Musk sues OpenAI, Sam Altman for straying from nonprofit path

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, OpenAI was a nonprofit AI research lab that challenged the profit-driven model of big tech.

However, most of the OpenAI’s models are now closed source, contradicting the company’s own name.

This is part of the reason why Elon Musk is taking legal action against OpenAI, its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and related bodies, TechCrunch reported.

The lawsuit he filed says that the company has deviated from its original goal of using AI for the global good, and is instead chasing profit – allegedly breaching the founders’ contractual agreement.

A key point of the lawsuit is GPT-4, OpenAI’s recent natural language model. Musk believes that this system is essentially artificial general intelligence (AGI), and alleges that OpenAI and its commercial ally Microsoft have wrongly licensed it.

Notably, Musk launched his own AI chatbot last year, called Grok AI, which feeds on real-time information from his social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

Nevertheless, the lawsuit also takes issue with the restructuring of OpenAI’s board. According to Musk, Altman chose new board members who lack the “technical expertise or any substantial background in AI governance” that the previous board commanded.

Provided the court finds that OpenAI is presently operating for personal profit, the Tesla CEO is demanding potential refunds of donations initially provided for public-interest research.

See also: What I learned about genAI from failing to scale my AI startup