Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief Sam Altman, alleging that they’ve led the firm to “radically depart from its original mission” by prioritizing profit over humanity.
Musk’s lawsuit, filed in California’s Superior Court late Thursday, notes that OpenAI’s certificate of incorporation states that its work “will profit the general public,” and that it isn’t “organized for the private gain of any person.”
Nevertheless, OpenAI, under a latest board formed in November after Altman’s short-lived ousting as CEO — now seeks “to maximise profits for Microsoft, slightly than for the good thing about humanity,” the suit claims.
To show OpenAI’s deep ties to the tech behemoth, the criticism pointed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comment in November because the drama was unfolding — stating publicly “that it might not matter ‘if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.”
Microsoft’s Nadella “explained that we ‘have all of the IP rights and all the potential’” to maintain OpenAI’s tech running — including GPT-4, the fourth and most advanced version of ChatGPT, whose internal design Musk alleged “stays an entire secret except to OpenAI — and, on information and belief, Microsoft,” in accordance with the suit.
The suit comes as a rivalry between OpenAI and Musk’s own artificial intelligence startup xAI is heating up.
On Thursday, The Post reported that xAI — which powers the snarky Grok chatbot — is aiming to lift billions of dollars in the approaching weeks in a personal funding round that would value the corporate as high as $20 billion. OpenAI has raised greater than $11 billion so far, with a secondary stock sale recently valuing the firm at greater than $80 billion.
Musk, 52, was on OpenAI’s founding team with Altman and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel back in 2015 when the AI firm was launched as an open-source alternative to behemoths like Google, which had acquired DeepMind the yr before.
Musk and Altman were reportedly friends on the time, though that dissolved when Altman led OpenAI right into a partnership with Microsoft, marking a transition away from its purely nonprofit roots, in accordance with Walter Isaacson’s biography on Musk.
OpenAI remains to be reportedly governed by a nonprofit, though it has a for-profit arm whose outstanding investors include Microsoft, which has committed $13 billion to the corporate as a part of a “multi-year agreement.”
As a part of the deal, Microsoft received a 49% stake within the earnings of OpenAI’s for-profit arm, in accordance with The Wall Street Journal.
When Altman, 38, was brought back as OpenAI CEO lower than two weeks after his resignation, it was a part of a deal that eliminated the members of the previous five-member board.
Former Twitter chairman Bret Taylor, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo were appointed to a latest nine-member board in November — members Musk alleged within the lawsuit were “hand-picked by Mr. Altman and blessed by Microsoft.”
Musk added within the court documents that he filed the case “to compel OpenAI to stick to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI [artificial general intelligence] for the good thing about humanity, to not personally profit the person defendants and the biggest technology company on the earth.”
The court filing — which asks for a jury trial and a court order requiring OpenAI to proceed to follow its alleged vow to profit the general public slightly than Microsoft — was earlier reported on by Bloomberg.
Musk’s legal counsel at Irell & Manella LLP and representatives for OpenAI didn’t immediately reply to The Post’s request for comment.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief has since been amongst probably the most outspoken about AI’s risk to humanity.
On multiple occasions, Musk — the world’s richest person with a $215 billion fortune — has sounded the alarm about AI having “the potential of civilization destruction.”
Last yr, the billionaire has called on governments to develop clear safety guardrails for AI, warning that unrestricted development of the tech poses a possible existential threat to humanity.
Nevertheless, Musk has still been working on a enterprise called xAI, which boasts its own ChatGPT-style AI-powered chatbot called Grok.
Grok stands out for what Musk described as a “rebellious streak,” which sees the chatbot spitting out responses infused with sarcasm and humor.
Rival Altman, nonetheless, has bashed Grok’s output as “cringey boomer humor.”
