All a-bot the money
Musk sues OpenAI for putting cash over ‘mission’
Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief Sam Altman, alleging the firm has “radically depart[ed] from its original mission” by prioritizing profit over humanity.
Musk’s lawsuit, filed in California’s Superior Court late Thursday, notes that OpenAI’s certificate of incorporation states that its work “will benefit the public,” and that it isn’t “organized for the private gain of any person.”
Nevertheless, OpenAI, under a new board formed in November after Altman’s short-lived ousting as CEO — now seeks “to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the suit claims.
To demonstrate OpenAI’s deep ties to the tech behemoth, the complaint pointed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comment in November as the drama was unfolding — stating publicly “that it would not matter “if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.”
Nadella said his company has “all the IP rights and all the capability” to keep OpenAI’s tech running — including GPT-4, the fourth and most advanced version of ChatGPT, whose internal design Musk alleged “remains a complete secret except to OpenAI — and, on information and belief, Microsoft.”
The suit comes as a rivalry between OpenAI and Musk’s own artificial-intelligence startup xAI is heating up.
On Thursday, The Post reported that xAI — which powers the snarky Grok chatbot — is aiming to raise billions of dollars in the coming weeks in a private funding round that could value the company as high as $20 billion.
Musk, 52, was on OpenAI’s founding team with Altman and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel back in 2015 when the AI firm was launched as an open-source alternative to behemoths like Google, which the year before had acquired DeepMind.
Musk and Altman were reportedly friends at the time, though that dissolved when Altman led OpenAI into a partnership with Microsoft, marking a transition away from its purely nonprofit roots, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography on Musk.
Musk’s legal counsel and representatives for OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.
Elon Musk (left) — right up there among the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs — has filed suit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, saying the company has violated its terms of incorporation by working to boost profits for Microsoft instead of working to “benefit the public.”