Elon Musk reminds everyone he named OpenAI ‘with a lot of good intentions’

Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against the company, which he has recently dropped, accusing OpenAI of betraying the firm's founding principles.

Elon Musk said that he named OpenAI as he jabbed at the direction Sam Altman's company has taken since then. Talking at Cannes Lions, Elon Musk discussed technical innovation, AI and the future of tech. The Tesla boss had cofounded OpenAI in 2015 but left the company three years later. He even filed a lawsuit against the company, which he has recently dropped, accusing OpenAI of betraying the firm's founding principles.

Elon Musk had cofounded OpenAI in 2015 but left the company three years later. (Getty Images)

On OpenAI, Elon Musk said he had started the company to compete with Google. "It was very much a unipolar world where Google was completely dominant in AI," he said. The company was “formed with a lot of good intentions. The 'open' in OpenAI was meant to stand for 'open source,'” he said.

Elon Musk asserted, "I named it."

He jabbed at the company saying, “Now it's closed-source for maximum-profit AI, which is different from what was intended. I don't know how it got there.”

On the potential of artificial intelligence, he said, "In the positive scenario, the AI will be doing its best to make you happy. So that might work out pretty well."

He also talked about his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), saying, “Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find…compatible with their brands. That's totally fine. What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform.”

Talking about his own posts on X, he said, “I do shoot myself in the foot from time to time. If you’re constantly going through a filter, now you aren’t being real. It’s better to be real.”