Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over alleged breach of contract

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its Chief Executive Sam Altman for allegedly failing to uphold an agreement inked on the time of the factitious intelligence group’s launch.

Musk, who was a part of OpenAI’s founding team, filed the lawsuit on Thursday with the San Francisco Superior Court. The Tesla Inc. CEO is searching for a ruling that might require the AI group to uphold the agreement at the main focus of the litigation. Moreover, Musk has asked the court to find out whether GPT-4 might qualify as a man-made general intelligence, which could have implications for OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft Corp.

OpenAI launched in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research group. On the time, Musk and other outstanding tech executives committed greater than $1 billion in donations to support its work. The Tesla CEO held a board seat until 2018, when he reportedly left within the wake of an unsuccessful takeover attempt. 

In his lawsuit, Musk charges that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman agreed the AI developer would adhere to a “founding agreement.” This agreement allegedly specified that OpenAI would operate as a “non-profit developing AGI for the advantage of humanity, not for a for-profit company.” Moreover, the grievance states that the AI developer committed to open-sourcing its work except in cases where safety considerations might warrant taking a special approach.

Musk accuses OpenAI of breaching the founding agreement. The lawsuit alleges that, despite committing to operate as a nonprofit with a deal with open-source research, the AI developer has “transformed right into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the most important technology company on the planet: Microsoft.”

OpenAI launched a for-profit arm in 2019 that raised $1 billion from Microsoft later that yr. Last January, the AI developer reportedly received an extra $10 billion from the cloud computing and software giant. The businesses also maintain a technical partnership that has seen Microsoft integrate OpenAI’s models into several of its products.

“This case is filed to compel OpenAI to stick to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the advantage of humanity, to not personally profit the person Defendants and the most important technology company on the planet,” Musk’s lawsuit states.

The Tesla CEO can also be asking the court to make a decision whether GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest large language model, needs to be considered an AGI. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI only allows the previous company to license models that don’t meet this criterion. Potentially, a ruling that finds GPT-4 qualifies as an AGI could influence Microsoft’s ability to incorporate the LLM series in its products.

Recent reports indicate OpenAI is developing a brand new language model dubbed Q* with more advanced capabilities than GPT-4. Musk’s lawsuit argues that, under the terms of the AI developer’s founding agreement, it can have to make the upcoming model publicly available.

Last June, Musk launched an AI startup called xAI Inc. that competes with OpenAI. The corporate’s first product is a ChatGPT-like chatbot called Grok that may answer natural language questions, generate code and perform related tasks. Regulatory filings indicate that xAI has raised no less than $135 million in enterprise funding. 

Photo: NASA/Wikimedia Commons