Elon Musk criticized Bill Gates’ understanding of AI as “limited” in a tweet on Monday. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, about a year after Musk left the board.
Elon Musk took a dig at Bill Gates and his understanding of AI in a tweet on Monday. Musk tweeted, “I remember my early meetings with Gates.” “His understanding of AI was limited.
Elon Musk sent the tweet in response to another Twitter user’s post about Gates’ involvement in OpenAI and his overall bullish attitude towards AI. In a blog post published last week, Gates wrote about how AI could transform the workforce, healthcare and education.
The Microsoft founder has been meeting with the OpenAI team since 2016, Gates wrote, and he met them as recently as September. It is unclear whether the 2022 meeting was in his capacity as a part-time advisor to Microsoft. (Gates left Microsoft’s board in 2020 after stepping down as CEO in 2000.)
Elon Musk founded OpenAI as one of several Silicon Valley executives who pledged $1 billion to the company in 2015. Elon Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018 and has since been critical of the company, particularly its relationship with Microsoft. In February, the billionaire said that OpenAI, which was initially founded as an open-source, non-profit, “has become a closed source maximize-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.”
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. The partnership allowed the company to license the AI technology. Since, Microsoft has announced plans to invest “multi-year, billions of dollars” in the company and even launched a new version of its Bing search engine in collaboration with OpenAI.
But Gates wasn’t always a big supporter of OpenAI. As The Information reports, when Microsoft first considered partnering with the firm, it expressed skepticism about the company’s technology. Sources familiar with the matter told the publication that the billionaire was “very busy” analyzing OpenAI’s technology prior to the 2019 partnership and was skeptical of the AI’s ability to understand and contextualize human speech.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, is “furious” at ChatGPT’s immense popularity, per Semaphore. The news outlet said that in early 2018, Sam Altman and other OpenAI cofounders rejected Musk’s offer to run the company on their own.
Elon Musk and Gates have an old rivalry. The two billionaires first started feuding in 2020 when they disagreed on the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the same year, Musk said that “his conversations with Gates have been very short” after Gates told him that he had decided to buy a Porsche Taycan instead of a Tesla.
The Tesla CEO also accused Gates of undermining the car company’s stock and even made fun of Gates’ weight. Elon Musk and Gates did not respond to a request for comment from SpaceX Kings prior to publication.
@BussinessInsider