In the recent podcast with Lex Fridman, Elon Musk suggested that he likes the idea of open source AI. “I am generally in favour of open sourcing, like biassed towards open sourcing.”
Musk’s xAI has recently released Grok, its own based chatbot. It took just four months for the team to build it. He is also planning to double the compute at xAI every month. Currently, Grok is trained on 8,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
On the contrary, Sam Altman just built Grok with a single prompt on GPT Builder, taking a dig at Musk’s dream project.
Musk further adds that the whole idea of him founding OpenAI was about open sourcing AI. He highlighted his discussion with Larry Page, the former CEO of Google, who was Musk’s friend then. “I sat in his house and talked about AI safety, and Larry did not care about AI safety at all.”
The discussions with Larry were the reasons that Musk founded OpenAI. “At one point Larry called me a ‘speciest’, for being pro-human,” Musk added. He mocked Page for being on the team of robots.
“The breaking of the friendship was because of OpenAI,” Musk said when Fridman asked him if he can be friends again with Page. “The key moment was recruiting Ilya Sutskever. He is brilliant, a good human, and has a great heart” he added about the co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI.
Recruiting Sutskever was a battle between Musk and Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind. “Ilya went back and forth between staying at Google or joining OpenAI. Finally, he agreed to join OpenAI. That was the toughest recruiting battle we have ever had.” Musk said that Sutskever is the linchpin of OpenAI.
Musk said that he was crucial in recruiting a lot of other people at OpenAI and providing almost all the funding in the beginning, around $40 million dollars.
“The ‘open’ in OpenAI is all about open source,” said Musk, highlighting that the company has become a closed source for maximum profit company, which according to him is “not good karma.”
Only solution is Musk buying back OpenAI.
