Elon vs OpenAi

The Battle for Humanity

Zander Huff
March 05, 2024

Goodmorning - happy Tuesday. First off, sorry about the horrendous design yesterday if you viewed our newsletter on mobile. Working through some kinks but seems like we’ve got a few towels ringed out.

Something big has been brewing over the last few months dating back to a fishy day in November when the CEO of OpenAi was ousted from his position by the board.

Today we’re covering everything you need to know about the story, the implications for you and me, and what this probably means for the ai space.

I can confidently say, this is the best newsletter yet.

If you want more information on what we cover today, make sure to check out the resources down below!

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Disclaimer
We know about xAi

I want to get this out of the way before the keyboard warriors come after me.

Yes - xAi (Consumer facing arm Grok) is a closed source for profit large language model owned by X.

That is not a good enough reason to label this story as “Elon is falling behind in his own current product so he’s trying to make up for it in a monetary hurt against OpenAi and Microsoft”.

If there would be anybody as a CEO and Founder against that, it would be Elon - ie: Elon has patents that he’s tried to make as public as possible for others, whom have good intentions, can build off of the development they have made.

He literally wants competition because he recognizes it’s for the betterment of humanity.

The Story
The Timeline You Need to Know

(for a full timeline, good ole wikipedia at the bottom has everything in depth)

We pick up at the start in 2015:

Ilya Sustkever and Greg Brockman announce in 2015 the start of OpenAi, INC with the goal of “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”₁
- At the time of writing that statement, there were 2 board members → Elon Musk and Sam Altman

Now, Elon made initial claims of his ~$100M being the initial investment into the company whereas in other articles he’s walked it back to $50M. Nonetheless, his initial investment was one of, if not, the first investment made into OpenAi as a NON PROFIT for the ~betterment of humanity~.

OpenAi altogether raises over $1B for this non profit organization.

Fast Forward a little to early 2018:

New donors have entered the fold (still non profit) with Elon Musk stepping down off of the board (because of potential overlap with Tesla and their ai development for their cars - or so he said. You can find other reports here). Allegedly, He claimed to remain a donor and advisor but other reports say that’s not true₈.
That same year, Musk signs an agreement with other ai leaders to not develop lethal autonomous weapons (weapons that kill on their own 😅 ).

3 Months after Elon steps down: OpenAi sets up 3 company structures, not in place, but as subsidiaries of OpenAi, Inc (non profit) titled OpenAi, LP (previously SummerSafe, LP), OpenAi GP, LLC, and OpenAi OpCo, LLC. This would mean the board of the non profit still has the final say.

2019: OpenAi Inc, creates OpenAi Global LLC - a subsidiary that’s a for profit. (this is what ChatGPT, Dalle-3, Sora are held under)

2020 (year of bloody Covid): OpenAi goes on to create 4 more company structures. Still counting today.

Fast Forward to Nov 2023: Sam Altman is ousted from the board members of OpenAi, Inc (non profit arm) that controlled all the other OpenAi For Profits. Board members at the time of firing were Ilya Sutskever, Adam De’Angelo (non employee), Tasha McCauley (non employee), and Helen Toner (non employee).

TLDR
The Situation in Plain Terms

OpenAi, Inc was founded in 2015 as a Non Profit to help with the development and oversight of artificial intelligence. All code was set to be open source (available for any and all developers to build off of the work they’ve done) to speed up development.

In 2019, OpenAi, INC (among other subsidiaries listed above) create OpenAi Global, LLC - a for profit subsidiary with a capped profit of 100x for first stage investors, looking to bring in top talent in the ai space.

Over the time frame of 2018-2020, after Musk departure, along with more connectedness with Microsoft and other corporate donors, they slowly start moving there code from an open source available to all to a close source - open your wallet for access - type.

Remember: shifting from open source to close source now only allows those with investment in the company or people at the company access to the development of these GPTs. Not the initial intent.

The Implications
Why Does This Matter to Me?

Reported from the San Fransisco Standard “A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original nonprofit mission of OpenAI” ₅

I want to start this off by saying there is absolutely nothing wrong with making money. I think you should make as much money as your heart desires. And that should be off the back of building products or offering services that make people’s lives better.

But we’re not talking about building a new type of a calendar app or another version of GrubHub.

Those platforms, with all due respect, look like a drop in the bucket in impact to society to what artificial intelligence is and will be.

In 2015, Sam Altman wrote a blog₁₀where IN THE FIRST SENTENCE, it says “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” ₁₀

So we now have a guy who is running the biggest ai company in the world, destroying google, leaving Meta in the dust, creating a company in the start was for the betterment of humanity and now is out to make as much money as possible (I know there’s a 100x cap but if there successful, they’ll be the biggest company ever created).

Does that sound like a successful outcome for humanity?

This doesn’t look good.

I understand them needing cash for products, top tier talent for development, and a different structure for opportunity - but the whole company from the start was set up to go against the evilness of Google.

My biggest worry is when push comes to shove in 5-10 years, there will come a day where there will need to be a decision made to either do what’s best for humanity or for himself.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS WHOLE STORY IS THIS: Will Sam do what’s best in that moment for Humanity or will he do what’s best for the betterment of his investors and himself?

Better yet…

Can Elon Musk catch up?

I sure as hell hope so.

Wrap it up
In Conclusion

I told you in one of the very first newsletters I wrote a few months back, I, in a joking non audible tone, said that I would let you know when things get “scary”.

We’re not there yet!

But, reports are coming out, that we’ll cover on Wednesday and Thursday that raise the hair on my arms.

We’ll see ya tomorrow,

Zander