American business tycoon Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its Chief Executive Sam Altman on Thursday, claiming they breached the AI company’s founding mission of prioritizing humanity over profits.
What’s the issue?
Elon Musk sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in a San Francisco court on February 29 over allegations that the AI company’s strong relationship with Microsoft violates the original goal of delivering public, open-source AI, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. 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.”
Lawsuit
For context, Elon Musk was among the founders of OpenAI in 2015. He was the company’s main benefactor at its outset. However, he subsequently fought with Sam Altman over plans to establish a for-profit company, as per the lawsuit. As a result, Musk gave up its position as co-chair in 2018 and stalled his financial share.
Microsoft then started to get involved with an initial investment in OpenAI in 2019, followed by a bigger commitment last year. It allocated $13 billion to obtain a 49% stake in the proceeds of OpenAI’s for-profit unit.
OpenAI apparently “set the founding agreement aflame” last year upon launching its most potent language model, GPT-4, as a Microsoft product.
OpenAI’s founding mission
American billionaire Elon Musk and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman originally agreed to take a nonprofit path upon founding OpenAi as they sought to prioritize the “benefit of humanity” over any single company, as per the lawsuit.
The founders’ original goal was to develop and offer a nonprofit competitor to Alphabet’s Google, which Elon Musk regarded as too powerful in the AI space.
Reuters reported that OpenAI initially aimed to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), enabling machines to perform tasks like humans that benefit humanity.
The court filing also indicated Sam Altman’s email to Elon Musk, saying that he thought it was impossible to prevent humanity from exploring AI. He reportedly added, “If it’s going to happen, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.”
What does Elon Musk want?
Elon Musk is seeking a court ruling that would require OpenAI to offer its research and technology to the public and prevent it from utilizing its assets like GPT-4 only to benefit Microsoft (or any individual).
The American billionaire also pursues a court ruling that OpenAi’s GPT-4 and the more advanced tech Q* should be classified as AGI. In that sense, these AI technologies will depart Microsoft’s license to OpenAI.
However, several legal experts contend that Elon Musk’s breach of contract claims may fail to hold up in court, considering that the lawsuit is partially based on an email between him and Sam Altman.
The email indicated in the lawsuit apparently appears as a proposal and a “one-sided discussion,” Boston College Law School Professor Brian Quinn.
“To the extent Musk is claiming that the single email in Exhibit 2 is the ‘contract’, he will fall well short.”
Brian Quinn, Law Professor at Boston College Law School
