OpenAI: Elon literally wanted us to be for-profit!

That is the pointed message from OpenAI to cofounder Elon Musk that appears in a lengthy blog post today on the company’s website, the second such post to publicly push back on Musk’s legal attacks on the company.

In a post titled “Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit” the company makes the case that Musk, who has filed multiple lawsuits to stop OpenAI from altering its core structure to a for-profit business, actually wanted that structure in the first place and even filed the paperwork to do that.

Currently, the company is structured as primary nonprofit entity, with a smaller for-profit arm.

OpenAI lays out a timeline to the key events in the feud since OpenAI’s founding in 2015. The post showed the receipts in the form of text-message threads detailing Musk meetings as well as redacted emails to and from Musk that all appear to show that Musk was indeed in favor of the for-profit approach to raise the huge amounts of capital needed to build the computing infrastructure and produce the first tangible results of their efforts.

According to a reading of OpenAI’s version of events, Musk seemed to be supportive and on-board until September 2017, when the founders were discussing the equity allocation for the for-profit arm. According to the post, Musk wanted 50% to 60% ownership of the company and to be CEO.

“On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars.”

After detailing his preferred terms for the new for-profit entity, Musk told founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman in an email:

“I’ve been really impressed with the quality of discussion with you guys on the equity and board stuff. I have a really good feeling about this. “

Two days later, Musk’s agents registered a public-benefit corporation named “Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc.” in Delaware.

Sutskever responded with the OpenAI team’s concerns in an email to Musk titled “Honest Thoughts,” which did not land well with Musk. Sutskever wrote:

“The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis [presumably Nobel Prize recipient and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis] could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.”

That appeared to trigger the famously mercurial Musk, as evidenced by his curt reply:

“Guys, I’ve had enough. This is the final straw.

Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay or I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup.

Discussions are over.”

The post goes on to detail more examples of Musk supporting the for-profit model and urging the company to raise vast sums of capital as quickly as possible. In January 2018, Musk suggested rolling OpenAI into publicly traded Tesla, offering the company a $1 billion budget, which Altman and the others were opposed to.

While things appeared chilly heading into 2018, Musk still communicated with Sam Altman and the others, casting doubt on their chosen path forward. Musk wrote to the OpenAI team:

“My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.

Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”

After Musk saw OpenAI’s fundraising achieve a valuation of $20 billion, Musk was angry. In a text to Altman, Musk said that he provided the bulk of the seed funding for OpenAI and was left without any equity (which OpenAI says he declined).

“This is a bait and switch,” Musk wrote.

A few months later, Musk founded his OpenAI competitor, xAI, and cosigned a letter calling for an industry-wide pause on AI development.