Sources say Musk's attempt to take control of OpenAI in 2018 was rejected by other founders

CTOnews.com According to Semafor, Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk tried to take control of OpenAI before it emerged.

James Duncan Davidson reports that Musk was one of the original founders of OpenAI, donating $1 billion in start-up funding to OpenAI in 2015. Musk proposed taking over and running OpenAI in 2018, arguing that the company's AI ambitions were far behind Google's.

Musk's proposal was rejected by other co-founders, including current CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, who was then chief technology officer.

CTOnews.com learned from the report that OpenAI subsequently had an internal power struggle. The internal conflict ended with Altman taking control of the company as president, Musk stepping down from OpenAI's board and severing ties with the company.

The conflict of interest between the two sides mainly lies in the talent aspect. Tesla was developing autonomous driving algorithms and poached OpenAI leader Andrej Karpathy to lead its autonomous driving efforts.