The creation of OpenAI was inspired by fear

OpenAI should not be free, but it should be made freely available: comments on Musk and Sutskevar’s Twitter rant and tweet about Hassabis

The newly published emails also imply that Musk was not dogmatic about OpenAI having to freely provide its developments to all. In response to a message from chief scientist Ilya Sutskevar warning that open sourcing powerful AI advances could be risky as the technology advances, Musk writes, “Yup.” That seems to contradict the arguments in last week’s lawsuit that it was agreed from the start that OpenAI should make its innovations freely available.

“I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment. This is definitely true. I will cover whatever anyone else doesn’t provide,” Musk wrote in a missive discussing how to introduce OpenAI to the world. He did not think it would be a good idea to announce $100 million of funding, because of the huge resources of both Facebook and Google.

Elsewhere in the email change, the AI software—like some commentators on Twitter—guessed Musk had forwarded arguments that Google had a powerful advantage in AI from Hassabis.

Sam Sutskever, an Executive with an Amazing Career, will be a Board Member at OpenAI, informing OpenAI of a Cosmic Innovation Revolution

Sutskever has since gone quiet, leading to questions about his involvement with the company going forward. On the call, Altman said there was “nothing to announce” but that “Ilya is awesome,” and “I hope we work together for the rest of our careers.”

OpenAI said on Friday that it planned to “strengthen” its conflict of interest policy for employees without elaborating, and that it would also create a whistleblower hotline for employees and contractors.

An independent investigation commissioned by OpenAI’s nonprofit board has found that CEO Sam Altman’s conduct “did not mandate removal.” He will rejoin the board after surviving a coup attempt in November.

Altman and three veteran business executives, all women, were named to OpenAI’s board on Friday, OpenAI announced in a blog post. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former Sony general counsel; and Fidji Simo, the CEO and chair of grocery delivery company Instacart and a former Facebook executive, are the others joining the board.

The company’s governance has drawn public scrutiny because of its development of ChatGPT, Dall-E, and other services that have kicked off a boom in generative AI technologies over the past couple of years.

While the investigation cleared Altman to reclaim his board seat, he said he “did learn a lot from this experience,” expressing remorse for one incident in particular involving a board member he did not name.