Elon Musk and his fellow billionaire tech bros are brawling over their differing views on OpenAI, and the back-and-forth is getting ugly.
The move by Musk to sue OpenAI didn’t go down well with the company’s backer, Vinod Khosla. Understandably, seeing that in 2019, Khosla’s venture capital firm invested $50 million in OpenAI.
“With Elon Musk, feels like a bit of sour grapes in suing OpenAI, not getting in early enough, not staying committed and now a rival effort,” Khosla wrote in an X post on March 2, referencing Musk’s AI company, xAI.
“Like they say if you can’t innovate, litigate and that’s what we have here. Elon of old would be building with us to hit the same goal,” Khosla continued.
“Vinod doesn’t know what he is talking about here,” Musk wrote in a reply on X.
With @elonmusk , feels like a bit of sour grapes in suing @OpenAI , not getting in early enough, not staying committed and now a rival effort. Like they say if you can’t innovate, litigate and that’s what we have here. Elon of old would would be building with us to hit the same…
— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) March 2, 2024
Venture capitalist and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen took shots at Khosla as well. In an earlier post, Khosla had defended OpenAI and its leadership, saying they “have pushed out better products faster than anyone in AI.”
“Vinod is lobbying to ban open source,” Andreessen wrote on X.
Thursday’s lawsuit appears to be a culmination of Musk’s various grievances against OpenAI. Since leaving OpenAI’s board, Musk has been critical of Altman’s leadership of the company.
Altman appears to have limited his response to the Musk lawsuit to a couple of cryptic tweets. His chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, went a little further.
“We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not being involved with the company today,” Kwon wrote in an internal memo on Friday, per CNBC.
In 2019, Musk talked more about his decision to leave the board. Besides needing to focus on Tesla and SpaceX’s engineering and manufacturing problems, Musk said he “didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”
Musk didn’t elaborate on what those disagreements were.
Then, in February 2023, Musk said that the current iteration of OpenAI is “not what I intended at all.”
“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” Musk wrote on X.
Representatives for Musk, Khosla, and Andreessen did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
