Elon Musk says he is the reason OpenAI exists.

Billionaire Elon Musk, in an interview with CNBC said he is the “reason OpenAI exists,” citing his past investments in the company.

“I came up with the name,” the businessman said.

He also said that he played a key role in recruiting key scientists and engineers to the company.

Musk is one of the founders of OpenAI. In 2015 he pledged $1 billion to support the startup. However in 2019 the businessman left the company over disagreements.

In total, according to Musk, he invested in OpenAI around $50 million.

The entrepreneur also condemned the ties between the startup and Microsoft again. Earlier he claimed the tech giant has “very strong influence, if not direct control over OpenAI.”

In January, Microsoft agreed to a deal with the California startup, which media valued at $10 billion. Later OpenAI’s developments appeared in the tech giant’s products, including GPT-4 in the Bing search engine.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella firmly rejected Musk’s claim.

“While I have a great deal of respect for Elon and his work, I would simply say that this is basically not true,” he said.

However Nadella acknowledged Microsoft’s non-controlling stake in OpenAI and a “large commercial partnership” between the companies.

Musk said he used to be close friends with Google’s co-founder Larry Page. He said they often talked about the nature of AI. Musk described the former friend as “quite carefree” about artificial intelligence.

“Page, it seems, didn’t worry about AI safety. […] The last straw was that Larry accused me of “speciesism” for supporting human-centric consciousness, not machine consciousness,” the billionaire said.

In March, Musk and hundreds of other experts signed an open letter calling for a pause in experiments with large language models.

In April the entrepreneur founded an AI company X.AI to compete with OpenAI.

In the same month, in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Musk spoke of plans to create a “most truthful” alternative to ChatGPT.