SAN FRANCISCO, March 2 — Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its chief executive officer Sam Altman, saying they abandoned the startup’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence (AI) for humanity’s benefit and not for profit.
The lawsuit filed late on Thursday (February 29) in the California Superior Court in San Francisco, the United States (US), is a culmination of Musk’s long-simmering opposition to the startup he co-founded.
OpenAI has since become the face of generative AI, partly due to billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft. Musk went on to found his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, launched in July last year.
His lawsuit alleges a breach of contract, saying Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman originally approached him to make an open source, non-profit company, but that the startup established in 2015 is now focused on making money.
Musk alleged that OpenAI’s three founders originally agreed to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI), a concept that machines could handle tasks like a human, but in a way which would “benefit humanity,” according to the lawsuit.
OpenAI would also work in opposition to Alphabet Inc’s Google, which he said he believes was developing AGI for profit and would pose grave risks.
Instead, the lawsuit alleged that OpenAI “set the founding agreement aflame” in 2023 when it released its most powerful language model GPT-4 as essentially a Microsoft product.
Musk has sought a court ruling that would compel OpenAI to make its research and technology available to the public and prevent the startup from using its assets, including GPT-4, for the financial gains of Microsoft or any individual.
OpenAI’s top executives rejected several claims that Musk made in his lawsuit, Axios reported yesterday, citing a memo.
“It was never going to be a cakewalk. The attacks will keep coming,” Altman said in his note, also seen by Axios.
OpenAI, Microsoft, and Musk did not respond to Reuters‘ requests for comment on the lawsuit.
Musk is also seeking a ruling that GPT-4 and a new and more advanced technology called Q* would be considered AGI and therefore outside of Microsoft’s license to OpenAI.
In November last year, Reuters was the first to report on Q* and warnings from OpenAI researchers about a powerful AI discovery.
Musk, who runs electric vehicle maker Tesla, rocket maker SpaceX, and social media platform X, decided to try to seize control of OpenAI from Altman and the other founders in late 2017, aiming to convert it into a commercial entity in partnership with Tesla, utilising the automaker’s supercomputers, said one source with knowledge of the situation.
Altman and others resisted, and Musk resigned, saying he wanted to focus on Tesla’s AI projects. He announced his exit to OpenAI staff in February 2018 during a meeting at which Musk called for OpenAI to increase its development speed, which one researcher called reckless, the source said.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment about his exit from OpenAI.
Since then, he has on several occasions called for regulation of AI.
“We expect this will have zero impact on AI development inside or outside of OpenAI and would chalk it up to Musk seeking to get a slice of equity in a company he effectively founded but in which he holds no stake,” said Giuseppe Sette, president and co-founder of market research firm Toggle AI.
OpenAI’s tie-up with Microsoft is under antitrust scrutiny in the US and the United Kingdom following a boardroom battle last year which resulted in Altman’s sudden ouster and return and the creation of a new temporary board.
The startup plans to appoint new board members in March, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. In November last year, Microsoft said it would have a non-voting observer seat.
Some legal experts said Musk’s allegations of breach of contract, based partly on an email between Musk and Altman, might not hold up in court.
While contracts can be formed through a series of emails, the lawsuit cites an email that appears to look like a proposal and a “one-sided discussion,” said Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College Law School.
“To the extent Musk is claiming the single e-mail in Exhibit 2 is the ‘contract,’ he will fall well short,” he said.
Musk’s xAI
Musk’s rival AI effort with xAI comprises engineers hired from some of the top US technology firms he hopes to challenge, including Google and Microsoft.
The startup started rolling out its ChatGPT competitor Grok for Premium+ subscribers of social media platform X in December last year, and aims to create what Musk has said would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI.”
According to xAI’s website, the startup is a separate company from Musk’s other businesses but will work closely with X and Tesla.
Musk has also made waves about his interest in artificial intelligence via Tesla. In January, he stirred controversy with Tesla shareholders, saying he felt uncomfortable growing the carmaker into a leader in AI and robotics unless he had at least 25 per cent voting control of the company.
Musk, who ranked second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List yesterday at an estimated worth of US$210.6 billion (RM999.4 billion), currently owns about 13 per cent of Tesla.
Musk, who has called AI a “double-edged sword,” was among experts and executives who last year called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, citing great risks to humanity and society.
Since ChatGPT’s debut, companies have adopted it for a range of tasks, from summarising documents to writing computer code, setting off a race among Big Tech companies to launch offerings based on generative AI.
— Reuters
