Following Monday’s news that an Elon Musk and xAI-backed group offered OpenAI’s board $97.4 billion for control over the company, CEO Sam Altman has declared OpenAI “not for sale.” While the board will have to review the offer, it is unclear if they will seriously consider an off that effectively amounts to a hostile takeover of the company.
“Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is the latest — you know, this week’s episode,” Altman said during a Bloomberg TV interview at the Paris AI Action Summit Tuesday. “I think he’s probably just trying to slow us down.”
Previously, Musk cosigned an open letter demanding that the AI industry as a whole enact a six-month hiatus in developing models more complex than GPT-4 before launching his xAI company almost exactly six months later. More recently, Musk disparaged OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate Project, claiming that the consortium backing the plan did not have the funds to do so. When asked about those comments in the interview, Altman said “I’m not the one who tweeted funding secured. I just actually try to show up and build,” referencing Musk’s infamous Tesla tweet.
OpenAI currently operates as a nonprofit organization that controls the subsidiary OpenAI LP for-profit company. The for-profit LP company is what helped OpenAI develop from a bare-bones research startup to an industry leader valued at around $100 billion. The company now intends to flip that hierarchy on its head with the for-profit entity controlling the non-profit arm as a subsidiary, a matter over which Elon Musk is currently suing.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, told CNBC. As part of the offer, Musk’s own generative AI company, xAI, would merge with OpenAI (with, presumably, Musk at the helm instead of Altman).
“I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics,” Altman said in the Bloomberg interview. “Many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this. And we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”
When asked whether Musk’s strategy against OpenAI comes from “a position of insecurity,” Altman took a moment to savage his business rival.
“Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy,” he said. “I don’t think he’s, like, a happy person. I do feel for him.”
