Elon Musk is once again taking aim at the tech company he helped found. Musk filed a lawsuit Monday against OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, claiming they helped him “manipulate” the company.
that much lawsuit It alleges that OpenAI reneged on its initial promise to benefit humanity for the sake of business gain. The lawsuit claims that Altman and OpenAI’s leaders “intentionally courted and deceived Musk to exploit X’s owner’s humanitarian concerns about the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence.”
Musk said Early Investors OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization. December 2015. OpenAI restructured and established OpenAI LP as a for-profit entity. Corporation in 2019. OpenAI and Microsoft announced a partnership That same year, a $1 billion investment was required. Since then, the alliance has evolved. Expansion in 2023 It involves investments over several years, billions of dollars, reported to be $10 billion. Musk felt betrayed by OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, which he says “engaged in rampant self-dealing and built a network of OpenAI affiliates that pursued opaque interests.”
“The betrayal and fraud were Shakespearean in nature,” the lawsuit said.
Today’s lawsuit comes two months after Musk withdrew his previous lawsuit against OpenAI. Similarly argued The AI research platform has abandoned its initial mission of altruism and broad public sharing of technology. Musk withdrew the lawsuit without explanation in June, the day before a judge ruled against it. March 2024 Blog Posts In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI said: “OpenAI’s mission is to: [artificial general intelligence] “It’s beneficial to all of humanity, and it means helping build a safe and beneficial AGI and creating broadly distributed benefits.”
Musk’s attorney, Mark Toberoff, said in a statement: luck“No matter how many excuses and evasions the defendant makes, he cannot avoid responsibility for his self-interest and intentional misrepresentation of Musk and the public.”
He added: “Even today, the accused cover themselves with altruism. But as the world knows, the emperor never wore clothes.”
Musk and Altman have been feuding over power at OpenAI since before Musk left the company in 2018. Musk was concerned that OpenAI was falling behind Google’s DeepMind AI research lab. According to reports wanted sole control of the AI company. OpenAI’s founders disagreed, and Musk was forced to vacate his board seat. At the time, Musk publicly stated that he had stepped down from OpenAI because his role conflicted with his work at Tesla. In a blog post responding to Musk’s March lawsuit, OpenAI detailed its argument that Tesla should absorb OpenAI, including excerpts from Musk’s emails, and supported OpenAI’s argument that a for-profit division was needed to “create more sustainable revenue streams over time.”
“As I mentioned earlier, the most promising option I can think of is for OpenAI to connect with Tesla and use them as a cash cow,” Musk wrote. email January 31, 2018. “I think attachments to other big suspects (e.g. Apple? Amazon?) would fail because their corporate DNA is incompatible.”
“Elon’s previous emails continue to speak for themselves,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. luck.
Musk’s Big Stake in AI
Musk’s anxiety about AI is well documented. More than 10 yearsTesla CEO advocated for the creation of a government commission to study and regulate the technology.
“As AI becomes much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is likely to be similar to or greater than that of humans and cats,” he said. interview With technology journalist Kara Swisher in 2018.
AI is “destruction of civilizationMusk said this in April 2023, a month after signing the petition along with several other tech leaders. 6 months suspension The launch of GPT-4 accelerates AI development.
But for all Musk’s criticism of AI, which goes beyond his disdain for OpenAI itself, Musk has poured most of his energy into his AI efforts, which he has talked about at length. Supercomputer, Dojo It will train Tesla’s network of self-driving cars. Musk founded xAI in March 2023 to “understand the true nature of the universe” and compete with OpenAI.
Musk’s xAI venture raised $6 billion in May 2024 from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Saudi investor Kingdom Holding. Considered one of the best-funded AI projects to compete with OpenAI, xAI $24 billion valuation OpenAI is valued at $80 billion.
While Musk’s attacks on OpenAI have focused on his ethical concerns, xAI has also faced similar criticism. After the company’s first AI model, Grok, was released in November last year as a cheeky chatbot integrated into X, experts warned that the product’s anti-political correctness risks spreading bias and misinformation in the form of the model’s hallucinations.
“On the other hand, Elon Musk destroyed the trust and safety team. [X] And they’re trying to make these chatbots less politically correct, which means they’re more rude and inappropriate,” said Reid Blackman, an AI ethics advisor at Virtue Consultants. said The Financial Times.
Tesla and Microsoft did not immediately respond. luck‘ This is a request for opinion.
