminating in an open letter calling for the organization to pause work on more powerful systems.
“It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open source, and somehow transform itself into a for profit, closed source,” Musk said in a CNBC interview Wednesday, following a Tesla shareholder’s meeting. “This would be like, let’s say you funded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead they became a lumber company, and chopped down the forest and sold it for money.”
The power of his criticism hinges on the fact that Musk helped to launch the AI research organization. But exactly how much support he gave, even Musk seems unsure about.
“I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he tweeted in mid-March. A week later he complained on Twitter again: “I donated the first $100M to OpenAI when it was a non-profit, but have no ownership or control.”
The $100 million figure has been widely reported as fact. But in the same CNBC interview yesterday, Musk abruptly shrank his claim. When asked how much he had donated to OpenAI, he replied: “I’m not sure the exact num …
