Elon Musk sued OpenAI, its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and related entities, alleging that ChatGPT’s creators breached their original contractual agreements by pursuing profits instead of the nonprofit’s founding mission of developing AI that benefits humanity.
Musk, a co-founder and early backer of OpenAI, claims that Altman and Brockman persuaded him to help found and fund the startup in 2015, promising it would be a nonprofit focused on countering the competitive threat from Google . The founding agreement required OpenAI to make its technology “freely available” to the public, the suit claims.
The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco court late Thursday, says OpenAI, the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup, has shifted to a for-profit model focused on commercializing AGI research after partnering with Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world, which has invested about 13 billion dollars in the startup.
“In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has become a closed source de facto subsidiary of the world’s largest technology company: Microsoft. Under its new board, it’s not just developing, but actually improving an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, instead of benefiting humanity. treatment he adds. “This was a flagrant betrayal of the Founding Agreement.”
The lawsuit follows Musk raising concerns about OpenAI’s shifting priorities over the past year. According to the legal complaint, Musk donated more than $44 million to the nonprofit between 2016 and September 2020. For the first several years, he was the largest contributor to OpenAI, the lawsuit adds. Musk, who stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018, was offered a stake in the startup’s for-profit arm but declined because of a principled stance, he said earlier.
X, the social network owned by Musk, launched ChatGPT rival Grok last year.
Altman has also addressed some of Musk’s concerns in the past, including close ties to Microsoft. “I like the dude. I think he’s completely wrong about that,” he said of Musk’s criticisms at a conference last year. “He can say what he wants, but I’m proud of what we’re doing and I think we’re going to make a positive contribution to the world and I’m trying to stay on top of it all.”
OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked an AI arms race, with rivals still trying to match its incredible human responses. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella threw down a gauntlet to the rest of the industry last month. “We have the best model today … even with all the hype, a year later, GPT4 is better,” he said. “We are waiting for the competition to come. It will arrive, I’m sure, but the fact [is] that we have the… top LLM out there.”
An email exchange between Musk and Altman introduced as evidence in the lawsuit. Image Credits: TechCrunch/screenshot
Thursday’s lawsuit alleges close alignment between Microsoft and OpenAI, citing a recent interview with Nadella. Amid a dramatic leadership shakeup at OpenAI late last year, Nadella said that “if OpenAI were to disappear tomorrow … we have all the intellectual property rights and all the capabilities. We have the people, we have the calculation, we have the data, we have everything. We are below them, above them, around them.” The lawsuit presents this as evidence that OpenAI has strongly served Microsoft’s interests.
The lawsuit also centers around OpenAI’s GPT-4, which Musk claims is an AGI — an artificial intelligence whose intelligence is on par with, if not higher than, humans. It claims that OpenAI and Microsoft have wrongly licensed GPT-4, despite agreeing that OpenAI’s AGI capabilities would remain dedicated to humanity.
Through the lawsuit, Musk seeks to compel OpenAI to adhere to its original mission and prohibit them from monetizing technologies developed under his nonprofit for the benefit of OpenAI executives or partners such as Microsoft.
The lawsuit also seeks a court ruling that AI systems like GPT-4 and other advanced models in development constitute AI that transcends licensing agreements. In addition to injunctive relief against OpenAI, Musk is seeking an accounting and possible return of donations intended to fund its public research if a court finds it is now operating for private profit.
“Mr. Altman has hand-picked a new Board of Directors that lacks the similar technical expertise, or any meaningful background in AI governance, that the previous board had by design. Mr. D’Angelo, a technology CEO and entrepreneur, was the only member of the previous board who remained after Mr. Altman’s return. The new board consisted of members with more experience in business or profit-oriented politics than in AI ethics and governance,” the suit adds.
