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Elon Musk's exit was ‘very tough’ for OpenAI, says CEO Sam Altman
Musk, who served as an initial board member at the Dec 2015-founded company, left it in Feb 2018.
Elon Musk's departure from OpenAI was ‘very tough’ for the company, according to CEO Sam Altman, who noted that the billionaire's exit forced Altman to ‘reorient my time to make sure we had enough funding.’
The OpenAI CEO made the remark in a conversation with The New Yorker.
“It was very tough. I had to reorient a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding,” he said.
Both Musk and Altman served as initial board members at OpenAI, which was founded in Dec 2015. In Feb 2018, however, the former left, allegedly reneging on a commitment to further fund the AI research firm.
“Basically he (Musk) goes ‘You’re all a bunch of j*******s,' and he leaves,” The New Yorker quoted Reid Hoffman, a former associate of the South African-born US entrepreneur, as saying.
The exact amount invested by Tesla and SpaceX CEO – now the richest person in the world – in the San Francisco-based company is not known. In March, he claimed in a post on Twitter (Musk acquired the social media giant in October 2022 and rebranded it as X in July this year) that he invested the first $100 million (approx. ₹830 crore today). This was, however, disputed by TechCrunch, which reported, citing receipts, that the actual money was nearly half what he claimed.
OpenAI, meanwhile, received funds worth billions of dollars from Microsoft, and has gone on to become a major name in the world of artificial intelligence. In January, the two sides announced they were extending their partnership; shortly after this, Microsoft unveiled its Bing AI chat, which is powered by OpenAI's revolutionary ChatGPT, released in November last year.
