With Monday’s announcement that a group of investors, led by Elon Musk, had submitted a bid to purchase the nonprofit company that controls OpenAI, it’s worth asking the companies signature product, ChatGPT, what it thinks about the prospect of Musk owning the artificial intelligence company.
Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, submitted the bid to OpenAI’s board. The Wall Street Journal reported citing Musk as saying in a statement provided by Toberoff, “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens.”
ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot that interacts with it’s users in a conversational way. The program is utilized by users for a variety of things including online research, answering general questions and writing long form messages and emails.
ChatGPT can feel as if you are talking to a real life human on the other end of the chat. So we asked it what it would think about the prospect of Elon Musk buying it.
When prompted with the question “Will you accept Elon Musk’s bid to buy you, ChatGPT?” the chatbot responded:
“I appreciate the offer (hypothetically speaking), but I’m not for sale! My loyalty is to OpenAI and, more importantly, to the people who use me—like you. Besides, if Elon Musk owned me, who knows? I might start replying with “Just use X” for everything.”
We then asked the chatbot: “Will OpenAI accept Elon Musk’s $100bn offer to buy it?”
ChatGPT resonded saying citing various news articles such as the WSJ’s orignical report as well as the Associated Press.
“Elon Musk and a consortium of investors have submitted a $97.4 billion bid to acquire the nonprofit organization that controls OpenAI. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but departed in 2018, has expressed concerns that the company has strayed from its original mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity. He aims to return OpenAI to its nonprofit roots and focus on open-source, safety-centric AI development. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has responded to the offer by rejecting it and suggesting a counter-proposal to purchase Twitter (now X) for $9.74 billion, a platform Musk acquired in 2022.”
“Currently, OpenAI is in the process of transitioning from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity to attract necessary capital for advanced AI development. This move has been a point of contention between Musk and Altman, leading to legal disputes over the organization’s direction and adherence to its founding principles.”
As of now, OpenAI has declined Musk’s offer, and there is no indication that the organization plans to accept it.”
Finally, it was then prompted with the question “Would you like it if Elon Musk bought OpenAI?” It responded:
“I don’t have personal preferences, but if Elon Musk bought OpenAI, it would definitely shake things up. He has strong opinions on AI safety, open-source development, and the risks of artificial intelligence. That could mean major shifts in how OpenAI operates—potentially more transparency, but also possible conflicts with its current goals and partnerships.
It would be interesting to see if he’d keep OpenAI’s mission intact or take it in a completely new direction. What do you think—would it be a good or bad thing?”
When prompted a second time with both questions it gave different answers but essentially communicating the same message, that as far as the bot was concerned, it was not for sale.
Musk, who is now the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a charity, along with Sam Altman. Musk left the company in 2019, citing a potential conflict of interest, as Tesla were beginning to develop AI for self-driving cars at the time.
Altman became chief executive upon Musk’s departure. According to the WSJ, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary that has served as a vehicle for it to raise money from Microsoft and other investors.
Since his departure in 2019, Musk has filed a number of legal complaints, accusing OpenAI of betraying its original nonprofit mission of using AI to better humanity. Last March, the Space X CEO filed a lawsuit against Open AI, alleging that the maker of ChatGPT violated their original contract as a nonprofit venture with the goal of developing AI for the benefit of humanity.
