OpenAI director Larry Summers said he has not received any formal outreach from billionaire Elon Musk and his consortium of investors about their $97.4 billion offer to take control of the ChatGPT maker.
“As a board member, I have not received any formal communication of any kind outside of media reports,” Summers said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Tuesday.
Musk made waves a day earlier with an unsolicited bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the company he helped co-found a decade ago. With the offer, Musk said he hopes to return OpenAI to being “the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” according to a statement.
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman quickly rebuffed the offer and accused the world’s richest man of making the bid to gain a competitive advantage. “I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor,” Altman said in a separate interview with Bloomberg Television Tuesday on the sidelines of an AI summit in Paris.
Asked if Musk’s bid could complicate OpenAI’s plans to restructure as a traditional for-profit business, Summers said the company will “speak to that, as appropriate, if and when the board actually receives an offer, as distinct from reading media reports.”
--With assistance from David Westin.
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