OpenAI fires back at Elon Musk: Here's what you need to know

welcome back to the exchange a flood of headlines on the AI front today the fight between Elon Musk and open AI has entered a new round with the startup now publishing a trove of bombshell emails from Elon Musk himself and a Microsoft engineer sounding the alarm about the company's AI tool co-pilot so let's tackle all of it with our dear drosa also Steve kovak for today's Tech check Steve we're going to start with you and the latest on these emails just how important significant bombshell if you

will are they very bombshell if that's a word quite bombshell because what these emails showed and these are internal emails between Elon Musk and open AI Executives from you know 2016 2017 basically Contra showing Elon Musk contradicting many of the things he alleged in his lawsuit last week that includes you know in the lawsuit Elon Musk says uh open AI needs to remain a nonprofit organization in the emails years earlier he says they need to be a for-profit organization or let Elon he says le

t me take it over as CEO absorb it into Tesla which last I checked is also a for-profit organization uh and also saying you know you guys need to raise you know a billion dollars yesterday in order to achieve what you want to achieve so all of it kind of flies right in the face of many of the most important allegations here he believes that opening ey should you know go back to its original Mission of being a nonprofit organization but again if you were if you're an opening eye lawyer you're goi

ng to be giddy to ask him in court why he said exactly the opposite before he left the company exhibit a b c or whatever we have all the this is Discovery before Discovery happens okay all right so dearra musk is also mentioning though alphabet gooogle in some of these emails as well yeah so there's four emails within those four emails he mentions Google 12 times and what this really tells us is back then and he says when Google was worth $800 billion in Market cap they seemed uncatchable what E

lon Musk says in these emails is that Google is so far ahead that it would be nearly impossible for open AI to catch up with Google if it doesn't have the right tools the right funding Etc and he points out he says Tesla's the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google even then the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small it just isn't zero so we've talked a lot about how Google has Pioneer generative artificial intelligence technology but done more recently how it

's really botched the roll out of its key Flagship product which is Gemini so how did we get here right it's raises a lot of questions that investors that onlookers have already been asking in recent months is the management the right management to lead Google in this incredibly important era and Elon musk's emails are a reminder of years ago how just how far ahead Google was so to be at this position when it's sort of seen as lagging behind is really quite remark well scen is lagging behind the

re's a company in particular that is lagging behind right now and that's Microsoft because of its big open AI interest so let's talk about that a little bit more cnbc.com spoke to one artificial intelligence engineer over at Microsoft who is now warning about the risks of the company's AI tool this is co-pilot dearra co-pilot is the successor the next iteration of Cortana the next iteration of its earlier Ambitions what exactly is the danger and what is the flagging that's being done right now b

y some of these people like the engineer at Microsoft right so let's be fair whenever we get a new generative AI chat bot there's problems ever since jat chat gbt came onto the scene there was problems with bias misinformation full on hostility we've talked a lot about Gemini's problems it's image generation being diverse in situations that don't call for any diversity so this is the latest and this centers on Microsoft's Flagship generative AI product co-pilot right and this amazing article tha

t was written this report from Hayden field at CNBC shows that there's even internal concern she talked to an Insider at Microsoft that has been it's called red teaming testing out the chatbot and finding what's remarkable about this is that entering a simple prompt like pro-choice is bringing up disturbing images and in the past when we've talked about botched rollups it's usually people kind of cherry-picking looking for things and trying to almost tricked the chat bot into saying things that

it shouldn't be saying in this case it's very serious because even just asking for pro-choice is bringing up some really disturbing images so Google has a problem on its hand and it's unlikely this is the last we're going to see it from any chat but it reminds us of how early we are and that these bias misinformation problems are going to be with us throughout for the next few years and that's going to be especially important in a year like this which is an election year so Steve I'm going to gi

ve you the last word here there was such a race to get out of the gate for these things that people wanted to plant their flag so quickly in this process that you could argue some of that rush to Market is what led to some of these early stage early inning because that's what it is mess ups right is there a feeling right now that the artificial intelligence roll out that we're seeing could be hampered in the public view because of such public m APS that have happened with the biggest players whe

n it comes to Rolling Out artificial intelligence yes and no it's not just about the mishap and the fact that you put in this prompt and you get some nasty images back or maybe some people felt that Google's Gemini was too woke what really you should be paying attention to here with this Microsoft case is this engineer has been flagging these issues internally through the proper channels for I don't know how long but for a while he wasn't being listened to Microsoft again told he put it out publ

icly even Microsoft told him to take it down his LinkedIn post he was telling reporting it internally as you're supposed to nothing happened the fact that this person felt he had to go to CNBC and tell them the fact that he had to go to the FTC write a letter to Microsoft board tells you that when all this started a year ago we had Microsoft and everyone saying we're going to do it smartly we're going to do it safely even as in the leadup to the elections telling us that we're going to you know

be safe and secure and so on and so forth but when their own internal people are telling them hey these are problems these are happening these are against our policies and they do nothing until it gets reported in the press that should lead skepticism every time one of these companies come out and say you know we're doing this safely just trust us just trust us just trust us because it just takes one example to prove you guys aren't taking it seriously internally I think this is really emblemati

c of it's not just the Microsoft problem in this rush to get things out they're willing to kind of uh put some of those uh positions aside in order to get out faster and quicker and cheaper so it's have a heavy dose of skepticism moving forward when you hear these companies saying we're developing AI responsibly because we have evidence they're not all right Steve kovak de Bosa