Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and the company’s co-founders, accusing the company of deviating from its original principles in favor of “maximizing profits” for Microsoft.First reported by the BBC). Open AI is best known for his ChatGPT, whose biggest investor so far is Microsoft. The company has invested billions of dollars in long-term partnerships with the company since his 2019, and last year showed its level of control by taking a leading role in ChatGPT. Firing and rehiring of Mr. Altman By OpenAI board.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman (Including, among others, Peter Thiel) To develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) in 2015, the three agreed on certain principles for a company inspired by doing the opposite of Google. OpenAI’s work will be “for the benefit of humanity,” it will be non-profit, and its technology will be freely open sourced. Musk will leave OpenAI in 2018.
The new lawsuit says it was only under these conditions that Musk agreed to co-found OpenAI, and that the company is now more focused on profits than those principles. The complaint states:
“This lawsuit seeks to force OpenAI to abide by its founding agreement and return to its mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the personal benefit of individual defendants or the world’s largest technology companies. It was raised by.”
OpenAI’s structure changed in 2019, with the nonprofit creating a for-profit subsidiary. Although the subsidiary had a cap in place, large amounts of money still started flowing into it. Microsoft invested $1 billion in the same year, and while the numbers are a bit fuzzy, it is currently estimated that it has invested more than $13 billion. To put it bluntly, Microsoft is doing this because it thinks it has more money than mountains.
The lawsuit also focuses on the controversy surrounding Mr. Altman’s firing last year. OpenAI’s board of directors ousted the company’s CEO last November on mysterious grounds that he did not “communicate consistently and openly.” I like to imagine that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had just taken a sip of coffee before hearing this news, because in a highly unusual move, Microsoft stepped in and said, would hire altman And basically the majority of OpenAI’s employees (who supported Altman extensively). Faced with this kind of opposition from its single largest investor, OpenAI’s board threw in the towel and Altman was reinstated days after his firing.
Musk’s lawyers described these “alarming developments” as evidence of the influence Microsoft currently has over OpenAI, a relationship that is already under scrutiny by EU and US regulators. There is. The lawsuit further states that as a result, OpenAI’s “technology, including GPT-4, is closed source primarily to serve Microsoft’s proprietary commercial interests.” […] This secrecy is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety. ”
Complicating matters, Musk founded another AI startup, xAI, last year. However, the only product the company has released so far is a chatbot called Grok, which is rather designed in Musk’s own image. It’s supposed to be interesting, but it’s just a little boring.
Musk’s lawsuit alleges breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices, and requires a court order to return OpenAI to its original nonprofit roots and open source OpenAI, among other issues. I’m looking for something. As AI advances, oh yeah, he wants money too. At this point, you may be wondering about the billionaire troll’s true motives. After all, Musk now has competitors to OpenAI, and things aren’t looking so rosy for some of his other businesses.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that Mr. Musk has a point. OpenAI was founded on certain principles, but the co-founders’ abandonment of those principles in favor of Microsoft’s investment and the fact that GPT-4 is not open source “sparked the founding agreement. ” he says. According to the complaint, OpenAI is now “a closed-source de facto subsidiary of Microsoft, the world’s largest technology company. Under its new board, the company is not just developing, but actually We’re not just developing it, we’re actually making improvements to maximize Microsoft’s profits for the benefit of humanity. ”
The lawsuit highlights AGI’s potential “threat to humanity” and that Microsoft views AGI as more of a “source of profit and power.” There’s room for Google to take a few shots at this, too, so it doesn’t feel left out. Musk’s lawyers say AGI in the hands of these technology companies is a “particularly serious and harmful danger” to us meatheads. GPT-4 also mentioned Q*, an OpenAI project that is said to be light years beyond ChatGPT’s capabilities, and that OpenAI does not have the expertise to know if it is developing Skynet. claims.
At the time of Altman’s firing, there was a lot of debate about the reasons for his firing, with both Q*’s potential and OpenAI’s commercial arm being the most persistent rumors, but the turn of events made it impossible for him to leave the boardroom. There were very few people there. It knows the truth itself.
Perhaps this will reveal it, but either way it will be a clash of giants. Both sides of this debate can afford lawyers from all over the world, and the stakes are not only very high, but also ideological. What was OpenAI founded for? And is Musk really here? We’re certainly going to find out, but all I remember is Alien vs. Predator’s Immortal Bondage: Whoever wins, we lose.
