Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk is now goading OpenAI to change its name in exchange for Musk dropping a lawsuit he filed against the company last week.
"Change your name (t)o ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit," Musk posted late Tuesday evening on X.
The post was a response to a post from OpenAI which had just published a string of previously private communications between Musk and co-founders Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.
In a blog post published on Tuesday, OpenAI refuted many of Musk's allegations and said it would seek a dismissal of the lawsuit.
"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," OpenAI wrote.
Since leaving the organization in 2018, Musk has openly criticized OpenAI for adding a for-profit arm, working with Microsoft and veering towards a more closed-source model of software development.
But Musk was purportedly onboard with OpenAI's evolving strategy, the emails show.
Musk also pushed OpenAI to say it had $1 billion in donations when it launched in 2015, then bailed on his own funding commitments to the organization, OpenAI says.
OpenAI's founding team had planned to raise $100 million in initial funding, the post says, but Musk pushed them to go "much bigger" and promised to "cover whatever anyone else doesn't provide."
For years, Musk publicly claimed that he had put $100 million into OpenAI, then walked that figure back to "some number on the order of $50 million" in an interview with CNBC last year.
Its nonprofit arm has only raised $135 million, which includes $45 million from Musk, OpenAI now says.
OpenAI has since raised at least $13 billion from Microsoft alone, making it the top-funded generative AI startup in the Bay Area.
The extraordinary move to publicly air out a years-long rift between the founders comes in response to a lawsuit Musk filed last week against OpenAI, Altman and Brockman.
In that lawsuit, Musk alleges a breach of contract that hinges around OpenAI supposedly veering away from its original mission as a not-for-profit, open-source research organization.
Musk was onboard with OpenAI's shift to a more closed-development model, according to an email thread from early 2016.
"As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)," Sutskever wrote in a January 2016 email.
Musk's response to Sutskever was "yup."
OpenAI has not submitted an official response to Musk's complaint as of Wednesday morning, according to case records filed at San Francisco Superior Court.
Instead, OpenAI's strategy seems to revolve around pushing the issue into the court of public opinion first.
The move also comes a few days after one of the company's longtime investors publicly slammed Musk over the lawsuit.
"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 (sic) be building with us to hit the same goal," venture capitalist Vinod Khosla wrote in a social media post this weekend.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after a failed power grab, the details of which were first reported by Semafor last year and now confirmed by OpenAI.
By 2017, not only was Musk onboard with adding a for-profit corporate structure, he "wanted full control" of the company and board, as well as the CEO title. He also suggested OpenAI merge with Tesla.
"A for-profit pivot might create a more sustainable revenue stream over time and would, with the current team, likely bring in a lot of investment," Musk wrote in a January 2018 email.
The emails also show Musk's fixation with competing against Google in the AGI race.
"The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow. I believe attachments to other large suspects (e.g. Apple? Amazon?) would fail due to an incompatible company DNA," Musk continued in the January 2018 email.
At some point during this time, Musk "withheld funding" and one of OpenAI's early backers, Reid Hoffman stepped in and "bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations," OpenAI wrote.
When Musk lost his bid for control, he left the organization, decided to launch his own AI effort within Tesla, and told OpenAI that it would never succeed.
"My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise," Musk wrote in a December 2018 email, the post says. "Even raising several hundred million won't be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."
Musk did eventually launch his own AI company last year, which he named xAI, though it is not a division within Tesla. He also referred to OpenAI as "woke AI" in a sarcastic meme post last year, and called for a temporary pause on developing advanced AI models.
