OpenAI must not be tied to Microsoft, agrees Elon Musk who sues the AI company

After getting sued by another 3 publications earlier this week, OpenAI finds itself sued by none other than Elon Musk. The tech magnate says OpenAI must return to its non-profit, open state, as it was before Microsoft invested in the company.

In other words, Musk says OpenAI committed a breach of contract and violated unfair competition laws, suing its CEO, Sam Altman, along with other OpenAI executives, and demanding the return of the independent OpenAI company.

In the lawsuit, which can be accessed here, Musk has a lot to say about OpenAI and Microsoft. He claims that Microsoft is using OpenAI to make millions, and the AI company is keeping the GPT-4’s code and design a secret, something that he doesn’t agree with.

In other parts of the lawsuit, Musk says OpenAI and Microsoft’s goal to reach AGI would not be beneficial to humanity, but only to them, as the technology would give them a source of power and money, stating:

Mr. Musk has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity—perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today. Mr. Musk publicly called for a variety of measures to address the dangers of AGI, from voluntary moratoria to regulation, but his calls largely fell on deaf ears. But where some like Mr. Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power.

It’s worth mentioning that Elon Musk was on the OpenAI’s board until 2018, and continued to make investments in the company until 2020. That year, OpenAI established a partnership with Microsoft, that saw the development and release of the GPT-3 model, and that was the first time the company committed a breach of contract, according to Musk.

Mr. Altman became OpenAI, Inc.’s 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. However, OpenAI published a detailed paper describing the internals and training data for GPT-3, enabling the community to create similar models themselves. And, 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, Inc.’s non-profit Board, not Microsoft, to determine when OpenAI attained AGI.

Moreover, Elon Musk, through the lawsuit, also claims OpenAI’s new GPT-4 model is the first step towards AGI, and Sam Altman being reinstated as CEO of the company a few days after he was fired, was all Microsoft exploring its power and using it to contain and control the company.

Furthermore, on information and belief, GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm, and hence expressly outside the scope of Microsoft’s September 2020 exclusive license with OpenAI. In this regard, Microsoft’s own researchers have publicly stated that, “[g]iven the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.” Moreover, on information and belief, OpenAI is currently developing a model known as Q* (Q star) that has an even stronger claim to AGI. As noted, Microsoft only has rights to certain of OpenAI’s pre-AGI technology. But for purposes of the Microsoft license, it is up to OpenAI, Inc.’s Board to determine whether OpenAI has attained AGI, and a Board coup took place in November 2023. On November 17, 2023, OpenAI, Inc.’s Board fired Mr. Altman after losing “confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI” because “he was not consistently candid with the board.” In a series of stunning developments spanning the next several days, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman, in concert with Microsoft, exploited Microsoft’s significant leverage over OpenAI, Inc. and forced the resignation of a majority of OpenAI, Inc.’s Board members, including Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Mr. Altman was reinstated as CEO of OpenAI, Inc. on November 21. On information and belief, the new Board members were hand-picked by Mr. Altman and blessed by Microsoft. The new Board members lack substantial AI expertise and, on information and belief, are ill equipped by design to make an independent determination of whether and when OpenAI has attained AGI—and hence when it has developed an algorithm that is outside the scope of Microsoft’s license.

The lawsuit also contains emails shared by Elon Musk and Sam Altman right when OpenAI was a nascent company, along with other information, and it comes in a week where OpenAI was the subject of different lawsuits.

Aside from news companies suing it, OpenAI is also investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Wall Street Journal reports the company is being accused of providing misleading to investors.

Hard week for OpenAI!