Anyone still upset that the Musk-Zuck cage match got called off will get a chance to witness a tech billionaire standoff with much higher stakes: a Musk-Altman legal battle.
Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its co-founders, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, yesterday, alleging that they breached the organization’s founding agreement by letting it become too profit-motivated.
Musk’s beef with OpenAI goes way back: He co-founded it in 2015 as a nonprofit alongside Altman and other tech moguls, and alleges he even gave it $44 million of his own cash. But he left OpenAI’s board in 2018 after feeling that it was straying from its goals, according to the filing.
Musk vs. OpenAI
The lawsuit claims that instead of fulfilling its mission to develop AI for the public benefit, the $80 billion company betrayed its original goals by:
- Developing advanced AI for profit (the organization now has a for-profit subsidiary but it’s bound to hew to the nonprofit’s mission), and becoming a “de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.” The tech giant invested $13 billion in OpenAI, buying 49% of its business arm.
- Improperly licensing its GPT-4 AI model to Microsoft despite having an obligation to create such sophisticated tools for nonprofit ends.
The suit asks the court to require OpenAI’s research to be public. But some wonder whether Musk might have an ulterior motive in dragging OpenAI to court. Last year, he founded a rival AI startup, the Grok chatbot-maker xAI.
OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said in an internal memo seen by Bloomberg that the company “categorically disagrees” with Musk’s allegations, and a separate memo from Altman said he missed when Musk competed by just making better tech.
Musk vs. AI
Despite developing AI himself and using it to roast World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab, Musk has long been wary of rushing the development of the tech. In 2018 he said that AI is “far more dangerous than nukes.”
Last year, Musk was among the hundreds of tech luminaries who signed an open letter calling on all AI labs to pause testing of powerful AI systems for six months. Altman pushed back at the time, saying that OpenAI takes safety into account.
It’s been a rough week for Altman…the Musk lawsuit follows a WSJ report that the SEC is probing whether OpenAI misled investors around his brief ouster as CEO last November.—SK
