OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responds to Musk's hurtful comments

In a recent interview, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman responded to the recent critical comments made by Elon Musk about OpenAI and its leading software, ChatGPT.

Skip to 1:22:06 for the Elon Musk segment

Sam Altman has sat down with Lex Fridman on the 'Lex Fridman Podcast' where he discussed a variety of different topics surrounding the developments of artificial intelligence, language models, the dangers of AI, the importance of AI safety, Elon Musk, Microsoft, and more. It was only a few days ago that a report from Semfor surfaced that claimed Musk's departure from OpenAI wasn't just because of Musk's public reason of Tesla and OpenAI wanting the same top AI developers but because of an internal power struggle between Musk and Altman.

This purported power struggle, which Semafor writes comes from eight people familiar with the inside story that spoke to the publication, was caused by Musk's attempt at taking over OpenAI and leading the company in a specific rejection. Musk's takeover proposal was rejected by OpenAI's other board members and Altman, which resulted in the Tesla CEO withdrawing from the company's board of directors and immediately stopping his $1 billion drip feed pledge to the company.

• Read more: Elon Musk reportedly left OpenAI after he failed at taking over the company

"Despite him being a jerk on Twitter whatever I'm happy he exists in the world," Altman told Fridman, referring to Musk, "but I wish he would do more to look at the hard work we're doing to get this stuff right, a little bit more love."

Since Musk's departure, the Twitter CEO has been critical of OpenAI, writing on Twitter, the company has strayed away from his initial founding intentions and has become a closed-source company that focuses entirely on profit. Fridman asked Altman for his thoughts on Musk's late criticism, and the OpenAI CEO recounted a 60-minute interview with Musk where he was asked his thoughts on space legends such as Neil Armstrong testifying against the commercialization of space and, by extension, SpaceX. Musk is seen getting emotional in the video, saying it's hard to see his heroes come out against him.

Altman says he relates to Musk in the above video, as he recognizes the SpaceX and Tesla pioneer as his hero and wishes that he spent more time looking at the hard work OpenAI is doing to make sure they get AI right. Altman goes on to say that despite Musk's recent criticism of OpenAI he is still happy he exists and that without him electric vehicles wouldn't be where they are today or where they will be in the future.

"Maybe some day I should hit back and maybe someday I will," Altman said. "But it's not like my normal style."

In other artificial intelligence news, Microsoft researchers have said that OpenAI's newest language model is so advanced that it's the beginning of a human-level AI. If you are interested in learning more about artificial intelligence or would like to read more about a human-level AI, check out the below link.

• Read more: Microsoft researchers say GPT-4 is the beginning of a human-level AI