Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman because they no longer seek the ‘good of humanity’ | Technology

The war between Elon Musk and Sam Altman is increasing in intensity. The Tesla owner last night filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, against its CEO, Sam Altman, and against other top officials of the organization, such as Greg Brockman (president of OpenAI), for having abandoned the initial mission. of the company he co-founded: contributing to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in a selfless and non-profit manner. Musk believes this is completely impossible in light of OpenAI’s deal with Microsoft, the world’s largest company by market capitalization, which invested $13 billion in its partner.

Musk’s lawyers argue that from the moment Microsoft partnered with OpenAI, the company changed its goal and focused on making money, which is at odds with its founding contract. “OpenAI, Inc. has become a subsidiary de facto closed source from the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” reads the lawsuit filed in San Francisco. “Under the leadership of its new board of directors, it is not only developing, but also perfecting AGI (general AI, which can match or surpass human capabilities) to maximize Microsoft’s profits, rather than to the benefit of humanity.”

Musk’s legal team also argues, as an example, that the company kept the design and development of GPT-4, the most advanced model launched to date, in “absolute secrecy.” And he adds a quote from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella from November last year: It wouldn’t matter “if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.” (…) We have its capabilities, its people, its IT, its data. We have everything.”

Elon Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, born in 2015 as a non-profit organization aimed at contributing to the scientific development of AI. The owner of Tesla, SpaceX or X (the former Twitter) contributed $50 million of his personal fortune to launch the project.

Unofficially, OpenAI was Musk and other Silicon Valley heavyweights, like Peter Thiel, an early Facebook investor and founder of Palantir, an attempt to counter Google’s dominance in time in the development of this technology. One of the necessary triggers for the emergence of OpenAI, whose name was Musk’s idea, was Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014, one of the world’s leading laboratories in deep learning, the most powerful AI technique. “Musk was deeply concerned about this. “He believed (and continues to believe) that, in the hands of a private, for-profit company like Google, artificial intelligence poses a danger to humanity,” the lawsuit says.

It was Musk himself who put Altman in charge of OpenAI. Although this relationship was interrupted a few years later: he left the organization in 2018, which was one of the biggest mistakes of his career, as he admitted. Already outside OpenAI, he promoted a letter calling for a six-month moratorium on AI research and in the meantime developed his own project, xAI, which he presented at the end of last year. Grok, your alternative to ChatGPT.

Altman, for his part, has become the visible leader of the generative AI revolution, widely championed by his company. The executive was suddenly fired last year by OpenAI’s shareholder meeting. However, under pressure from staff, who even threatened to leave en masse for Microsoft, he was reinstated in less than a week.

ChatGPT is one of the most successful applications in history. Launched in November 2022, it reached 100 million users in two months, a record never seen before, and today has around 200 million users. Its emergence has sparked a race in the tech sector to take the lead in what’s known as generative AI. Microsoft quickly partnered with OpenAI itself, in an alliance that is still under review by US and European competition authorities, while Google reorganized internally to accelerate the launch of AI-based tools.

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