Elon Musk Fuming As OpenAI Becomes "For-Profit With $30B Market Cap" After He Made $100M Donation

Elon Musk is clearly fuming over the increasing AI race between Microsoft and Google. According to Yahoo, in 2015, Musk donated an estimated $100 million to the revolutionary chatbot, ChatGPT while it was still in its start-up stage. During that time, OpenAl was a nonprofit.  But its value has increased over the few years, and now, OpenAI operates in a hybrid “capped profit” model since 2019, which means it has a private valuation of about $30 billion and Microsoft as a major investor.

This apparently has Musk fuming as he tweeted, “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?”

The Tesla CEO is more concerned about an AI takeover in the tech market rather than the legal aspects of the financial valuation of ChatGPT. When one AI expert, Max Tegmark tweeted, “An erratic race to the bottom will end badly for mankind,” Musk replied, “I agree!”, expressing his open frustration about the potential dangers of the OpenAI technology.

According to Business News, Musk wasn't aware of the Microsoft takeover while donating to the OpenAI project, and he had assumed that Google would have a significant edge on the AI ​​front. He later tweeted his resentment: “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “open” AI) to serve as a counterweight to the non-profit company Google, but it is now a closed source has become a profit-maximizing company effectively controlled by Microsoft… that was not my intention at all.

Meanwhile, the AI ​​race between Microsoft and Google has intensified with the search engine giant launching GPT-4, a more powerful successor to ChatGPT. On the other hand, tech pioneer, Microsoft, has announced an enhanced version of the OpenAI that will power its Bing search engine which is a direct rival to Google. The expected AI technology has already been providing power to Microsoft projects, and it will now appear on Office Apps as well. 

Google, in response, has announced incoming AI features for its workspace apps, including Gmail and Docs. Google is also refining Bard—a ChatGPT rival—before making a phenomenal global release. There are also reports from the tech industry that Google experts have already started their test runs on a more powerful version of the OpenAI, which is tentatively called the Big Bard version.

Earlier this month, the SpaceX inventor, expressed his regret about being associated with OpenAI. Speaking at the Tesla Investors Day event he said, “I’m a little worried about the AI ​​stuff. We need some kind of, like, regulatory authority. Or something overseeing AI development. Make sure it’s serving the public interest. It’s a very dangerous technology. I’m afraid I may have done a few things to speed it up.”