OpenAI rejects Elon Musk claims, provides detailed reply

In a blog post on the OpenAI website, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sam Altman and other executives have provided a detailed reply with supporting documents to all the accusations Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made against them, AFP reported.

They wrote, "We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we've deeply admired, someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI's mission without him."

Musk, who was one of the co-founders along with Altman of OpenAI, parted ways with the organisation in 2018 and since then has become its fiercest critic.

The Tesla CEO filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week in San Francisco court, alleging that the firm was always intended to be a nonprofit entity.

In the blog post, the company refuted all the claims, explaining that in 2017, "we all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission —billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we'd be able to raise as a non-profit,"  they said.

The following year, Musk suggested in an email that OpenAI be attached "to Tesla as its cash cow."

But in the face of refusal from the team, Musk "soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0," adding that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.

"When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our path to raising billions of dollars," said the OpenAI blog post.

Altman and his colleagues also said that their company is providing free AI access to organisations and countries, including Albania, which "is using OpenAI's tools to accelerate its European Union accession by as much as 5.5 years."