OpenAI GPT-3 licensing deal with Microsoft draws criticism from Elon Musk

It has been a challenging year for the business as the pandemic presented unexpected issues that have affected sales and production. While some that cater to specific markets such as the gaming industry have reported positive outcomes, others are less fortunate. Meanwhile, ventures helmed by Elon Musk have been notably successful such as SpaceX, Neuralink, and Tesla more so after the Battery Day showcase. However, it seems he is concerned about the recent licensing deal between OpenAI and Microsoft related to GPT-3.

The non-profit research company was co-founded by the billionaire in 2015 with Microsoft being one of its biggest supporters along with the likes of Peter Thiel. The group hopes "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." However, it may have been the nature of exclusivity granted to the Richmond, Washington-based tech firm that prompted a response from Musk, reports CNN.

"Since then, you've probably already seen OpenAI's announcement of their groundbreaking GPT-3 model – an autoregressive language model that outputs remarkably human-like text. GPT-3 is the largest and most advanced language model in the world, clocking in at 175 billion parameters, and is trained on Azure's AI supercomputer," wrote Microsoft's executive vice president and chief technology officer Kevin Scott.

"Today, I'm very excited to announce that Microsoft is teaming up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3, allowing us to leverage its technical innovations to develop and deliver advanced AI solutions for our customers, as well as create new solutions that harness the amazing power of advanced natural language generation," he continued.

This elicited a response from Musk who wrote on Twitter: This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft." Others appear to agree with him and believe the collaboration is contradictory to its original purpose, which is to make it accessible for those who are interested.

In 2017, Musk expressed his opinion regarding artificial intelligence which he described as an "existential threat," which led to arguments with other tech titans. He even exchanged words with Microsoft founder Bill Gates who envisioned benefits from harnessing AI.