Tesla CEO Elon Musk is one of those tech CEOs who has always been a big champion of artificial intelligence (AI). So much so that he helped establish a firm called OpenAI about five years ago. However, recently it was revealed that Open AI was teaming up with Microsoft for an exclusive licence deal for something called GPT-3 language model. A Twitter user pointed this out to Musk and the Tesla CEO didn’t seem too please with the idea. He replied to the tweet and said, “This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.”

For the uninitiated, OpenAI was founded in 2015 and is a leading artificial intelligence lab. Musk was one of the founding members, which also included Microsoft, but quit the board sometime in 2018. OpenAI had then announced Musk’s departure from the board and said, “Elon Musk will depart the OpenAI Board but will continue to donate and advise the organization. As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon.”
So Musk does remain associated with the organisation but has been critical of them. In February this year, Musk said that OpenAI should be more open. He further said that he now has “no control & only very limited insight into OpenAI”, Musk was also sceptical about Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s research director, and said that confidence in Amodei “is not high”.
About the partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft in a blog post said that it “is teaming up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3, allowing us to leverage its technical innovations to develop and deliver advanced AI solutions for our customers, as well as create new solutions that harness the amazing power of advanced natural language generation.”