OpenAI exposes emails of Elon Musk demanding 'full control' of tech company

OpenAI, the tech firm behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, on Tuesday, refuted Tesla CEO Elon Musk's claims that the firm "betrayed" its original goal, vowing to work towrads getting the charges dropped in court.

Musk, the owner of SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter, recently filed a legal case against OpenAI, arguing that the company was always intended as a nonprofit, citing documents filed in a San Francisco court.

"We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon's claims," OpenAI and its executives said in a blog post.

Musk, one of the founders of the tech firm with CEO Sam Altman in 2015, left the organisation in 2018 and has become a vocal critic of the company.

OpenAI, a non-profit focused on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) released its chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, capable of generating poems, and essays, and even excelling in exams.

The bot quickly gained public attention.

OpenAI’s objective was to ensure the safety of AI technology for humanity, for which the tech firm received a $13 billion investment from Microsoft recently.

Altman and other executives from the tech startup exposed Musk’s emails in which they had discussed the matters surrounding OpenAI.

"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," they wrote in a blog post.

In 2017, "we all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission — billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit”, they said.

In another email the following year, Musk suggested OpenAI be attached "to Tesla as its cash cow", but the team refused.

After leaving OpenAI, Musk left predicting a zero probability of success and planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.

"When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars," said the OpenAI blog post.

Additionally, according to Altman and his colleagues, their company offers free AI access to organisations and nations including Albania which is "using OpenAI's tools to accelerate its EU accession by as much as 5.5 years."