Musk is not afraid of competition, and fighting to the end is in line with his character; what he fears is not being able to tear open the passive situation.

Author: Zhao Weiwei

Source: Landong Business

"The collaborative approach to artificial intelligence by OpenAI and @Sam (Altman) is what I support, as it can bring the best results for humanity," said Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, recently.

This is clearly taking a stand against Musk. Like Musk, he was once an angel investor in OpenAI, co-founding the non-profit AI research lab OpenAI, with the goal of countering Google's strong position in this field, but later, Musk and Hoffman both left OpenAI to start their own AI companies.

Unlike Hoffman's affection for OpenAI, Musk has completely torn off his face with OpenAI.

Starting last year, Musk saw that OpenAI was leaning towards the big company Microsoft, first publicly calling for a pause of at least 6 months on research into AI systems more powerful than GPT-4; later, Musk himself founded the AI company xAI, and last November released its first AI model "Grok", with the goal of "understanding the true nature of the universe", but it is still far behind OpenAI.

Recently, the anxious Musk took OpenAI to court, and he must know that he will face a fierce counterattack from OpenAI.

Musk has officially sued OpenAI, claiming that OpenAI should restore its open-source status, and prohibit the company and its CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft from profiting from AI technology. Afterwards, OpenAI, in order to refute Musk, listed the historical emails of that year on its official blog, using facts to slap Musk in the face: the creation of a for-profit entity was a joint decision, it was just that the suggestion to incorporate OpenAI into Tesla at the time was not adopted, and Musk left OpenAI.

In simple terms, Musk's lawsuit has raised the issue, accusing OpenAI of betraying its original ideals; OpenAI's counterattack has brought the issue down to earth: you are just for competitive interests.

Is Musk anxious?

Looking back at the lawsuits Musk has fought over the past decade or so, it is not difficult to find that going to court is just one of his business competition strategies. Musk is not afraid of competition, and fighting to the end is in line with his character; what he fears is not being able to tear open the passive situation.

Old grudges are hard to forget

Past affections often seem fragile in the face of current business interests and goals.

On the day Musk officially sued OpenAI, Sam Altman said in an internal memo to OpenAI employees that "benefiting humanity and entrepreneurship are to some extent inconsistent, a confusing statement, and I miss the old Musk."

"Personally, this is saddening." Musk is 14 years older than Altman, and Altman has always seen Musk as a personal hero, a person who achieves competition through building better technology, a builder, someone I hope will be on our side.

Altman misses the old Musk, and Musk likewise misses the old OpenAI.

In suing OpenAI, Musk's 46-page complaint lists many "crimes" of OpenAI, such as pursuing commercial interests in violation of the founding agreement. Musk believes that OpenAI has become a closed-source subsidiary of Microsoft, the world's largest tech company, and now all members of the OpenAI board are handpicked by Altman and are approved by Microsoft, so OpenAI's purpose is no longer to benefit humanity, but to help maximize Microsoft's interests.

From the lawsuit's demands, Musk wants to bring OpenAI back to its pre-commercialization ideals.

First, to make OpenAI open-source, providing the developed AI research technologies to the public, and also to prohibit the defendants from continuing to profit economically from OpenAI and its assets; secondly, to rule that GPT-4 and the more advanced GPT-Q are general artificial intelligence (AGI), and not to be used by Microsoft. In addition, Musk is also seeking his own past losses.

The complaint states that between 2016 and September 2020, Musk donated a total of more than $44 million to OpenAI. But in fact, according to the evidence published by OpenAI, the funds raised by Musk were less than $45 million, while other supporters, including Hoffman, provided more than $90 million.

In OpenAI's rebuttal article, it further points out the key to Musk's divergence from OpenAI: control.

In 2017, OpenAI and Musk reached a consensus to establish a for-profit entity as the next strategic move. "Musk wanted to get a majority stake, gain preliminary control of the board, and serve as CEO. During this period, he suspended the planned financial support." Fortunately, Reid Hoffman's generosity filled the funding gap in salaries and operations.

Musk's suggestion at the time, looking at it today, is still unacceptable. "In early February 2018, Musk forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should treat Tesla as its cash cow, and commented that Tesla is the only entity with a chance to compete with Google, even though the chances are small, but at least not zero."

In fact, according to the description in "The Musk Biography", after parting ways with OpenAI, Musk also poached OpenAI's deep learning and computer vision experts, including Andrej Karpathy, to lead Tesla's AI project.

"We realized that Tesla would become an AI company and would compete with OpenAI for similar talent," Altman said, "This made some of our team members very angry, but I fully understand what's going on." Later, in 2023, Altman turned the tables: when Karpathy was exhausted by Musk's torment, he extended an olive branch and re-recruited Karpathy.

So, old grudges are hard to forget, and this is the key to the current controversy between Musk and OpenAI, the unresolved past grievances, and the accelerating competition in general artificial intelligence have added a new fire to the two.

The new situation is unresolved

Musk's announced Grok V1.5 chatbot has not been released to date, and as early as February 22, he had said on Twitter that it would be released in early March, two weeks later.

Since its release last November, the Grok chatbot has not generated much attention in the industry. And the AI company xAI behind Grok, founded in July last year, is essentially competing with OpenAI. In Musk's words, competition makes companies honest, and he supports competition.

Grok's biggest competitive advantage is Musk's acquisition of Twitter, which allows Grok to use Twitter content for its data training, including over 1 trillion tweets posted by people over the years, as well as 5 billion new ones added every day, of course, this is a benefit that Musk only realized after acquiring Twitter.

But the irony is that while Musk is constantly opposing the commercialization of OpenAI, his own AI model Grok is closely tied to the commercialization of Twitter from the start. Only Twitter Premium+ subscribers can use it, and becoming a Premium+ subscriber costs $16 per month.

From the information released by xAI, the 12 members of the xAI team are all male, and they have previously worked at leading companies or renowned academic institutions such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, etc., and have been involved in the development of projects such as AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

However, in terms of talent density, xAI still lags behind industry leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic, with the current recognized top-tier large model forces in the industry mainly concentrated in OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which was founded by former members of OpenAI, and Anthropic has also received investments from Amazon and Google, with the internet giants already taking their positions.

More importantly, the competition for large models in Silicon Valley, USA has already begun to accelerate.

Just this February, Google released its brand-new Gemini 1.5 AI model, and quickly open-sourced the lightweight open-source large model Gemma, these continuous actions are similar to OpenAI's release of the text-to-video model Sora, all of which are announcing their capabilities in the field of general large models, causing industry shockwaves.

In contrast, Musk, in this raging AI wave, is no longer the unrivaled figure. The "Musk Biography" once defined him as: with the two giants of OpenAI and Google competing, a third gladiator needs to enter the arena - a gladiator focused on AI safety and committed to protecting humanity.

Musk was once full of confidence, he once stated in the "Musk Biography": "The AI capabilities accumulated by Tesla in the real world have been underestimated, imagine if Tesla and OpenAI had to swap tasks, with them making self-driving vehicles and us making large language model chatbots, who would win? Of course, it would be us."

Confidence is confidence, and means are means.

As confident as Musk, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT, he cut off OpenAI's data pipeline access to Twitter, limiting the opponent's means of defense against the future. Musk has never been soft-handed, so suing OpenAI can still be seen as one of Musk's strategies to limit his opponent.

In fact, Grok chatbot is still far from matching Musk's vision, Musk once stated at the release that xAI's Grok is very important to humans and will help humans explore the "ultimate truth" and the "essence of the universe", and he did not forget to put down his competitors, stating that OpenAI and Google's Gemini will only lead humanity astray.

In addition, there are reports that Musk's xAI is preparing for a new round of financing, planning to raise $1 billion through equity financing at a valuation of $15 billion to $20 billion.

Subsequently, Musk denied this news, but it is undeniable that the consumption of tens of billions of dollars is necessary for large models, and he has recently been posting information on Twitter to recruit for xAI, how xAI will compete with peers like OpenAI is still a problem that troubles him.

Lawsuit - A Strategy of Not Wanting to Lose

Controversies around Musk have been constant, and looking back on his entrepreneurial and business warfare path, going to court to sue has often been one of his usual strategies for solving problems, and it is also a manifestation of intensified industry competition. At the most fundamental level, this represents Musk's real anger.

For example, during Tesla's startup period, he sued the famous automotive designer Henrik Fisker.

At the time, Musk approached him, wanting Fisker to design the later Model S, but the final design delivered by Fisker did not match Tesla's expectations. Later, Musk learned that Fisker was helping Tesla on the one hand, and on the other hand, he was setting up an electric vehicle company and incorporating the Tesla product concepts that Musk had told him into the business plan of his new company.

Musk could not tolerate this betrayal, although Tesla ultimately lost the lawsuit, being ordered to pay Fisker $1.14 million in legal fees and expenses, and Fisker's electric vehicle company then rose rapidly, even snatching the government low-interest loans that could have belonged to Tesla, but Fisker's company still went bankrupt in 2013, and he was forced to resign.

In the space competition, Musk's SpaceX has also sued Bezos' Blue Origin.

At the time, Amazon founder Bezos and Musk were both trying to build reusable rockets. In 2014, Bezos' Blue Origin applied for a U.S. patent called "Sea-based rocket landing", which described a method for landing and recovering a booster stage and other components on an offshore platform.

After seeing the patent, Musk turned pale, choosing to resort to legal action. Because the method of sea-based landing has been discussed for half a century, and has appeared in many fictional films, "but now we have so much available technology, and we still have to repeat the old tune, that's crazy. To apply for a patent for something that people have been discussing for half a century is absurd."

This lawsuit intensified the competition between Musk and Bezos in the space rocket field, and the result was that after being sued by SpaceX, Bezos agreed to withdraw the patent.

And in the 2022 drama of Musk's acquisition of Twitter, initiating a lawsuit to threaten the other party was also one of Musk's methods of psychological warfare.

At the time, when Musk was acquiring Twitter, he demanded a lower acquisition price, but the progress was not great, in Twitter's plan, the $44 billion price could be reduced by 4%, but Musk demanded a 10% reduction, otherwise he would not consider it. In the psychological tug-of-war between the two parties, Twitter's executives and board of directors insisted that no matter how the negotiations went, they had to protect themselves from future lawsuits from Musk.

"We will never let them get legal immunity," Musk said emotionally at the time, "If we have to hold them accountable, then unless they're dead, we won't let a single one of them go."

Musk once threatened to sue Twitter, because he believed that Twitter's board of directors and management had lied about bot accounts. But ultimately, Musk's lawyers persuaded him that going to court would likely result in a loss, and the best approach was still to complete the transaction at the original $44 billion. In the end, Musk took over Twitter, achieving his acquisition goal, while the former CEO and others were laid off.

Looking back on Musk's three lawsuits in Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, there have been wins and losses and abandonments, but the core strategy has not changed, which is to use legal self-defense to curb opponents and increase his own chances of winning when faced with an unfavorable competitive landscape, turning a passive situation into an active offensive.

Lawsuits are one way to achieve competitive goals, even if the lawsuits are lost, this public counterattack to defend interests is in line with his consistent personality of fighting to the end. And now suing OpenAI makes Musk's stance in the battle for artificial intelligence even more apparent: he cannot afford to lose.

After OpenAI officially responded to Musk's lawsuit, Musk did not retaliate on Twitter, and the facts and postures of all parties are now clear. As for the result, we will have to wait for the final ruling, which is destined to be as long as the evolutionary path of general artificial intelligence, and for now, we still need to see how capable xAI's Grok chatbot is.