Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman
Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and associated entities. Elon Musk alleges that the creators of ChatGPT have violated their initial contractual agreements by prioritizing financial gains over the original non-profit mission to create AI for the benefit of humanity.
Elon Musk, one of the co-founders and initial supporters of OpenAI asserts that Altman and Brockman persuaded him to play a pivotal role in establishing and funding the startup in 2015. The promises made at that time included the commitment to operate as a non-profit organization with a primary focus on addressing the competitive challenge posed by Google. According to the lawsuit, the founding agreement mandated OpenAI to provide its technology to the public “freely available.”
The lawsuit, which was submitted to a San Francisco court late on Thursday, claims that OpenAI, the most valuable AI startup in the world, changed to a for-profit business model with an emphasis on commercializing its AGI research after collaborating with Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world, which has contributed roughly $13 billion to the startup.
“In actuality, OpenAI, Inc. has undergone a significant transformation into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the world’s largest technology company, Microsoft. Under its revised board, the organization is not only engaged in the development but is actively fine-tuning an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with the primary objective of maximizing profits for Microsoft, rather than prioritizing the betterment of humanity,” states the lawsuit. “Such actions represent a clear and severe breach of the terms outlined in the Founding Agreement.”
The legal action comes after Musk expressed apprehensions about OpenAI’s altered priorities in the past year. The lawsuit reveals that Musk contributed over $44 million to the non-profit from 2016 to September 2020, making him the leading donor to OpenAI for the initial years. Despite departing from OpenAI’s board in 2018, Elon Musk has been offered a stake in the for-profit segment of the startup. However, he has consistently declined to accept it, citing principled objections, as he mentioned earlier.
X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, introduced Grok last year, positioning it as a competitor to ChatGPT.
Altman, for his part, has previously responded to some of Musk’s concerns, particularly regarding the strong connection with Microsoft. “I like the dude. I think he’s totally wrong about this stuff,” he stated at a conference last year in reference to Elon Musk’s criticisms. “He can say whatever he wants, but I’m proud of what we’re doing, and I believe we’re poised to make a positive contribution to the world. I try to stay above all that.”
The introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022 triggered an AI arms race, prompting competitors to hurriedly attempt to replicate its remarkably human-like responses. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took a subtle swipe at the rest of the industry last month, asserting, “We have the best model today… even with all the hoopla, one year after, GPT-4 is better. We are waiting for the competition to arrive. It will arrive, I’m sure, but the fact is that we have the… leading Large Language Model (LLM) out there.”
The lawsuit filed on Thursday claims a significant alignment between Microsoft and OpenAI, referencing a recent interview with Nadella. During a notable leadership restructuring at OpenAI late last year, Nadella remarked that if “OpenAI disappeared tomorrow…we have all the IP rights and all the capability. We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. We are below them, above them, around them.” The lawsuit puts forth this statement as evidence supporting the argument that OpenAI has substantially served the interests of Microsoft.
The lawsuit is also focused on OpenAI’s GPT-4, which Musk contends qualifies as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—an AI system with intelligence equivalent to, if not surpassing, that of humans. Musk asserts that OpenAI and Microsoft have inappropriately licensed GPT-4, disregarding their initial agreement that OpenAI’s AGI capabilities would be exclusively dedicated to serving humanity.
Through the lawsuit, Elon Musk aims to compel OpenAI to adhere to its original mission and prevent the monetization of technologies developed under its non-profit status for the personal benefit of OpenAI executives or affiliated partners such as Microsoft.
The lawsuit additionally calls for a court ruling that AI systems such as GPT-4 and other advanced models in development qualify as artificial general intelligence, extending beyond the scope of licensing agreements. Alongside injunctions compelling OpenAI’s compliance, Musk seeks accounting measures and potential restitution of donations intended for public-minded research, should the court determine that the organization now operates for private gain.
“Mr. Altman hand-picked a new Board that lacks comparable technical expertise or significant backgrounds in AI governance, a deliberate departure from the composition of the previous board. Mr. D’Angelo, a tech CEO and entrepreneur, was the sole member of the previous board to retain his position after Mr. Altman’s return. The newly constituted Board comprised individuals with more experience in profit-centric enterprises or politics than in the realm of AI ethics and governance” states the lawsuit.
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