Musk’s ‘extreme mental stress’ revealed in new OpenAI emails

Unimaginable wealth doesn’t create an oasis of calm, if you believe the emails released as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

DeepMind is “causing me extreme mental stress”, Musk wrote in 2016, over apparent fears that the research lab would win the race to artificial general intelligence.

Musk was an ally of DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, but the pair fell out when Hassabis sold his company to Google in 2014. Musk’s relationship with Sam Altman, his co-founder at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, similarly soured.

Musk is suing Altman and OpenAI, which he claims abandoned its mission to develop AI to benefit humanity. Last week Musk expanded the lawsuit by accusing OpenAI of monopolising the generative AI market with Microsoft, and Altman of exploiting Musk’s “money, stature, and contacts”. Hence the latest cache of emails.

This may just seem like a power struggle between two wealthy men – three if you count Hassabis, who is not party to the lawsuit – but the future of computing is at stake.