ndian-American billionaire Vinod Khosla has said that Elon Musk suing OpenAI feels like a case of sour grapes because the Tesla billionaire did not get into the AI game early enough.
Elon Musk was OpenAI’s largest donor when it was still a non-profit, while Khosla was the first venture capitalist to invest in the ChatGPT-creator when the company switched from a non-profit to a private enterprise in 2019, Moneycontrol explained in a report.
Musk is now suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman over what he says is a betrayal of the ChatGPT maker’s founding aims of benefiting humanity rather than pursuing profits.
The report adds that the lawsuit filed late on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco is a culmination of Musk’s long-simmering opposition to the startup he co-founded. OpenAI has since become the face of generative AI, partly due to billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft. Musk went on to found his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, launched last July.
In a post shared Sunday, Khosla slammed Musk over the lawsuit. “With Elon Musk, feels like a bit of sour grapes in suing OpenAI, not getting in early enough, not staying committed and now a rival effort. Like they say if you can’t innovate, litigate and that’s what we have here. Elon of old would would be building with us to hit the same goal,” he posted on X, the social media platform that Musk owns.
Meanwhile, Axios reports OpenAI’s top executives rejected several claims Musk has made in a lawsuit — insisting in a Friday memo to staff, seen by Axios, that the company remains independent, committed to benefiting humanity and has yet to achieve artificial general intelligence in its products.
“[Musk’s] allegations — including claims that GPT-4 is an AGI, that open-sourcing our technology is the key to the mission and that we are a de facto subsidiary of Microsoft — do not reflect the reality of our work or mission,” chief strategy officer Jason Kwon said in a memo to employees seen by Axios.
The report states that Kwon’s email also acknowledges the government inquiries that followed last November’s ouster and rehiring of Altman. “Separately, I want to update you on inquiries from government agencies. After the events of last November, they asked us for information and this matches what we’d expect given the circumstances,” Kwon wrote. “We are a law-abiding company, committed to meeting all legal obligations and fully complying with the government’s requests. ”
Read More: Elon Musk sues Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Sam Altman under claims of breach of contract