Elon Musk Sues OpenAI And CEO Sam Altman Over Agreement Breach

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New Delhi: Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of violating their initial contractual agreements concerning artificial intelligence (AI). Filed in a San Francisco court in the United States, the lawsuit centers on OpenAI's recent development of the GPT-4 natural language model.

The owner of company X has accused OpenAI and Microsoft of improperly licensing GPT-4. This is despite an agreement that the artificial general intelligence capabilities would be non-profit and aimed at serving humanity. ()

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

In Musk's lawsuit, he outlines grievances including breach of contract, violation of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices. Musk served as a founding 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”.

Altman became OpenAI CEO in 2019. On September 22, 2020, OpenAI entered into an agreement with Microsoft, exclusively licensing to Microsoft its Generative PreTrained Transformer (GPT)-3 language model.

“Most critically, the Microsoft license only applied to OpenAI’s pre-AGI technology. Microsoft obtained no rights to AGI. And it was up to OpenAI’s non-profit Board, not Microsoft, to determine when OpenAI attained AGI,” the lawsuit further read.

Musk said that this case is filed to compel OpenAI to “adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual defendants and the largest technology company in the world”. (With Inputs From IANS)