Elon Musk an avid user of Twitter
Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman’s OPenAI for breach of contract charging that the company has failed to live up to its found principle of working, “for the benefit of humanity broadly.” Sam Altman is also named in the lawsuit that alleges he reneged on the original plan for OpenAI to be a non-profit, open-source mission.
The 35 page lawsuit was filed in Superior Court in San Francisco.
Elon Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI in 2015, when it was founded as a non-profit. He left the company’s board of directors in 2018. In 2019, after OpenAI restructured to offer “capped” profits to investors, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the firm.
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This is just the latest in a string of legal woes for OpenAI. Last week the company was hit with copyright infringement suits by The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet, who all allege that it used their content without permission.
Elon Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit comes as the SEC said it is investigating whatever really went on behind the scenes last fall when Sam Altman was ousted by the board of his own company, only to return as CEO a few days later.
In January, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into possible antitrust violations about large investments made in OpenAI by five companies, including Microsoft, Amazon and Google, requiring them to provide information regarding recent investments and partnerships involving generative AI companies and major cloud service providers.
“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said Elon Musk’s lawsuit.
“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.‘s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” it says.
“Under its new Board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” adds Elon Musk’s lawsuit.
“This Founding Agreement is memorialized in, among other places, OpenAI, Inc.’s founding Articles of Incorporation and in numerous written communications between Plaintiff and Defendants over a multi-year period.”
And Elon Musk has taken to his Twitter platform to attack OpenAI’s leadership, saying things like, “What matters is having directors who deeply understand AI and will stand up to Sam. Human civilization is at stake here.”
On Sam Altman personally, Elon Musk wrote, “I have mixed feelings about Sam. The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power. So I don’t know.”
“I’m quite concerned that there’s some dangerous element of A.I. that they’ve created,” he also said.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and implementation organization based in the United States. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and several others. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity.
