Musk attacking us as he is stressed about AI safety: OpenAI CEO

SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has hit back at Twitter CEO Elon Musk for criticising his for-profit company which is now owned by Microsoft.

During the 'On With Kara Swisher' podcast, Altman said OpenAI is "independent" from Microsoft.

 Altman said Musk has been critical of OpenAI on Twitter.

"Elon Musk is obviously attacking us," he noted.

"To say a positive thing about Elon, I think he really does care about a good future with artificial general intelligence (AGI). I mean, he's a jerk, whatever else you want to say about him. But he has a style that is not a style that I'd want to have for myself," Altman was quoted as saying.

"But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future's going to look like for humanity," the OpenAI CEO added.

Musk tried to take control of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in early 2018 but Altman and OpenAI's other founders rejected Musk's proposal.

Musk later walked away from the company and reneged on a massive planned donation, according to Semafor.

Musk told Altman that he believed the "venture had fallen fatally behind Google".

When Musk walked away, he resigned from its board in 2018 citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla.

According to the Semafor report, he also reneged on a promise to supply $1 billion in funding, contributing only $100 million before he walked.

In March, 2019, OpenAI announced it was creating a for-profit entity so that it could raise enough money to pay for the compute power.

Less than six months later, Microsoft infused $1 billion in OpenAI, and the rest is history.