Musk Sues OpenAI, Its CEO Sam Altman Over Agreement Breach Around AI

The lawsuit, filed in a court in San Francisco in the US, revolves around OpenAI’s latest natural language model titled GPT-4.

The X owner alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft (which has poured billions of dollars into Sam Altman-run company) have “improperly licensed GPT-4” despite agreeing that artificial general intelligence (AGI) capabilities “would remain non-profit and dedicated to humanity”.

“Musk has long recognised that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity — perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today,” read the lawsuit.

Musk’s lawsuit details complaints such as contract breach, fiduciary duty violation, and unfair business practices.

Musk was an original board member of OpenAI until 2018.

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s initial research was performed in the “open, providing free and public access to designs, models, and code”.

When OpenAI researchers discovered that an algorithm called “Transformers,” initially invented by Google, could perform many natural language tasks without any explicit training, “entire communities sprung up to enhance and extend the models released by OpenAI”.