Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging they have violated their original contractual agreements around AI. The lawsuit filed in a court in San Francisco in the US revolves around OpenAI’s latest natural language model GPT-4. Let us know about it in detail.
CEOs of Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI, Sam Altman, are being sued by Elon Musk, who claims that they breached their initial contracts over artificial intelligence.
The case, which was brought before a US court in San Francisco, concerns OpenAI’s most recent natural language model, GPT-4. And’s owner is committed to serving humanity.
AGI is a serious threat to humanity
AGI, in Musk’s opinion, is potentially the most existential challenge facing civilization now and represents a major threat to humanity.
Musk has filed a lawsuit alleging unfair business practices, breach of fiduciary duty, and breach of contract. Up until 2018, Musk served as a founding member of the OpenAI board.
🧵Elon's losing case against OpenAI, Microsoft, and Altman, as explained by me, a tech lawyer, general counsel and former litigator.
Tl;dr – PR fireworks and fun-to-read intrigue and philosophizing about AGI. But legally, a stinker because there’s no contract breach. Thread. 👇 pic.twitter.com/VHhD4h3wrL
— Cecilia Ziniti (@CeciliaZin) March 2, 2024
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s initial research was conducted in the open, providing free and public access to its designs, models, and code. When OpenAI researchers discovered that an algorithm called Transformers, initially invented by Google, could perform many natural language tasks without any explicit training, entire communities emerged to enhance and extend the models released by OpenAI.
Altman, CEO of OPENAI in 2019
At OpenAI in 2019, Altman was appointed CEO. The Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)-3 language model from OpenAI was granted an exclusive license to Microsoft on September 22, 2020.
The license from Microsoft only covers OpenAI’s pre-AGI technology, which is the most significant issue. No rights over AGI were granted to Microsoft. And when OpenAI reached AGI was a decision made by the nonprofit board of the company, not by Microsoft.
Musk said the case was filed to force OpenAI to abide by the founding agreement and return to its mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not the individual defendants and the world’s largest technology company. Should be done to provide personal benefit.