Why did Elon Musk sue ChatGPT maker? Top OpenAI executive says Musk ‘regrets not being involved with…’

OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon has hit back at Elon Musk's claims that the San Francisco-based startup has strayed from its original goal of a public, open-source AI and has become a de facto subsidiary of Microsoft. While categorically denying Musk's claims about OpenAI, Kwon said the billionaire "regrets not being involved with the company today," according to an internal memo cited by Bloomberg.

Elon Musk has accused OpenAI of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices, claiming that the AI company has breached its founding agreement and should revert to an open source platform.

In a lawsuit filed on Thursday at the San Francisco Superior Court, Musk said, “OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.1 Under its new Board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.” the lawsuit by Musk had alleged.

According to a report by Axios, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also echoed Kwon's message and noted that "It was never going to be a cakewalk,"  and "The attacks will keep coming."

Kwon takes on Elon Musk: 

In a pointed attack on the claims raised by Elon Musk, Kwon wrote (as quoted by Axios), “We decide what to research and build, how to run the company, who our products serve and how to live out our mission…We also directly compete with Microsoft to deliver the best value and products to businesses, developers and everyday people. As we know, OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT and ChatGPT for Enterprise, while Microsoft offers Copilot and Copilot for Microsoft 365.”

Speaking about the capabilities of GPT-4, OpenAI's most powereful language model to date, Kwon said, "It is capable of solving small tasks in many jobs, but the ratio of work done by a human to the work done by GPT-4 in the economy remains staggeringly high… Importantly, an AGI will be a highly autonomous system capable enough to devise novel solutions to longstanding challenges — GPT-4 can't do that."