'He thought OpenAI was going to fail': Sam Altman reacts to Elon Musk's lawsuit

OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman has said that it is 'unbecoming' of Elon Musk to sue the company that created ChatGPT. During a candid discussion with Lex Fridman on his podcast, Altman delved into the strained relationship with the founder of Tesla.

"Look, I think this whole thing is unbecoming of a builder. And I respect Elon as one of the great builders of our time. I know he knows what it’s like to have haters attack him and it makes me extra sad he’s doing it to us," Altman said in a conversation with Lex Fridman in the YouTuber's podcast. 

Altman also mentioned that the fact Musk had said he'd drop the lawsuit if OpenAI changed the name to ClosedAI "speaks to the seriousness with which Elon means the lawsuit".

Earlier in the month, Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging a betrayal of the company's founding principles. Musk claimed that when he funded OpenAI's creation, he secured an agreement for it to remain a nonprofit and make its technology open to the public. Musk asserted that OpenAI's acceptance of funding from Microsoft and its close ties with the tech giant contradict this agreement, perverting the company's original mission.

"In terms of what Elon’s real motivations here are, I don’t know," Altman said.

Altman also clarified it wasn't OpenAI which had decided to part ways with Elon Musk. Instead, it was the other way round. "He thought OpenAI was going to fail. He wanted total control to turn it around. We wanted to keep going in the direction that now has become OpenAI. He also wanted Tesla to be able to build an AGI effort. At various times, he wanted to make OpenAI into a for-profit company that he could have control of or have it merge with Tesla. We didn’t want to do that, and he decided to leave, which is fine."

"My memory is the proposal was just like, yeah, get acquired by Tesla and have Tesla have full control over it. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was."

Altman also mentioned that Musk had not open-sourced his own AI chatbot Grok until he was called out.

"Look, I mean Grok had not open-sourced anything until people pointed out it was a little bit hypocritical and then he announced that Grok will open-source things this week. I don’t think open source versus not is what this is really about for him," he said.

"I think this whole thing is unbecoming of a builder. And I respect Elon as one of the great builders of our time. I know he knows what it’s like to have haters attack him and it makes me extra sad he’s doing it to us."

"It makes me sad. And I think it makes a lot of people sad. There’s a lot of people who’ve really looked up to him for a long time. I said in some interview or something that I missed the old Elon and the number of messages I got being like, “That exactly encapsulates how I feel."

FAILED COUP AT OPEN AI

In the podcast, Altman described the failed coup last year at his company as the most painful experience of his life. In corporate drama for the ages from Silicon Valley, Altman was removed from the Open AI board on 17 November, only to be rehired within a week.

In a statement issued initially, the board criticised Altman for his lack of consistent candour in communication, expressing a loss of confidence in his leadership capabilities. However, less than a week later, he was reinstated as CEO following significant internal pressure, including threats of resignations from many within the company. Notably, board chair Greg Brockman, in response to Altman's removal, stepped down from his position as the company's president.

“That was definitely the most painful professional experience of my life, and chaotic and shameful and upsetting and a bunch of other negative things,” Altman told Fridman.

In hindsight, Altman sees some positives in the incident. “There were great things about it too, and I wish it had not been in such an adrenaline rush that I wasn’t able to stop and appreciate them at the time. But I came across this old tweet of mine or this tweet of mine from that time period. It was like going your own eulogy, watching people say all these great things about you, and just unbelievable support from people I love and care about. That was really nice, really nice.”

Altman is glad the incident occurred early on in Open AI’s history, giving the company the resilience to prepare for future challenges.

“I also think I’m happy that it happened relatively early. I thought at some point between when OpenAI started and when we created AGI, there was going to be something crazy and explosive that happened, but there may be more crazy and explosive things still to happen. It still, I think, helped us build up some resilience and be ready for more challenges in the future,” he said.

Altman added that the incident was now behind and OpenAI was busy with work.

“At this point, it feels like something that was in the past that was really unpleasant and really difficult and painful, but we’re back to work and things are so busy and so intense that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. There was a time after, there was this fugue state for the month after, maybe 45 days after, that I was just drifting through the days. I was so out of it. I was feeling so down. Really painful, and hard to have to keep running OpenAI in the middle of that. I just wanted to crawl into a cave and recover for a while. But now it’s like we’re just back to working on the mission.”

Altman also shared his thoughts on the board members: “I think the board members are well-meaning people on the whole, and I believe that in stressful situations where people feel time pressure or whatever, people understand and make suboptimal decisions. And I think one of the challenges for OpenAI will be we’re going to have to have a board and a team that are good at operating under pressure,” he said.

On being asked if he thought the board had too much power, Altman said: “I think boards are supposed to have a lot of power, but one of the things that we did see is in most corporate structures, boards are usually answerable to shareholders. Sometimes people have super voting shares or whatever.”

“In this case, and I think one of the things with our structure that we maybe should have thought about more than we did is that the board of a nonprofit has, unless you put other rules in place, quite a lot of power. They don’t really answer to anyone but themselves. And there’s ways in which that’s good, but what we’d really like is for the board of OpenAI to answer to the world as a whole, as much as that’s a practical thing.”

Altman said OpenAI is in the process of building the new board after the incident.

“The old board got smaller over the course of about a year. It was nine and then it went down to six, and then we couldn’t agree on who to add. And the board also I think didn’t have a lot of experienced board members, and a lot of the new board members at OpenAI have just have more experience as board members. I think that’ll help,” he said.

“For new board members since, and new board members we’ll add going forward, we have some criteria that we think are important for the board to have, different expertise that we want the board to have. Unlike hiring an executive where you need them to do one role well, the board needs to do a whole role of governance and thoughtfulness well.”