Senior OpenAI executives have circulated memos discussing the lawsuit Elon Musk’s lawyers filed in California on Thursday. CNBC reports that one of the memos hints that the lawsuit may have been sparked by ‘Elon’s regrets’ in distancing himself from OpenAI a few years previously. Moreover, each pillar of Musk’s lawsuit is meticulously rebutted by the OpenAI execs, perhaps partly to calm staff nerves.
In our report on Friday, we talked about the main allegations of the plaintiff, Elon Musk. We considered the main complaint to be the alleged breach of OpenAI’s founding agreement. Other important threads within the lengthy filing raised concerns about the “grave threat to humanity” of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and how OpenAI has become a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. The filing also provided background to the complaints, such as an outline of Musk’s substantial donations when the organization operated as a non-profit.
Just ahead of the weekend, senior management figures at OpenAI, including Sam Altman (CEO) and Jason Kwon (Chief Strategy Officer, CSO), appear to have circulated internal memos to give employees an insight into their position, and likely to support company morale.
Altman’s memo is interesting as it contains quite a personal statement. According to CNBC, this memo recalls that Musk was once a hero of Altman and that the old version of the Tesla CEO is sorely missed. The OpenAI CEO went on to warn staff that attacks on the company are going to continue for the foreseeable future.
Kwon’s memo is much more matter-of-fact. In excerpts quoted by Axios, Kwon started by characterizing OpenAI as a law-abiding company that will responsibly cooperate with government requests. Then, Kwon sought to rebut what he considered to be Musk’s three main lawsuit claims.
On the topic of AGIs and their danger to humanity, Kwon did a sidestep by claiming GPT-4 is quite a long way from being an AGI. As evidence of this, he defined an AGI as a “highly autonomous system capable enough to devise novel solutions to longstanding challenges.” However, Kwon asserted “GPT-4 can't do that.”
Kwon also denied that OpenAI had abandoned its mission of benefitting humanity. The firm’s broadly available APIs and products were highlighted as important parts of the firm’s mission. Moreover, it was claimed the commercialization of the firm has delivered the capital to pay for vital guardrails for the technology.
Kwon also clarified the nature of OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft. OpenAI’s CSO asserted that it is up to him and the other leadership figures how they research, build, and run the company. He also said that Microsoft is actually a competitor and that ChatGPT and ChatGPT for Enterprise were direct competitors for Microsoft’s Copilot and Copilot for Microsoft 365.
