Musk's lawsuit, filed on February 29, 2024, accuses OpenAI and its leaders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of breaching the organization's founding agreement by keeping the internal design of GPT-4 closed and private, accessible only to OpenAI and, as the suit alleges, Microsoft. OpenAI intends to move to dismiss all of Musk's claims. The outcome of this lawsuit remains to be seen.
Key takeaways:
- OpenAI has responded to a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, its former co-founder, who claimed the company abandoned its founding principles and identity as a non-profit.
- The response includes a series of heavily redacted emails that seem to show Elon Musk not pushing back on the idea OpenAI would need to form a for-profit entity to continue its mission of achieving artificial generalized intelligence (AGI).
- Musk had proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla to use as its “cash cow” to provide the funds the founders thought they needed to pursue AGI, a proposal the multiple founders could not agree to.
- The lawsuit filed by Musk accuses OpenAI and Altman and Brockman specifically of breaching the organization’s “founding agreement” by keeping the “internal design” of GPT-4 closed and private, accessible only to OpenAI and, as the suit accuses, Microsoft.