Musk, who co-founded the artificial intelligence (AI) company, alleged that Altman and OpenAI set the company’s founding agreement “aflame” in its partnership with Microsoft. Musk now owns a separate AI company known as xAI.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit reads.
“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,” it continues. “Its technology, including GPT-4, is closed-source primarily to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft.”
According to the lawsuit, Musk, Altman and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman agreed in 2015 that OpenAI would be a nonprofit that developed AGI for the benefit of humanity and would remain open source, an agreement that they “reaffirmed with Mr. Musk on multiple occasions.”
However, with the advent of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in March 2023, the lawsuit argues Altman “caused OpenAI to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public.”
Unlike with earlier models, the AI company did not provide details about GPT-4’s internal design, a move that Musk argued was primarily driven by commercial considerations.
The lawsuit also alleges that GPT-4 represents an early version of AGI and should be outside the scope of Microsoft’s license with OpenAI, which only applied to the company’s pre-AGI technology.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
