Technology billionaire Elon Musk allegedly wanted to head Open AI, the developer of the artificial intelligence-powered chat program ChatGPT, and left the company when his request was not accepted.
Unidentified sources speaking to the news website Semafor claimed that Musk made an offer to Sam Altman, one of the company’s co-founders, to head Open AI in 2018.
According to the report published on Friday, Musk told Altman, the company’s CEO, that the company was lagging behind Google and that he wanted it to gain a stronger position in the market. To make this happen, he offered to take the helm of the company.
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At the time, the company’s board of directors included Musk and Altman, as well as Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman and Andrej Karpathy.
According to the news, Musk, whose proposal was rejected by all board members, left the company on February 20, 2018.
In the press release, it was stated that Musk left the company due to the potential conflict of interest in the recruitment processes between Tesla, where the tech billionaire is CEO, and Open AI.
It was also stated that Musk would continue to fund Open AI after leaving. However, the news claimed that Musk never made the promised investment of 1 million dollars, which left the company in a financially difficult situation.
According to the information shared, Musk provided a total of 100 million dollars in funding to the company, which was founded in 2015, before leaving.
Open AI, on the other hand, made a $1 billion deal with Microsoft in January.
Musk has not yet made a statement regarding the allegations. On the other hand, it was reported in February that he had formed a team to launch a rival program to ChatGPT.
The first version of ChatGPT, which has been on the agenda recently, was released last year. The company also recently announced the development of GPT4, a new AI-powered language model of the chatbot.
