What just happened? OpenAI might be struggling to keep track of all the lawsuits launched against it. After being sued by The New York Times and other entities, Elon Musk has become the latest to launch litigation against the ChatGPT maker and CEO Sam Altman. Musk's case isn't over copyright infringement, though; he says the pair have breached their original contractual agreements by putting profit ahead of developing AI that benefits humanity.
Musk was one of the co-founders, backers, and initial board members of OpenAI, departing the company in 2018 over what he said was a conflict of interest with Tesla.
Musk says that when he was approached by Altman and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, to help fund the startup in 2015, he was promised that OpenAI would be an open-source, not-for-profit company focused on safely creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI) and countering the competitive threat from Google.
Three years later, soon after Musk left, OpenAI established its for-profit business, which has attracted $13 billion of investment from Microsoft. In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco, lawyers said OpenAI's focus on money breaches the original contractual agreements.
"OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. 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," the lawsuit states. "This was a stark betrayal of the Founding Agreement." The complaint notes that Musk donated $44 million to the nonprofit between 2016 to September 2020.
Musk hasn't tried to hide his disdain for ChatGPT and OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft. He called the chatbot "woke" last year and said the company was "effectively controlled by Microsoft." Musk said he had been offered a stake in the for-profit branch of OpenAI but refused to accept over ethical reasons.
The suit also claims that the design of GPT-4, OpenAI's most advanced LLM, had been kept "a complete secret" by the company. Musk claims GPT-4 constitutes an AGI and that OpenAI and Microsoft improperly licensed the LLM.
The lawsuit aims to force OpenAI to stick to its original mission of benefiting humanity via AI. It also seeks to stop the company from monetizing technologies developed under its non-profit for the benefit of executives and partners such as Microsoft. As reported by TechCrunch, Musk also asks for accounting and potential restitution of donations that were meant to fund OpenAI's public-minded research.
OpenAI and in some cases Microsoft are currently being sued for copyright infringement by The New York Times, which is accused of paying someone to "hack" ChatGPT, along with several digital publishers, authors, and other creators. With the world's richest person filing suit, OpenAI might find a lot of the money it's currently generating being spent on lawyers' fees.