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Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman (techcrunch.com) 179

Elon Musk has sued OpenAI, its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and affiliated entities, alleging the ChatGPT makers have breached their original contractual agreements by pursuing profits instead of the non-profit's founding mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. TechCrunch: Musk, a co-founder and early backer of OpenAI, claims Altman and Brockman convinced him to help found and bankroll the startup in 2015 with promises it would be a non-profit focused on countering the competitive threat from Google. The founding agreement required OpenAI to make its technology "freely available" to the public, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit, filed in a court in San Francisco late Thursday, says that OpenAI, the world's most valuable AI startup, has shifted to a for-profit model focused on commercializing its AGI research after partnering with Microsoft, the world's most valuable company that has invested about $13 billion into the startup. "In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity," the lawsuit adds. "This was a stark betrayal of the Founding Agreement."

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Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman

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  • needs saving from its own creators. #Irony
  • Embrace and extend (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Friday March 01, 2024 @07:51AM (#64281532)

    This is just Microsoft doing what they have always very publicly done. It won't be long before everyone at OpenAI is flat out on the Microsoft payroll through a back door acquisition. It's been happening in public view.

    I dealt with Microsoft rep who came to our office over a proposed deal with my startup. Guy was there to do technical due diligence etc. so he has a bunch of questions like any potential client I had answered a zillion times before then he switches to asking to see my production firewall rules and source code. I told him politely but absolutely not.

    After some back n forth he gets very huffy with me and this happens:
    Him: "Do you understand who I represent??"
    Me: "Yes, I know exactly who you represent and how your company does business with smaller companies and that is exactly why you will never see my firewall or source code until after you've bought us and the check has cleared".
    Him: *head explodes*
    End of meeting.

    They treated my C levels the same so they were told to fuck off.

    Arrogant pieces of shit. None of the other Fortune 100s we dealt with were dicks, most were quite nice and kudos to HP for being some of the easiest people I've ever worked with.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday March 01, 2024 @08:11AM (#64281576)

      Interesting. I never had the misfortune to deal with any MS rep, but this fits nicely with my expectations.

      And their products are getting crappier by the minute. I just found out a few days ago that their o365 file classification labels are fake security and are completely worthless: One of the Universities I teach for has had the bad sense to disallow "print to PDF" in o365 and Students rightfully complained that they could not read the PDFs made with the other options in PowerPoint (I am forced to use it there). So I did some experiments. Turns out, all I had to do was switch the organization to the o365 account of another University (one click) and suddenly the classification labels vanished and I could print to PDF with no issues.

      That is cargo-cult fake security and much worse than not having security at all! I have to admit I was somewhat surprised that things at Microsoft are now this abysmally bad. Fake ineffective rituals to pretend to have an enterprise-grade security mechanism! This was on my own computer, but still. Security mechanisms must be effective or they are much worse than not having them, because they mislead people into depending on them and then things go wrong.

    • by sinij ( 911942 )
      Is there any benevolent interpretation for such ask?
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is just Microsoft doing what they have always very publicly done.

      Corporate charters being enforced/broken/changed does carry a lot of weight in court.

      99% of the time it is the corporate charter that promises profits to stock holders, and holders of controlling stock can and do sue companies all the time when those promises are not met.
      They nearly always win too.
      This case is an odd duck since the OpenAI charter doesn't promise profits but instead a vague "for the good of humanity" phrase.

      The reality of it is just that Elon, who was given his controlling stock options for

      • This is just Microsoft doing what they have always very publicly done.

        Corporate charters being enforced/broken/changed does carry a lot of weight in court.

        99% of the time it is the corporate charter that promises profits to stock holders, and holders of controlling stock can and do sue companies all the time when those promises are not met. They nearly always win too. This case is an odd duck since the OpenAI charter doesn't promise profits but instead a vague "for the good of humanity" phrase.

        The reality of it is just that Elon, who was given his controlling stock options for $0, is attempting to have a judge assign a >$0 value to those stocks, so that he will get something back when he refuses to accept the changes to the new corporate charter.

        The two results of such lawsuits is to be compensated when the company revokes your controlling shares by not agreeing to the updated charter, and to be compensated for damages by not enforcing the charter.

        He will lose his controlling shares either way, so might as well try to get some cash out of it.

        It's hard to say regarding damages here. Normally when the charter promises profits, there are ways to calculate out dollar amounts of lost potential profit to argue to the judge. Here they didn't promise profits, but instead some vague "for the betterment of humanity" Not so easy to put a dollar amount on that.. although I'm sure Elon will try. Ultimately it comes down to what the judge thinks, and could very easily be none.

        Considering our entire society right now is completely built on the premise that "corporate profit is the ultimate goal and purpose of all of humanity," my guess would be that "for the betterment of humanity" will either be deemed an impossible to meet standard and thus disregarded, or deemed as directly comparable to a profit first mentality, and thus disregarded in preference of bowing to corporate profit. I kinda like that we're at least getting a public showdown over "good of humanity" vs. "profit first

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Sure Donald. And the wind turbines are killing the whales.

      But what does your imaginary Microsoft/HP diatribe have to do with Musk suing OpenAI? Or is it just about demonstrating what a douche you are?

      • Yeah weird how someone on slashdot, a tech social site full of old techies, has ever talked to someone at a large tech co pant. A completely ridiculous and unbelievable story! You totally busted me! No one here has ever talked to a big tech company!

        Lmao, you're so wildly insanely over the top triggered. Thank you for making me laugh so hard first thing in the morning.

        Enjoy your weekend, bro.

    • by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      Not sure how old you are; but in the very very early 90s they intentionally sold windows 3.1 for $5 to all the small computer builders. They later came back with fine-print royalty clauses and started gobbling up companies left and right. Its how they acquired the hardware company that was making the Natural ergonomic keyboard and mouse. Only company I ever wished the employees all got prostate cancer. Dont even get me started on their false flag linux editorial site. Its why Linus had to trademark linux.
      • Yup, I remember those days. They also strong armed BeOS out of existence. And many many other shitty things along the way.

        Oh and before Windows, they strong armed the MSDos competitors, too. It's in their DNA.

    • Interesting.
      That's not the first time I've heard that about HP either.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        OTOH, their technical reputation is (or was the last time I dealt with them) extremely low. (Unless you really mean HPE or something.)

  • Wow, I had to look it up to verify. I did not think they were still #1 market cap, over Apple, Aramco, the Nvidia bubble, Amazon, Google...

  • Claims it was to benefit humanity and freely available yet his latest attempt and creating a LLM is locked behind a twitter paywall.
  • Way to go Elon :]
  • by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Friday March 01, 2024 @08:40AM (#64281634)
    It's still just a glorified chatbot.
    • ... and not a very good one at that. Ref: https://www.pcguide.com/ai/gpt... [pcguide.com]
    • It's a GREAT documentation summarizer.

      And, honestly, we're having to rewrite our C++ programming tests. It can answer questions about copy elision and move semantics better than most humans, and the questions that are small programming tasks are trivially solved by it.

      The questions aren't meant to be super difficult (though in the case of copy elision and move semantics, it's a little bit obscure and you have to go do some reading) but ChatGPT completely obviates them.

      I know ChatGPT doesn't actually KNOW th

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Saying it's a stochastic parrot may be true, but saying it can't reason is false. Unfortunately, what it reasons about is patterns of text rather than the physical world.

  • by Cafe Alpha ( 891670 ) on Friday March 01, 2024 @09:09AM (#64281688) Journal

    Elon is 100% correct that OpenAI betrayed its founding document, but I don't see how that translates to a civil suit.

    • by Rinnon ( 1474161 )

      I haven't read the suit (nor do I plan to) but generally speaking cash money isn't the only thing you can sue for. You could seek an injunction barring a party from performing a particular act; or you could seek specific performance, which is a discretionary equitable remedy awarded in lieu of damages.

      For example, if you buy a car, which includes the service of if being delivered to your house, and the seller transfers you ownership of the car but leaves the car in another country, the lawsuit could seek a

  • "Open"AI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cajun Hell ( 725246 ) on Friday March 01, 2024 @10:21AM (#64281884) Homepage Journal

    I have no idea about Musk's legal claims and what he is owed. Maybe he's full of shit as usual, and maybe he has a great case.

    But about having "open" in your name while your main product is proprietary: if I were on a jury, that combination of facts would give me the default assumption that the company intended willful fraud.

    "Open"AI has the burden of proof that they're not crooks.

    They can meet that burden by showing that we're all misspelling their name (it's really "O Peen AI"). Or they could meet that burden by providing a link to the full source and data, along with a statement that it's all been given to Public Domain.

    Barring that, they very much look like intentional crooks who are deliberately ripping off all contributors and investors.

    • I have no idea about Musk's legal claims and what he is owed. Maybe he's full of shit as usual, and maybe he has a great case.

      But about having "open" in your name while your main product is proprietary: if I were on a jury, that combination of facts would give me the default assumption that the company intended willful fraud.

      "Open"AI has the burden of proof that they're not crooks.

      They can meet that burden by showing that we're all misspelling their name (it's really "O Peen AI"). Or they could meet that burden by providing a link to the full source and data, along with a statement that it's all been given to Public Domain.

      Barring that, they very much look like intentional crooks who are deliberately ripping off all contributors and investors.

      Words don't have meanings in the hands of the marketroids. You can make any word mean anything. That's been a thing for about as long as marketing has existed. There's no requirement that the title of a book or the name of a company have ANYTHING to do with what they produce. I'd think the first line of argument could be "open, in this case, means open to the investors." Done. *WIPES HANDS*

  • Recall that there were rumors that OpenAI had either achieved, or had breakthroughs relating to AGI, back when Altman was fired:

    https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]

    Musk is using a lawsuit to do a few things at once, I think, and it'll be obvious whether he's achieved his goals depending upon how the case shakes out.

    I predict that they'll settle to avoid discovery; Musk will be made aware of their AGI progress, and X.ai will receive the same access to OpenAI's tech as Microsoft. No benefit to humanity.

    I hope I'

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