Elon Musk Revives Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman – The New York Times
Artificial Intelligence
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The Tesla chief executive has renewed claims that the A.I. start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Cade Metz
Reporting from San Francisco
Elon Musk has revived a lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT, refueling a six-year-old feud that began with a power struggle at the San Francisco start-up.
Like the original suit, the new complaint, filed on Monday in federal court in Northern California, claims that OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Mr. Musk withdrew his original suit seven weeks ago, without an explanation, one day before a judge was set to rule on whether it should be dismissed.
After joining with Mr. Musk to create OpenAI in 2015 and pledging to carefully develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, the suit claims, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman abandoned this mission by entering a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft.
Mr. Musk was “betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices,” the suit said. “The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions.”
In response to Mr. Musk’s new suit, OpenAI pointed to a company blog post about his original suit that said his claims were meritless and reproduced emails indicating that Mr. Musk had tried to transform OpenAI into a commercial operation before leaving the organization in 2018.
“Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” said Lindsey Held, a spokeswoman for OpenAI.
In the blog post, Mr. Altman and others at the company said that the company aimed to serve the public good by building artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
“The mission of OpenAI is to ensure A.G.I. benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial A.G.I. and helping create broadly distributed benefits,” they said.
When Mr. Musk founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and several young A.I. researchers, he envisioned the research lab as a necessary counterweight to A.I. work being done by Google. He believed that Google and its co-founder Larry Page were not sufficiently concerned with A.I.’s dangers.
Echoing the warnings of some others in the field, Mr. Musk worried that A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Mr. Altman and other OpenAI founders expressed similar concerns at the time. They created OpenAI as a nonprofit and vowed to freely share its technology with the public. They argued that A.I. would be too powerful and too dangerous to be controlled by a single entity like Google.
Mr. Musk parted ways with OpenAI in 2018 after a power struggle, withdrawing his financial support. Forced to find other sources of funding, Mr. Altman transformed OpenAI into a for-profit company and eventually raised $13 billion from Microsoft.
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in humanlike prose. This spurred an industrywide race toward A.I., spanning tech giants like Google and Microsoft as well as a new wave of start-ups. Mr. Musk founded his own A.I. company, xAI, last year while still warning against the dangers of the technology.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
In November, OpenAI’s board of directors unexpectedly fired Mr. Altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission to build A.I. for the good of humanity. He was reinstated five days later.
About two months after that, Mr. Musk sued OpenAI in a state court in San Francisco. The new suit, filed in federal court, claims that Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman knowingly misled him when they teamed up with him to create OpenAI.
“Elon Musk’s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook tale of altruism over greed,” the suit said. “Altman, in concert with other defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by A.I.”
The suit claims that Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman have backtracked on their promise to freely share, or open source, their company’s technologies and opted instead to provide Microsoft with an exclusive license to the technologies.
Mr. Musk filed the new suit in federal court in part because it argues that OpenAI violated federal racketeering laws by conspiring to defraud Mr. Musk, his lawyer, Marc Toberoff, said in an interview.
“The previous suit lacked teeth — and I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” he said. “This is a much more forceful lawsuit.”
The suit argues that OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft specifies that the tech giant would no longer have a right to OpenAI’s technology once the lab had achieved A.G.I. It asks the court to decide whether OpenAI’s latest systems have achieved A.G.I. and determine whether the company’s contract with Microsoft should be voided.
Most experts say that OpenAI’s current technology is not A.G.I. and that scientists do not yet know how to build such a system.
In late May, OpenAI announced that it had started working on a new artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives ChatGPT. The company said it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities.”
OpenAI is valued at more than $80 billion, according to its latest funding round. Mr. Musk’s company, xAI, is valued at $24 billion.
Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz
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Google, Microsoft and Amazon have made deals with A.I. start-ups for their technology and top employees, but have shied from owning the firms. Here’s why.
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As health insurance plans increasingly rely on technology to deny treatment, physicians are fighting back with chatbots that synthesize research and make the case.
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This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
Advertisement
Supported by
The Tesla chief executive has renewed claims that the A.I. start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Cade Metz
Reporting from San Francisco
Elon Musk has revived a lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT, refueling a six-year-old feud that began with a power struggle at the San Francisco start-up.
Like the original suit, the new complaint, filed on Monday in federal court in Northern California, claims that OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Mr. Musk withdrew his original suit seven weeks ago, without an explanation, one day before a judge was set to rule on whether it should be dismissed.
After joining with Mr. Musk to create OpenAI in 2015 and pledging to carefully develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, the suit claims, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman abandoned this mission by entering a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft.
Mr. Musk was “betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices,” the suit said. “The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions.”
In response to Mr. Musk’s new suit, OpenAI pointed to a company blog post about his original suit that said his claims were meritless and reproduced emails indicating that Mr. Musk had tried to transform OpenAI into a commercial operation before leaving the organization in 2018.
“Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” said Lindsey Held, a spokeswoman for OpenAI.
In the blog post, Mr. Altman and others at the company said that the company aimed to serve the public good by building artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
“The mission of OpenAI is to ensure A.G.I. benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial A.G.I. and helping create broadly distributed benefits,” they said.
When Mr. Musk founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and several young A.I. researchers, he envisioned the research lab as a necessary counterweight to A.I. work being done by Google. He believed that Google and its co-founder Larry Page were not sufficiently concerned with A.I.’s dangers.
Echoing the warnings of some others in the field, Mr. Musk worried that A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Mr. Altman and other OpenAI founders expressed similar concerns at the time. They created OpenAI as a nonprofit and vowed to freely share its technology with the public. They argued that A.I. would be too powerful and too dangerous to be controlled by a single entity like Google.
Mr. Musk parted ways with OpenAI in 2018 after a power struggle, withdrawing his financial support. Forced to find other sources of funding, Mr. Altman transformed OpenAI into a for-profit company and eventually raised $13 billion from Microsoft.
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in humanlike prose. This spurred an industrywide race toward A.I., spanning tech giants like Google and Microsoft as well as a new wave of start-ups. Mr. Musk founded his own A.I. company, xAI, last year while still warning against the dangers of the technology.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
In November, OpenAI’s board of directors unexpectedly fired Mr. Altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission to build A.I. for the good of humanity. He was reinstated five days later.
About two months after that, Mr. Musk sued OpenAI in a state court in San Francisco. The new suit, filed in federal court, claims that Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman knowingly misled him when they teamed up with him to create OpenAI.
“Elon Musk’s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook tale of altruism over greed,” the suit said. “Altman, in concert with other defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by A.I.”
The suit claims that Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman have backtracked on their promise to freely share, or open source, their company’s technologies and opted instead to provide Microsoft with an exclusive license to the technologies.
Mr. Musk filed the new suit in federal court in part because it argues that OpenAI violated federal racketeering laws by conspiring to defraud Mr. Musk, his lawyer, Marc Toberoff, said in an interview.
“The previous suit lacked teeth — and I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” he said. “This is a much more forceful lawsuit.”
The suit argues that OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft specifies that the tech giant would no longer have a right to OpenAI’s technology once the lab had achieved A.G.I. It asks the court to decide whether OpenAI’s latest systems have achieved A.G.I. and determine whether the company’s contract with Microsoft should be voided.
Most experts say that OpenAI’s current technology is not A.G.I. and that scientists do not yet know how to build such a system.
In late May, OpenAI announced that it had started working on a new artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives ChatGPT. The company said it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities.”
OpenAI is valued at more than $80 billion, according to its latest funding round. Mr. Musk’s company, xAI, is valued at $24 billion.
Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz
News and Analysis
California lawmakers have amended a bill that would create new restrictions for A.I., paving the way for first-of-their-kind safety rules that could set new standards for how tech companies develop their systems.
In a report, OpenAI revealed that it had considered the potential for users to form an emotional reliance on ChatGPT’s new, humanlike voice mode.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon have made deals with A.I. start-ups for their technology and top employees, but have shied from owning the firms. Here’s why.
The Age of A.I.
Hollywood actors and writers won strict limits on A.I. in contract negotiations, but movie editors and artists face a growing challenge.
As health insurance plans increasingly rely on technology to deny treatment, physicians are fighting back with chatbots that synthesize research and make the case.
The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil hopes to reach “the Singularity” and live indefinitely. His margin of error at 76 is shrinking.
Advertisement
This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
