The social media war of words raging on X on Tuesday between OpenAI (OPENAI) CEO Sam Altman and Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk was reminiscent of Musk’s feud with U.S. President Donald Trump back in July.
On Tuesday morning, Musk kicked it off with a tweet reading, “Don’t let your loved ones use ChatGPT.” Musk attached an earlier tweet by DogeDesigner alleging that ChatGPT had been linked to nine deaths among teens and adults.
Several hours later, Altman responded, “Sometimes you complain about ChatGPT being too restrictive, and then in cases like this you claim it’s too relaxed. Almost a billion people use it and some of them may be in very fragile mental states. We will continue to do our best to get this right and we feel huge responsibility to do the best we can, but these are tragic and complicated situations that deserve to be treated with respect.”
He then goes on to allege that Tesla’s Autopilot feature has been involved in more than 50 deaths.
“I only ever rode in a car using it once, some time ago, but my first thought was that it was far from a safe thing for Tesla to have released,” Altman added. “I won’t even start on some of the Grok decisions. You take ‘every accusation is a confession’ so far.”
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced it would be bringing age prediction to its near ubiquitous ChatGPT platform in an effort to determine whether a user is under the age of 18. The company said it would roll out the feature in the European Union in the “coming weeks.”
Civil suit wars
It appears tensions related to the legal battle between Musk and OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT) are boiling over into the public sphere. Musk, who was a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for up to $134B in damages over allegations that the ChatGPT maker defrauded him when it abandoned its founding nonprofit roots last year.
Musk, who departed OpenAI’s board in 2018 to launch his AI company, xAI (X.AI), filed a lawsuit alleging the Altman-led firm violated its founding mission when it switched to a for-profit business in October, giving the longtime backer Microsoft a 27% stake. The case is slated for a jury trial in late April.
OpenAI has also countersued billionaire Musk, alleging harassment and his attempts to sabotage the company’s transition to for-profit.
Court filings reveal details of OpenAI-Microsoft alliance
The ongoing legal battle has unveiled how the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft was forged, according to a report by GeekWire on Tuesday, which sifted through more than 200 court-related documents made public on Friday.
The documents reveal how OpenAI originally turned to Amazon Web Services (AMZN) for its computing power. However, this contract was up for renewal in late 2016, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who had only been running the company for two years at this time, wanted Microsoft to be involved with this AI startup.
Nadella reached out to Altman with a three-year, $50M computing donation. Altman asked Musk how he felt about the switch.
“I think Jeff (Bezos) is a bit of a tool and Satya is not, so I slightly prefer Microsoft, but I hate their marketing dept,” Musk said in an email to Altman, according to the report.
Microsoft and OpenAI officially revealed their partnership two months later in November 2016. Musk left OpenAI’s board in early 2018. He went on to found xAI (X.AI), which is now a direct competitor with OpenAI.
The details behind that split will be up for a jury to determine. Musk said he left OpenAI and eventually decided to sue the startup because it wanted to abandon its non-profit mission.
However, OpenAI said in a blog post last week that Musk agreed back in 2017 that a for-profit structure was the next phase for OpenAI. Musk allegedly wanted full control of OpenAI and planned to merge it with Tesla. When OpenAI rejected this offer, Musk “quit OpenAI, encouraging us to find our own path to raising billions of dollars, without which he gave us a 0% chance of success.”