Satya Nadella refutes Elon Musk’s statement about Microsoft’s control over OpenAI

While refuting Elon Musk’s statements about Microsoft’s control over OpenAI, Satya Nadella clears that Microsoft plays a non-controlling role in its commercial partnership with OpenAI.

Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella recently in an interview addressed the false accusations and claims that said Microsoft has control over OpenAI’s decision-making process and is greatly influencing the non-profit organization. Nadella respectfully denied these claims stating them as “factually not correct”. 

Nadella confirmed that even though the company’s partnership with ChatGPT’s parent company is a commercial partnership yet it has no intentions of controlling the company in any manner and the company is still driven by its non-profit board.

Nadella clarified, “Look, while I have a lot of respect for Elon and all that he does, I’d just say that’s factually not correct. OpenAI is very grounded in its mission of being controlled by a non-profit board. We have a non-controlling interest in it. We have a great commercial partnership in it.”

Nadella’s clarifications came in order to repudiate the statements of Tesla CEO and former OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk from an interview. Musk asserted that the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft has resulted in OpenAI losing its way and is indirectly being controlled by Microsoft, its biggest investor to date.

Musk was an investor and co-founder of the non-profit company OpenAI founded in 2015 but he withdrew from the company a few years back. OpenAI, in 2019, was restructured into a “capped-profit” organization OpenAI LP and after creating ChatGPT, attracted a lot of huge investors including Microsoft who invested a whopping 10 billion dollars in the company.

Musk even questioned OpenAI’s initial mission and has claimed that OpenAI, a non-profit organization has eventually turned into a company that is more concerned about profits under Microsoft’s influence.

Musk had questioned in the interview “What exactly is the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft? I worry that Microsoft made it more in control. As a part of the Microsoft investment, they have rights to all of the software, all of the model weights, and everything.”

Microsoft has already acquired OpenAI’s base technologies like GPT-4 and has integrated these technologies into its systems and products. Microsoft’s search engine Bing is powered by the GPT-4 language model technology.

Satya Nadella reinforced that AI technology has become a prominent part of the tech industry and it has put the sole dominance of Google and Microsoft at risk since the ChatGPT-like alternative chatbots are almost in the race to become equivalent to these search engines.