OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the artificial intelligence (AI) research company’s current name may not be the best fit, and that if he could go back in time, he would choose a different name, Business Insider reports.

The 38-year-old tech entrepreneur, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk and others, explained in an interview on a podcast hosted by Lex Friedman that when the company was founded, no one was sure of its direction. .

“We started out thinking we were just going to be a research lab and had no idea where this technology would take us. This was before we had any idea about an API (application programming interface) or selling access to a chatbot. This was before we even thought we were going to sell a product,” Altman told Friedman, a well-known MIT-educated computer engineer.

Altman refers to the fact that OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization with a mission to advance artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Elon Musk, who is now criticizing OpenAI for no longer releasing the source code of its programs (a reference to the word “Open” in the title), sued Altman, other executives and the AI ​​company itself, alleging that it “betrayed” its original mission.

In a complaint filed in a San Francisco court, Musk’s lawyers say that, contrary to its original goals, OpenAI did not release the code of its latest GPT-4 model, “in violation of the original contract.”

Thus, the founding agreement was completely called into question, they argued, accusing OpenAI of seeking profit “with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity,” Elon Musk’s lawyers also argued in the lawsuit.

The head of OpenAI says it made a natural transition to a profitable model

The South African billionaire left OpenAI in 2018 and has since become one of its fiercest critics.

Altman told Friedman that he didn’t really understand what Musk’s “real motivations” were, and defended OpenAI, saying it went through a natural transition to a commercial organization “because it became clear that we were going to have to do different things, and also have huge amounts of capital.”

“So I said, ‘Okay, okay, this organization doesn’t really work in that context. How do we fix the organization?” he explains, but admits that the current name OpenAI really doesn’t fit the company anymore.

“If I could talk to an oracle and go back in time, I would have chosen a different name,” the tech entrepreneur told Friedman.

However, Sam Altman noted that while OpenAI is not fully open source, the company is open in other ways, such as offering free versions of the technologies and programs it develops.