Two tech titans – X/Twitter owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman - are set to go head-to-head in court, as the former has accused the ChatGPT maker of straying from its founding agreement as a non-profit startup towards a for-profit venture.
Musk contributed a significant amount of funding towards OpenAI when it was set up in 2015.
The trial began on Monday with jury selection – a process which was made a little awkward by reports that juror questionnaires voiced their dislike for Musk, with one branding the Tesla boss a “world-class jerk” and another highlighting his “damaging statements and actions”.
The case will be overseen by US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California.
Let’s run through the details, and the reactions…
Musk’s allegations
The lawsuit, available on CourthouseNews.com, states the complaint is filed for breach of contract, promissory estoppel (a fancy legal term which relates to preventing a party from going back on a promise made to another party), breach of fiduciary duty (managing other people’s money and acting in their beneficiaries’ interests), unfair competition, and accounting.
It reads: “Mr. Musk has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity—perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today. His concerns mirrored those raised before him by luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy.
“Our entire economy is based around the fact that humans work together and come up with the best solutions to a hard task. If a machine can solve nearly any task better than we can, that machine becomes more economically useful than we are.”
Put simply, AGI or ‘artificial general intelligence’ concerns a hypothetical stage whereby an AI system “can match or exceed the cognitive abilities of human beings across any task”, per IBM.
The lawsuit continues: “Together with Mr. [Greg] Brockman, the three agreed that this new lab: (a) would be a non-profit developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits; and (b) would be open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations, and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons (The “Founding Agreement”).
“Reflecting the Founding Agreement, Mr. Musk named this new AI lab “OpenAI,” which would compete with, and serve as a vital counterbalance to, Google/DeepMind in the race for AGI, but would do so to benefit humanity, not the shareholders of a private, for-profit company (much less one of the largest technology companies in the world).”
However, Musk’s lawyers allege defendants Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and OpenAI as a company “set the Founding Agreement aflame” in 2023 with the release of its GPT-4 language model, which they claim is an “AGI algorithm”.
“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.
“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,” it states.
OpenAI’s response
In a tweet shared on Monday, OpenAI said it “can’t wait” to make its case in court, “where both the truth and the law are on our side”.
“This lawsuit has always been a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor. We'll also finally have the chance to question Mr. Musk under oath before a jury of Californians about this attempt to undermine our work to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” it reads.
The jury trial continues on Tuesday with opening arguments.
Why not read…?
Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter
How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel
Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.
