Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT‘s parent company OpenAI, recently addressed billionaire Elon Musk’s criticism of artificial intelligence (AI). Altman said that he believes Musk is being a “jerk on Twitter,” but also insisted that there are many situations in which he can relate to the self-made billionaire.
Altman was recently seen on Lex Fridman’s podcast where he said, “Elon is obviously attacking us on Twitter right now on a few different vectors, and I have empathy because I believe he is, understandably so, really stressed about AGI safety. I’m sure there are some other motivations going on too, but that’s definitely one of them.”
Altman acknowledged that he could see why Musk could be concerned about the security of artificial general intelligence (AGI), but he suggested that there might be other reasons for his recent Twitter attacks on OpenAI. In order to make a connection, Altman stated that Musk was also put down by early space industry pioneers when he started and that the attack left him looking injured. Musk, according to Altman, is the type of hero he grew up admiring.
Altman said that he believes despite what Musk says on social media, he has significantly advanced the globe. OpenAI CEO appreciated Musk’s accomplishments in the space and electric car sectors.
While speaking on Kara Swisher’s podcast, “On With Kara Swisher,” Altman also talked about Microsoft’s investment in the company. He said despite Microsoft investing $10 billion in OpenAI, the business is independent of the tech giant during his visit. “We’re not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft doesn’t even have a board seat on us, we are an independent company. We have an unusual structure where we can make very different decisions than most companies do. I think a fair part of that is we don’t open-source everything anymore. We’ve been clear about why we think we were wrong there originally. We still do open-source a lot of stuff,” Altman explained.
