Who owns ChatGPT developer OpenAI – is it Elon Musk?
ChatGPT has become one of the buzzwords of 2023, with the chatbot sensation offering users help with everything from idea brainstorming through to academic research.
The model, which incorporates databases from the Internet, is said to feature around 570GB of data within its system obtained from books, webtexts, Wikipedia, articles and other pieces of writing on the internet.
It’s even helped some people achieve financial success – such as the Thai man who claimed it helped him win the lottery – as well as spawned potential rivals within the technology industry.
The chatbot comes to us courtesy of the developer OpenAI – but just who owns it and what involvement does Elon Musk have?
Here’s what you need to know…
Does Elon Musk own ChatGPT developer OpenAI?
Despite some of the confusion surrounding this, Elon Musk is not the owner of OpenAI – but he is one of the founders of the company.
Others include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Loopt CEO Sam Altman, Polis-American computer scientist Wojciech Zaremba, Canadian-Israeli research scientist Ilya Sutskever,Canadian-Slovak computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, and the company’s current president Greg Brockman.
Musk remained on the board of directors of the company until 2018, when he stepped down due to potential conflicts of interest with his other ventures.
The company said in a statement at the time: ‘Elon Musk will depart the OpenAI Board but will continue to donate and advise the organization.
‘As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon.’
Who owns OpenAI?
OpenAI is not owned by any single person or organisation, instead being founded as a not-for-profit company governed by a board of directors – which several investors are also involved.
These include co-founders Altman, Brockman, Sutskever and Hoffman, as well as Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, venture capitalist Shivon Zilis and US politician Will Hurd.
PayPal director Peter Thiel and Jessica Livingston, founding partner of startup accelerator firm Y Combinator, are among the individual investors, while Microsoft, Khosia Ventures and Infosys are among companies who have invested in Open AI.
The board of directors and others involved aim to provide guidance and support for the organisation’s research and development efforts, as well as its advances in AI.
The company switched from not-for-profit to capped for profit in 2020, with the profit capped at 100 times any investment made.
Microsoft was reported to have invested $10bn in OpenAI in January of this year, as part of a long-term partnership with the company which sees them collaborate on such projects as their computer cloud Azure.
MORE : OpenAI will pay you up to $20,000 for reporting bugs in ChatGPT
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