Elon Musk sues OpenAI for abandoning its principles and says taking Microsoft's billions has 'set the founding agreement aflame'

SoftwareAIElon Musk sues OpenAI for abandoning its principles and says taking Microsoft’s billions has ‘set the founding agreement aflame’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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CEO of Tesla Motors Elon Musk speaks at the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing "Cyber Rodeo" grand opening party in Austin, Texas, on April 7, 2022. - Tesla welcomed throngs of electric car lovers to Texas on April 7 for a huge party inaugurating a "gigafactory" the size of 100 professional soccer fields.

The new lawsuit says that Musk only agreed to co-found OpenAI because it was under these conditions, but that the firm is now focused on profits rather than those principles. The lawsuit reads:

“This case is filed to compel OpenAI to adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual Defendants and the largest technology company in the world.”

OpenAI’s structure changed in 2019 when the non-profit set up a for-profit subsidiary, which is capped but nevertheless allowed the serious money to start flowing in. Microsoft invested $1 billion the same year, and though the numbers are a little fuzzy it is now estimated to have invested over $13 billion. To state the obvious: Microsoft is doing this because it thinks there’s gold in them thar hills.

The lawsuit also takes aim at the controversy over Altman’s firing last year. The OpenAI board kicked its CEO to the curb in November last year, with the cryptic rationale that he had not been “consistently candid in his communications.” I like to imagine Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had just taken a big sip of coffee before hearing the news, because in a highly unusual move Microsoft waded in and saidit would hire Altmanand basically the majority of OpenAI’s workforce (which broadly supported Altman). Facing this kind of opposition from its biggest single investor, the OpenAI board threw in the towel and a few days after being fired, Altman was back.

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Complicating things is that Musk founded another AI start-up last year, xAI, though the company’s only public product so far is a chatbot called Grok that is designed rather in Musk’s own image: it’s supposed to be funny, but is just a bit cringe.

Musk’s lawsuit is for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, unfair business practices, and is asking for many things: it wants OpenAI to be returned to its original non-profit roots, it wants OpenAI to be court-ordered to open source its AI advances, and oh yes he wants some money too. At this point you may well be wondering about the billionaire troll’s true motivations. Musk has his own competitor to OpenAI now, after all, and things aren’t looking enormously rosy at some of his other ventures.

The suit makes much of AGI’s potential “threat to humanity” and how Microsoft instead sees it “as a source of profit and power.” Lest Google feels left out, there’s room for a few shots at it too, with Musk’s lawyers saying that in the hands of such tech companies AGI is a “particularly acute and noxious danger” to us fleshbags. It also moves on from GPT-4 to mention the much-rumoured Q*, an OpenAI project that is allegedly light years beyond ChatGPT’s capabilities, and claims that OpenAI doesn’t have the expertise to know if it is developing Skynet or not.

At the time of Altman’s firing there was plenty of scuttlebutt around the reasons why, with both Q*’s potential capabilities and the profit-making arm of OpenAI being the most persistent rumours: but thanks to how it went down, few outside the boardroom itself know the truth.

Perhaps this will bring it to light but, either way, it’s going to be a clash of the titans. Both sides in this argument can afford all the lawyers in the world, and the stakes are not just enormously high but also ideological: what, exactly, was OpenAI founded for? And is Musk actually in the right here? We’re certainly going to find out, though I’m only reminded of the immortal strapline for Alien vs. Predator: whoever wins, we lose.

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