Elon Musk last Thursday filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI – a company he helped to found – and its chief executive Sam Altman. What’s behind the sparring? ET explains.
What does Musk’s lawsuit say?
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, California, alleges that OpenAI has strayed from its original not-for-profit mission of building open-source artificial intelligence (AI) for the good of humanity, working now to ‘maximise profits’ for its major investor Microsoft.
Musk sought that the court direct OpenAI to make its research and technology publicly available and prevent the use of its assets and cutting-edge generative AI models for the financial gains of software major and investor Microsoft or any individual, Reuters reported.
His lawyers argued there was a breach of contract as OpenAI had agreed not to commercialise any product that its board considered artificial general intelligence (AGI). Microsoft, which joined the board last November following Altman’s reinstatement as CEO after an ouster, in a paper had said OpenAI's GPT-4 model could be viewed as early AGI.
Microsoft first invested $1 billion in the AI startup in 2019. Its multi-year investment now totals $13 billion, $10 billion of which