Elon Musk's History with OpenAI: He Founded It, and Has Since Criticized It

The futuristic AI chatbot ChatGPT was released to the public recently by OpenAI (the company behind generative AI tool Dall-E). Its impressive new chatbot causes a stir, inspiring enthusiasm and concern.

The company that created the AI chatbot has a history with some of Silicon Valley's biggest names, including Elon Musk.

Musk, Altman, and other prominent Silicon Valley characters, including Peter Thiel and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, pledged $1 billion to the project in 2015.

The group aimed to create a nonprofit focused on developing artificial intelligence "in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole," according to a statement on OpenAI's website from December 11, 2015.

Musk said he quit the company because he "didn't agree with some of what [the] OpenAI team wanted to do."

By 2020, Musk tweeted, "I have no control & only very limited insight into OpenAI," adding his confidence in its safety was "not high."

This month Musk called ChatGPT "scary good" and warned, "We are not far from dangerously strong AI."

He also said he paused OpenAI's access to Twitter's database for training its software.

"Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward. OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true."