Elon Musk has said that while he is worried about Microsoft’s control of OpenAI, his early funding for the project is the reason that it exists.
Speaking to CNBC following Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, Musk said that he funnelled US$50 million (US$75 million) into OpenAI — though he had previously claimed the invested $100 million.
Musk stepped down from the board of OpenAI in 2018 and reportedly told fellow co-founder Sam Altman that the firm had fallen fatally behind Google’s DeepMind AI project. He said that the “Open” in OpenAI referred to the technology being open source and that Microsoft’s control, and therefore its use in Bing to serve adverts, contradicted the company’s founding ethos.
Musk said that “I do worry that Microsoft is more in control than the leadership team at OpenAI realises. As part of Microsoft’s investment, they have rights to all of the software, all of the model weights and everything necessary to run the inference system.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO said that while he has “a lot of respect for Leon and all that he does” his statement was “factually not correct.” He added that Microsoft has a non-controlling interest in OpenAI.
However, the structure of Microsoft’s US$10 billion (AU$15 billion) investment in OpenAI allowed it to bypass an anti-trust review process, receive a large profit share, an exclusive license to use the tech and access to a ready-made tool to go head-to-head with Google.
Speaking to CNBC himself, Nadella maintained that the battle between Microsoft and Google was far from over and that there was still room for other players to enter the space.
“It’s a more dynamic world. OpenAI is a startup with a couple of hundred people. Inflexion is a startup… [A small player] could [win]. It all depends on what happens with the product market fit that one of these folks finds. It’s not a given that Alphabet or Microsoft are the only two teams in town. Who would have thought that, if we were sitting here last year, someone would have said that, it would be a real contest around search and that people would have a real alternative to Google? There is not just Bing, there is ChatGPT and Bing and there are lots of other folks that entered the search market. To me, that is to be celebrated,” he said.
Nadella also said that the current regulations on online technology were capable of managing the demands of AI — they just needed to be applied in the same way as with other online content.
However, OpenAI’s Altman told the US Congress that without standalone regulation, AI would be able to run rampant.
