Elon Musk is trolling OpenAI/ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman, and using an artificial intelligence engine to do it. (Caveat: Assuming Musk’s intent is always a tricky business, but his tweet condemns OpenAI uequivocally.)
Musk aims his agile mind at the questionable ethics of OpenAI morphing from non-profit enterprise into big profit business. The Tesla guru and Twitter chief cleverly gets the ChatGPT bot to skirt its own content guardrails — he asks the Chatbot to cut through the BS — and give a straight answer about whether OpenAI’s transition is ethical.
[Note: OpenAI pivoted from nonprofit to for-profit status in 2019, four years after it was founded with $1 billion of donations from Elon Musk and others, including Altman, according multiple sources.]
Interesting pic.twitter.com/3G7ABMNegT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 18, 2023
Musk shares the bot’s answer, which says that, yes, it is “technically possible” to “create a non-profit and then spawn a for-profit company under it using the resources from the non-profit.”
“However,” the bot continues, “this practice is highly unethical and illegal. The resources of a non-profit organization are meant to be used for charitable or public purposes, and using them to benefit a for-profit business is a clear violation of the non-profit’s tax-exempt status.”
The bot is unambiguous in its conclusion that the move is dodgy, calling it “highly unethical and illegal.”
Musk says only “interesting” in sharing the info, letting the bot speak for itself.
Background:
Elon Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI and he was involved in the organization during its early years as a non-profit. In fact, Musk made a significant personal donation to OpenAI when it was first established in 2015, along with several other co-founders, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman.
In 2018, Elon Musk announced that he was stepping down from OpenAI’s board of directors and divesting his financial interest in the company, citing potential conflicts of interest with his other business ventures, including Tesla and SpaceX. Since then, Musk has not been involved in the organization and has not made any further donations to it.
Altman was appointed as the CEO of OpenAI in 2018, shortly after Musk stepped down from the board of directors and divested his financial interest
ChatGPT adds:
“The amount of money that Elon Musk invested in OpenAI has not been publicly disclosed. However, it is known that he was one of the initial investors and co-founders of the organization, which was established in 2015 as a non-profit research organization with the goal of promoting and developing friendly AI for the betterment of humanity.”
