Multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk is officially suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of hiding its AI models’ secrets from the world.
It’s a major escalation of a falling out that dates back to when Musk cofounded the company alongside Altman almost nine years ago. In 2019, Musk left OpenAI, which at the time was a non-profit, citing disagreements with leadership, which were likely related to executives’ efforts to push for a profit-driven approach.
Now, Musk is arguing that OpenAI’s $13 billion partnership with tech giant Microsoft betrays its original plans to develop an open-source AI, highlighting his longstanding “existential angst” about the technology.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit reads. “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.”
As always, it’s hard to get an exact read on Musk’s intention here. Is he just salty about having missed out on one of the biggest gravy trains in Silicon Valley history and is now trying to settle out of court to make up for his waning businesses? Worthy of note: Musk is now developing his own for-profit AI at several of his menagerie of companies, including X, xAI, and Tesla.
“Without Mr. Musk’s involvement and substantial supporting efforts and resources,” the suit reads, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground.”
Musk is accusing OpenAI and its leadership of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices.
As such, he’s calling for all of OpenAI’s technologies to be made openly available to the public and for Altman to give up all of the money he’s made so far, which are lofty requests that will more than likely raise considerable objections — if the suit even makes it to court, that is.
In his suit, Musk argues that OpenAI is getting closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point at which an AI can compete with humans on any intellectual task.
Musk claims that he’s been one of the few to ring the alarm bells over the development of the technology — which is far from the truth, of course — arguing that OpenAI’s closed-door development of AI models is dangerous.
“I’ve been banging this AI drum for a decade,” Musk told Business Insider in 2020, roughly a year after he left OpenAI. “We should be concerned about where AI is going. The people I see being the most wrong about AI are the ones who are very smart, because they can’t imagine that a computer could be way smarter than them.”
Meanwhile, his own AI venture xAI has released an “anti-woke,” dad joke-generating AI chatbot called Grok, which is trained on X-formerly-Twitter messages.
Musk has yet to open source Grok.
The billionaire is hoping to raise a whopping $6 billion for his AI venture, but exactly why remains a bit hazy. The company claims it wants to “understand reality” and “the true nature of the universe.”
In short, Musk certainly has a clear interest in suing OpenAI. His falling out with Altman, and OpenAI’s monumental rise to become a $80 billion company in his absence has clearly rattled him — and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get a piece of the pie.
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