Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, March 25 (Xinhua) Elon Musk left the board of artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, a ChatGPT developer, in 2018, claiming at the time that the reason was to avoid any conflict of interest with Tesla. But the latest report points out that the real reason for Musk's departure is the failure to seize power.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a high-profile non-profit organization with the support of billionaire tech celebrities such as Musk and Reid Reid Hoffman, who pledged to invest $1 billion in a group. OpenAI has attracted some of the top talent in the field, leaving them away from large technology companies and academia.

But by early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another founder of OpenAI, that he thought the company had lagged far behind Google, according to people familiar with the matter. So Musk came up with a possible solution: he took control of OpenAI and ran it himself.

As a result, Altman and the other founders of OpenAI rejected Musk's proposal. Mr Musk then left the company and broke a promise of a large donation plan. The conflict culminated when Musk announced his departure on February 20, 2018, and its aftermath will shape the artificial intelligence industry that is changing the world and OpenAI at its core.

The power struggle has also created a public rift between Musk and Altman, the two most important figures in today's technology. People familiar with the matter revealed details of their power struggle for the first time.

Back in 2018, there was no reason to think that the impulsive Musk or the eccentric, quiet Altman would be at the heart of the Silicon Valley story, even if they were already one of the most famous figures in Silicon Valley. Musk had other headaches at the time: Tesla was still struggling to meet his Model 3 production target, the share price was falling and the company's future was under threat.

Like other founders, Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI and then chief technology officer, opposed Mr Musk's takeover of the company. A power struggle ensued, according to people familiar with the matter.

Altman, who was running YCombinator, a powerful startup incubator, stepped in. In addition to being a director of OpenAI, he added the position of president to his title in 2018, according to tax documents.

Musk resigned from the OpenAI board after losing to Altman. He and OpenAI said publicly that he left because of a conflict of interest. Tesla was developing his own artificial intelligence technology for the autopilot system and would compete with OpenAI for talent. To some extent, this statement is true. Tesla had poached one of OpenAI's best talent, Andrej Karpathy, who later became an architect of Tesla's autopilot system.

But at OpenAI, few people believe that Musk left for this reason. His exit speech at the OpenAI office focused on potential conflicts of interest, but most employees didn't buy it, and they didn't fully believe the story.

OpenAI said in a statement that Musk would continue to provide funds for the organization, but Musk did not do so, according to a person familiar with the matter. He had already donated $100m (CTOnews.com note: current about 687 million yuan) and had promised to donate about $1 billion over the next few years (CTOnews.com note: current about 6.87 billion yuan), but stopped donating after he left. This makes it impossible for OpenAI to pay the high cost of training artificial intelligence models on supercomputers.

On March 11, 2019, OpenAI announced that it would create a for-profit entity to raise enough money to pay for the computing power needed to pursue the most ambitious artificial intelligence models. "We want to improve our financing capacity while continuing to serve our mission," the company wrote at the time. No existing legal structure we know can achieve the right balance. " OpenAI said it set a profit cap for investors and that the excess would be owned by the original non-profit organization.

Mr Altman also made an unusual decision for tech bosses: he will not take stakes in new for-profit entities, according to people familiar with the matter. He was already very rich and invested in several very successful technology startups and did not need money.

He also believes that the company needs to become a company to continue their research, but he tells people that the project is not to make money. Avoiding any ownership interests will help him to be in line with his original mission. But the decision actually deterred some potential investors in OpenAI, who worried that Altman would not see the benefits of the project.

Less than six months later, OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Microsoft provides not only funding, but also infrastructure expertise. Together they built a supercomputer to train large models and eventually created ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E. The latest language model, GPT-4, has 1 trillion parameters.

Musk was so angry that ChatGPT became popular around the world after its launch in November last year, which immediately made OpenAI the hottest new technology startup, forcing Google to catch up.

Musk was very angry about it, according to people familiar with the matter. In December, a month after the launch of ChatGPT, Musk revoked OpenAI's access to Twitter data sources. This is a contract signed between OpenAI and Twitter before Musk bought Twitter.

On February 17, he wrote on Twitter: "OpenAI was founded as an open source (that's why I named it 'open' AI) to compete with Google, but now it's a closed-source, profit-maximizing company effectively controlled by Microsoft. That's not what I want at all."

Musk said OpenAI had become Microsoft control, and then on March 15, he tweeted: "I'm still confused about how a non-profit organization that I donated about $100 million became a for-profit organization valued at $30 billion. If it's legal, why didn't everyone do it?"

Shivon Zilis, director of operations at Musk's brain-computer interface company Neuralink, has stepped down as a director of OpenAI, foreign media reported on Thursday. Chilis gave birth to twins to Musk.

"I'm sure everything will be all right," Musk wrote on Twitter on Friday. " He also posted a meme of Elmo, a cartoon character on the children's TV show Sesame Street, which read: "I realize that artificial intelligence, the most powerful tool ever created by mankind, is now in the hands of a ruthless monopoly."

OpenAI declined to comment. Mr Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

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