Elon Musk sues OpenAI for ‘treason’ by turning into a for-profit company

Billionaire Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) company that owns ChatGPT. The owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) accuses the company of: betraying principles and breaking contractual agreements.

The case was filed in a court in San Francisco, California, USA, and the hearing date is not yet known. The company as a whole, as well as co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, are also listed by name as defendants.

Musk’s main argument is that OpenAI harms his ideals. Transition from a nonprofit research organization to having a corporate arm. When this happened, contracts were changed and the brand’s entire strategy focused on making money.

According to Musk, he now owns ChatGPT “not just developing, but improving general-purpose AI to maximize profits.”.

But he had previously said he was focused. “benefit to humanity” — Something in the company’s articles of incorporation that is no longer valid.

The war between Musk and OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as an alliance of engineers and entrepreneurs seeking to conduct artificial intelligence research. Musk himself is one of the founding partners of the company.

But over the years, the billionaire distanced himself from the project and left OpenAI in 2019. He even tried to take control of the company but was rejected by the board of directors and other partners. From this point on, he became one of Altman and the company’s biggest critics.

Musk mainly complains that OpenAI has turned into a “closed-source subsidiary of one of the largest technology companies in the world.” In this case, he cites Microsoft, the main investor and one of the company’s largest partners, as an example.

Billionaire claims to have $44 million donated to OpenAI between 2016 and 2020, while still focused on not-for-profit. Part of the process involves recovering these values, as the company now has a different structure.

Elon Musk also complains about this OpenAI does not have a board with sufficient technical knowledge To maintain a powerful tool like the GPT-4 language model. The new members were recently elected following the controversial dismissal and rehiring of the CEO.