Microsoft has exclusive access to OpenAI’s codebase: Elon Musk

Twitter chief executive officer Elon Musk said on Friday that Microsoft was given exclusive and complete access to OpenAI’s codebase as part of its investment in the generative AI firm. Microsoft, an early backer of OpenAI, has reportedly invested another $10 billion in it.

“As part of their investment, Microsoft gained exclusive access to the entire OpenAI codebase,” Musk tweeted.

Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 along with a small group of entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and Ilya Sutskever, a former Google expert on machine learning, among others.

Musk served on OpenAI’s board until 2018 but left to focus on Tesla. Over the last few months, Musk has repeatedly criticized the company for installing safeguards that prevent ChatGPT from producing text that might offend users.

“ChatGPT is entirely housed within Microsoft Azure. When push comes to shove, they have everything, including the model weights,” Musk added.

Musk has criticised the firm for generating profits from OpenAI, which was founded as a non-profit.“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), a non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, the maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” the Twitter CEO had said last month.

Countering OpenAI

The Tesla CEO has approached several artificial intelligence researchers to form a new lab that will work on developing an alternative to ChatGPT, according to the US tech publication The Information.

Musk has also reached out to Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit and specialises in the kind of machine-learning models that power chatbots like ChatGPT, as per the report.

Babuschkin added that he has not officially signed onto the Musk initiative, according to the report.

“I’d like to work with Elon on something in the LLM space,” Babuschkin said.

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