As a co-founder of OpenAI, Elon Musk is actually a firm opponent of artificial intelligence. This is because Musk believes that artificial intelligence is one of the greatest risks to human civilization and should be strictly regulated, at least at the national level.
In 2015, Musk and Sam Altman (current CEO of OpenAI) founded OpenAI, with Musk naming the company OpenAI to operate as an open-source project, and OpenAI Inc. was established as a non-profit company.
At the time, the purpose of establishing OpenAI was to open up its patents and technologies to the public and freely collaborate with other research institutions and researchers to promote the development of artificial intelligence technology.
By 2018, Musk announced his resignation from the board of directors of OpenAI, because his company Tesla was researching self-driving technology, which also required the use of artificial intelligence technology. Musk believed that since he had a profitable company, he should avoid any conflicts of interest and should not continue to serve as a director of OpenAI.
In 2019, OpenAI established a profitable subsidiary, OpenAI LP, which was wholly owned by OpenAI Inc. to attract more funding. At that time, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI LP.
As we now know, in January of this year, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI LP and reportedly acquired 49% of its shares. As a result, related technologies such as ChatGPT are now exclusively controlled by Microsoft.
Musk tweeted that he founded OpenAI as a non-profit organization to compete with Google, because his investment in the artificial intelligence company DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014. Therefore, in 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others.
However, OpenAI has now become a closed-source, profit-seeking company that is controlled by Microsoft, which is something he did not want to see.