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Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for Violating the Company’s Principles

Daniel Nenni

Daniel Nenni

Admin
Staff member
Musk said the high-profile A.I. startup had prioritized profit and commercial interests instead of seeking to benefit humanity.


The lawsuit, filed by Elon Musk, describes OpenAI as a “de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. Credit...Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

March 1, 2024, 7:28 a.m. ET
Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breaching a contract by prioritizing profit and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence over the public good.

Mr. Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft represented an abandonment of its founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.

“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in an ongoing fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018, the company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, which can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose. Mr. Musk, who has his own A.I. company, called xAI, said OpenAI is not focused enough on the technology’s existential risk to humanity.

Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said OpenAI was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business and has restricted access to its technology.

OpenAI and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit is a fresh challenge for Mr. Altman, who was briefly ousted as OpenAI’s chief executive last year before regaining control of the company. In addition to Mr. Altman, the lawsuit also names Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, as a defendant.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content which was used to train the chatbots.

 
The head of Microsoft stated he wanted to hire Altman and did very briefly and his associates, but this effort quickly fell apart and was covered in detail with interviews live on CNBC. Microsoft definitely seeks monopoly powers any way it can. It was interesting to see these actions play out real time live.
 
Daniel Nenni said:
Musk said the high-profile A.I. startup had prioritized profit and commercial interests instead of seeking to benefit humanity.


The lawsuit, filed by Elon Musk, describes OpenAI as a “de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. Credit...Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

March 1, 2024, 7:28 a.m. ET
Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breaching a contract by prioritizing profit and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence over the public good.

Mr. Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft represented an abandonment of its founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.

“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in an ongoing fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018, the company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, which can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose. Mr. Musk, who has his own A.I. company, called xAI, said OpenAI is not focused enough on the technology’s existential risk to humanity.

Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said OpenAI was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business and has restricted access to its technology.

OpenAI and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit is a fresh challenge for Mr. Altman, who was briefly ousted as OpenAI’s chief executive last year before regaining control of the company. In addition to Mr. Altman, the lawsuit also names Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, as a defendant.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content which was used to train the chatbots.

Click to expand...

"Musk said the high-profile A.I. startup had prioritized profit and commercial interests instead of seeking to benefit humanity."

The new vanguard of human race and humanity: Mr. Elon Musk.
 
The legal filing is some 40 pages long. It's a good read on the development of OpenAI. If you read it, you may become impressed with what Elon has contributed to the advancements in AI, in addition to his other achievements.
 
FIvr said:
The legal filing is some 40 pages long. It's a good read on the development of OpenAI. If you read it, you may become impressed with what Elon has contributed to the advancements in AI, in addition to his other achievements.
Click to expand...

I tried my best to read it up to page 16. Then I feel exhausted. 😓

No wonder Elon Musk needs six lawyers to prepare and file this lawsuit for him.
 
From the Complaint (Page 25):
113. OpenAI’s conduct could have seismic implications for Silicon Valley and, if allowed
to stand, could represent a paradigm shift for technology start-ups. It is important to reflect on what
has transpired here: a non-profit startup has collected tens of millions of dollars in contributions for
the express purpose of developing AGI technology for public benefit, and shortly before achieving
the very milestone that the company was created to achieve, the company has become a closed, forprofit
partner of the world’s largest corporation, thereby personally enriching the Defendants. If this
business model were valid, it would radically redefine how venture capitalism is practiced in
California and beyond. Rather than start out as a for-profit entity from the outset, “smart” investors
would establish non-profits, use pre-tax donations to fund research and development, and then once
their technology had been developed and proven, would slide the resulting IP assets into a new forprofit
venture to enrich themselves and their profit-maximizing corporate partners. That is not
supposed to be how the law works in California or anywhere else in this country, and this should
not be the first Court to hold otherwise.
Click to expand...

When I first heard about the suit my gut reaction was that it was a frivolous and childish. Someone shared that block with me though and I actually think it raises a valid concern. People can spin-off Linux distributions to provide support, utilities, hosting, etc. What the lawsuit alleges feels different. Like Linus Torvalds suddenly deciding that Linux should be proprietary and then using it to build a rival to Microsoft, making himself a multi-billionaire in the process.
 
hist78 said:
It's getting more interesting now.


"“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” the company said in its blog post."

Click to expand...
Order of operation is kind of important - and I think the article misses this.

OpenAI became for profit in 2019. Musk called this out a couple of years later (plenty of twitter posts), and only after that did GrokAI become a thing.

The comment about 'told us we would fail' is also misleading -- saying they'd need billions to survive -- isn't the same as saying "you're going to fail".

This is going to be a mess with the polarized press and public these days in decoding what's really going on.
 
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