Elon Musk has revved up his feud with the makers of AI chatbot and virtual assistant ChatGPT in a real live legal war that the world’s richest man is portraying as altruism versus greed.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday in federal court in Northern California, the Tesla founder is claiming that OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman have abandoned the company’s founding pledge to pioneer artificial intelligence to benefit humanity in favor of turning it into a multibillion-dollar commercial behemoth.
Musk, who founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and Brockman, was “betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices” when they struck a lucrative deal with Microsoft, the lawsuit says, according to The New York Times. The company is now valued at $80 billion, writes the Times.
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“The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions,” the suit adds.
Musk says OpenAI “flipped the script” after its technology approached Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a type of technology that matches or surpasses human capabilities.
“OpenAI’s focus shifted from its advertised charitable purpose—to benefit the public and protect humanity—to a vehicle for Altman and his partners’ self-enrichment. This is most clearly evidenced in OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft and the proliferation of an opaque web of for-profit OpenAI affiliates, recently valued at a whopping $100 billion,” the suit reads, according to Deadline.
With the new lawsuit, the billionaire is reviving a legal action he dropped nearly two months ago against OpenAI after Altman and Brockman asked a judge to dismiss it. They agreed the company was launched to help the public good amid concerns that, left unfettered, AI had the potential to destroy the human race.
But when Musk left OpenAI in 2018, withdrawing financial support, the company got a $13 billion lifeline from Microsoft and released ChatGPT four years later.
The new lawsuit alleges: “Elon Musk’s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook tale of altruism over greed. Altman, in concert with other defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by A.I.”
In response to Musk’s original lawsuit, OpenAI wrote, according to Deadline, that “were this case to proceed to discovery, the evidence would show that Musk supported a for-profit structure for OpenAI, to be controlled by Musk himself, and dropped the project when his wishes were not followed.”
