OpenAI’s Sam Altman disagrees with Elon Musk on pausing AI research

OpenAI CEO and cofounder Sam Altman has been vocally supportive of regulation in the AI space. Speaking at the ET Conversations event earlier this week, Altman said he was in favour of regulations for OpenAI and large companies.

Asked about Tesla cofounder and Twitter boss Elon Musk’s stance on wanting to halt AI research, Altman said he would prefer external audits and red teaming safety tests (simulating cyberattacks to test security) when it comes to keeping the technology in check.

“I think a better framework is external audits, red teaming safety tests. When we finished GPT-4, it took us more than six months until we were ready to release it. The team did a lot of work on it … to be confident that we could put something out that was safe. …we weren’t going to put it out until we were ready to release it. Future systems may take longer, they may take less long. What I think matters is a set of safety standards and a process to ensure compliance with those,” Altman said during a Q&A session at the event.


Musk, who was one of the founders of OpenAI, is no longer associated with the company. In March, the SpaceX boss, along with a collective of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, penned an open letter advocating a six-month halt in the training of systems more powerful than OpenAI's latest model, GPT-4.

The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute, garnered more than 1,000 signatures including those of Musk, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, as well as AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.

"Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said.

“I like the dude, but…”

On being asked about Musk’s allegation that OpenAI had become a “maximum-profit company, effectively controlled by Microsoft”, Altman said, “I don't really want to get into an Elon food fight. I like the dude. I think he's totally wrong about this stuff.”

Musk, in a February tweet, had questioned Microsoft’s involvement with the company. “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” read Musk’s tweet.


OpenAI, which started as a non-profit company, moved to become a ‘capped profit’ company in 2019, to ‘rapidly increase investment and attract talent’.

“The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and employees can get a capped return if we succeed at our mission, which allows us to raise investment capital and attract employees with startup-like equity. But any returns beyond that amount—and if we are successful, we expect to generate orders of magnitude more value than we’d owe to people who invest in or work at OpenAI LP—are owned by the original OpenAI Nonprofit entity,” the company wrote in a 2019 blog post.

“He (Musk) can sort of say whatever he wants, but I'm proud of what we're doing. And I think we're gonna make a positive contribution to the world and try to stay above all of that,” Altman said in the interaction with ET.