Musk on the OpenAI lawsuit: converting from nonprofit to for-profit sets a dangerous precedent
In his latest Forbes interview, Musk publicly responded directly for the first time to the lawsuit with OpenAI, saying that OpenAI's shift from a nonprofit to a fully for-profit entity is setting an extremely dangerous precedent. He mentioned that when the parties reached a compromise back then, they agreed that once AGI was achieved, equity and control must be returned to the nonprofit organization, but this return clause was unilaterally deleted; he believes that if this matter can be gotten away with, existing charitable donation contracts will lose their foundation. The interview video is about two minutes long.
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In the interview, Musk framed the controversy over OpenAI's conversion to for-profit in terms of charitable contracts and public trust, offering a perspective for understanding this lawsuit.
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View original postIn his latest interview, when talking about AI taking away all jobs, Musk used an extremely gentle yet extremely cruel metaphor. He said: in the future, human work will most likely become gardening. You don't need to grow tomatoes and potatoes in your own backyard at all; what you buy in the supermarket will always be faster, cheaper, and more consistent in appearance than what you grow yourself. But today there are still many people growing flowers on balconies, pulling weeds in yards, or even spending an entire afternoon cooking a dinner for friends with ingredients they grew themselves. In terms of pure industrial efficiency, this is meaningless, but it carries a kind of warmth unique to humans. When many people talk about AI replacing humans, their first reaction is always panic, unemployment, pay cuts, and the collapse of social classes. But Musk extrapolated to a completely counterintuitive endgame: when AI and embodied intelligence completely crush the last drop of human sweat in productivity, the definition of labor itself is shattered. For the past few thousand years, humans have established their self-worth through usefulness. You can carry bricks, do accounts, write code, make reports; you are paid a monthly salary, and your dignity is built on the basis that society needs you to work. But when AI does every specific task better than humans at a lower cost, usefulness is no longer a scarce commodity. At that point humans will not go extinct; humans will collectively enter a state of forced retirement. Just like those retired elderly people who live extremely fulfilling lives, they get up early every day to practice calligraphy, play chess, grow flowers, and fish; none of these things creates GDP for society, but everyone lives happily and contentedly. In the future, all practical work will be completely devoured by automation. And those non-standard actions that are the least efficient, most time-consuming, and least cost-effective will instead become the last luxuries in human spiritual life. Writing a handwritten letter, baking a loaf of bread with your own hands, spending three months building a crooked treehouse with your child—the value of these things lies precisely in the fact that they are inefficient, clumsy, and full of humans' own real traces. Machines are responsible for solving the efficiency of survival; humans retreat to the experience of life itself. So here is a very important question worth thinking about: if in the future nothing you do can earn you a reward beyond what machines can do, what you really need to figure out clearly today is: after stripping away the social identity earned through working, what exactly do you rely on to make yourself happy?
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马斯克在最新的访谈里聊到 AI 抢走所有工作时，用了一个极其温柔、但也极其残酷的比喻。 他说：未来人类的工作，大概率会变成园艺。 你根本不需要自己在后院种番茄和土豆，超市里买到的永远比你自己种的更快、更便宜、品相更稳定。 但今天依然有很多人在阳台种花、在院子里拔草，甚至花一整个下午为朋友做一顿自己种出来的晚餐。 这件事在纯粹的工业效率上毫无意义，但它带着一种人类之间独有的温度。 很多人聊到 AI 替代人类，第一反应永远是恐慌、失业、降薪、社会阶层崩塌。 但马斯克推演到了一个完全反直觉的终局： 当 AI 和具身智能把人类在生产力上的最后一滴汗水都彻底碾压之后，劳动的定义本身被击碎了。 过去几千年，人类是通过有用性来确立自我价值的。 你能搬砖、能算账、能写代码、能做报表，你被按月支付薪水，你的尊严建立在社会需要你干活的基础上。 但当 AI 在任何一项具体任务上都比人类做得更好、成本更低时，有用性就不再是稀缺品了。 这时候人类不会灭绝，人类会集体进入一种被迫的退休状态。 就像那些退了休却过得极度充实的老人一样，他们每天早起练字、下棋、养花、钓鱼，没有一件事情是在给社会创造 GDP，但每个人都活得自得其乐。 未来所有的实用性工作，都会被自动化彻底吃掉。 而那些效率最低、最耗时间、最不划算的非标动作，反而会成为人类精神生活里最后的奢侈品。 写一封手写信、亲手烤一块面包、花三个月陪孩子搭一个歪歪扭扭的树屋，这些事情的价值恰恰在于它们是低效的、笨拙的，并且充满了人类自己的真实痕迹。 机器负责解决生存的效率，人类退回生命本身的体验。 所以这里有一个很重要的问题值得我们思考，如果未来你做任何事情都不再能换来超越机器的报酬，你今天真正该想清楚的是： 剥离掉靠打工换来的社会身份之后，你到底靠什么让自己感到快乐？
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For the first time, Musk publicly and directly responded to the core substance of the lawsuit with @OpenAI and his love-hate relationship with @sama Altman. In the latest Forbes interview, when Elon talked about the OpenAI lawsuit, he did not dwell on personal grudges, but instead directly flipped over a card that all of Silicon Valley is most afraid to lay bare. Musk said: OpenAI's forced conversion from a nonprofit to a fully for-profit entity is setting an extremely dangerous precedent. Many people look at this lawsuit and think it is just a clash of interests between founders, or that Musk is simply bitter because he missed out on a hundred-billion-dollar valuation.
But the core that Musk exposed in just over two minutes is in fact a Trojan horse that shakes the very foundation of modern commercial philanthropy: If a supergiant that was catalyzed by fully tax-exempt, lightly regulated charitable donations and is now valued at nearly $800 billion can casually take off its public-interest cloak and stuff itself directly into private pockets, then the existing charitable donation contracts across America and even the world would all be dead at the root.
When OpenAI was founded, the promise used to bring everyone on board was an extremely noble mission statement: We are a nonprofit organization; we develop AGI for the benefit of all humanity, to prevent super-technology from being privatized by commercial oligarchs such as Google.
Musk and other donors put in tens of millions of dollars in genuine, unpaid donations, not for equity dividends, but for the bottom line of the public interest.
Later, in order to raise funds to buy computing power, Sam Altman came up with a compromise structure with capped profits.
The key clause of the compromise at the time was written very clearly: the for-profit entity is only responsible for making money and repaying debt; once true artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved, all equity and control must be returned without reservation to the nonprofit charitable organization.
And what everyone has recently seen is this: This return clause, once used to reassure regulators and donors, was quietly and unilaterally deleted by them.
In the past, charitable trusts and tax-exempt funds could exist for hundreds of years because society reached a consensus: you trade tax exemption for public benefit, and your results forever belong to the public.
Now OpenAI has demonstrated a brand-new assembly line for getting rich: First, use the nonprofit slogan of saving humanity to feast on tax-exempt benefits, absorb the dedication of top scientists and the unpaid donations of society, and then, after technological breakthroughs and commercial barriers are built, reverse course and amend the charter, compliantly laundering priceless assets that originally belonged to public property into private property divided among a few managers and Wall Street capital.
If this deal ultimately gets away scot-free, then there will no longer be any truly meaningful charitable investment in the world.
All tech giants will learn to use the guise of nonprofit status to incubate core assets, leaving R&D risks to taxpayers and donors, and leaving the final rewards to private shareholders.
So this has long ceased to be a war between just Musk and Sam Altman; it is more like an ultimate showdown over public trust, the spirit of contract, and the bottom line of Silicon Valley capital's greed.