Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk tried to take control of OpenAI before the company came to prominence, according to Semafor.
Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson
Reports say Musk was one of the original founders of OpenAI and donated $1 billion to OpenAI in 2015 as start-up capital. Musk made a proposal in 2018 to take over and run OpenAI, arguing that the company’s ambitions in AI were far behind Google’s.
Musk’s offer was rejected by the other co-founders, including current CEO Sam Altman, and co-founder Greg Brockman, who was chief technology officer at the time.
The report that an internal power struggle ensued at OpenAI. The internal conflict ended with Alterman taking over control of the company as president and Musk stepping down from OpenAI’s board and severing ties with the company.
The conflict of interest was primarily over talent. Tesla was developing self-driving algorithms at the time and poached OpenAI leader Andrej Karpathy to lead its self-driving efforts.
