Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has initiated legal action against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging a breach of their original contractual commitments regarding artificial intelligence (AI).
The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco court in the United States, centers on OpenAI's recent development of the GPT-4 natural language model.
Musk contends that OpenAI and Microsoft, which has heavily invested in the company led by Altman, have "improperly licensed GPT-4" despite prior agreements stipulating that artificial general intelligence (AGI) capabilities would be "non-profit and dedicated to humanity."
"Musk has long acknowledged the serious threat AGI poses to humanity — possibly the greatest existential threat of our time," the lawsuit states.
Among Musk's grievances detailed in the lawsuit are breaches of contract, violations of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices.
Musk was an original board member of OpenAI until 2018.
The lawsuit outlines how OpenAI initially conducted research in an open manner, providing free and public access to designs, models, and code. However, as OpenAI researchers discovered the capabilities of an algorithm called "Transformers," originally developed by Google, to perform various natural language tasks without explicit training, "communities emerged to enhance and expand the models released by OpenAI."
Altman assumed the role of OpenAI CEO in 2019. On September 22, 2020, OpenAI struck an agreement with Microsoft, granting Microsoft exclusive licensing rights to its Generative PreTrained Transformer (GPT)-3 language model.
"Crucially, the Microsoft license only pertained to OpenAI's pre-AGI technology. Microsoft did not acquire any rights to AGI. The determination of when OpenAI achieved AGI rested with OpenAI's nonprofit board, not Microsoft," the lawsuit elaborates.
Musk asserts that the lawsuit aims to compel OpenAI to "uphold the Founding Agreement and return to its mission of developing AGI for the betterment of humanity, rather than serving the personal interests of the individual defendants and the world's largest technology company."
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