Elon Musk Kicks Off Battle of the Technocrats, Sam Altman Responds
The drama follows OpenAI into March 2024 as Elon Musk sues CEO Sam Altman and the company for breaching the founding agreement. OpenAI and Altman hit back at billionaire technocrat Elon Musk for suing them for what the latter believes is a fight for the company’s approach to AI development. Here’s the latest.
- The drama follows OpenAI into March 2024 as Elon Musk sues CEO Sam Altman and the company for breaching the founding agreement.
- Musk has expressed ethical qualms with Altman and OpenAI and has hit out multiple times. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is not taking the legal route to OpenAI.
- Sam Altman has responded by calling Musk’s actions “sad” and has disclosed previous email correspondence with him.
On Tuesday, OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman hit back at billionaire technocrat Elon Musk for stooping to a legal path for what the latter believes is a fight for the company’s approach to AI development. Meanwhile, OpenAI condemns the lawsuit and Musk himself for turning on his protégé-run company.
On March 1, Musk sued OpenAI, accusing the company of casting aside its contractual principles and forgoing its founding agreement to operate as a nonprofit company. Musk argued in his lawsuit that OpenAI shed its open-source principles when it partnered with Microsoft.
“I like to think of Elon as a builder and someone who competes by attempting to build better technology, and someone who I’d hope to be on our side,” Altman told his employees after Musk filed the lawsuit.
Musk was on OpenAI’s side since its inception and has contributed as much as $45 million to what everyone agreed would be a billion-dollar endeavor at the onset. However, as the redacted email correspondence of Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Altman and others with Musk (released in OpenAI’s rebuttal of Musk yesterday) reveals, OpenAI rejected his efforts to bring the AI company under Tesla’s fold, which is when Musk left OpenAI in February 2018.
“As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control. Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself. He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path,” OpenAI wrote.
Musk’s argument that Tesla would serve as the “cash cow” for OpenAI, like Google is to DeepMind and others, and thus didn’t sit well with OpenAI executives. “My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise,” Musk wrote to the OpenAI team in December 2018.
Since then, Musk alleged in his lawsuit that OpenAI has changed its corporate structure to a for-profit company and engaged in what he alleges constitute flagrant breaches of the founding agreement by transforming into a “closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
See More: Open Source vs. Proprietary AI: A Tussle for the Future of Artificial Intelligence
“Its technology, including GPT-4, is closed-source primarily to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft. Indeed, as the November 2023 drama was unfolding, Microsoft’s CEO boasted that it would not matter ‘[i]f OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.’ He explained that ‘[w]e have all the IP rights and all the capability.’ ‘We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything.’ ‘We are below them, above them, around them,’” the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit goes on to lay out Musk’s concerns regarding artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how he distrusts it in the hands of Google. And that OpenAI’s parallel research and development of GPT large language models (LLMs) has reached a stage where it is better at reasoning than average humans or AGI.
“Having reached the threshold of AGI, which under the Founding Agreement they were to develop for the benefit of humanity rather than for any for-profit company or personal profit, Defendants instead radically departed from their mission in breach of the Founding Agreement. GPT-4 is an entirely closed model. The internal design of GPT-4 remains a secret and no code has been released. OpenAI has not published a paper describing any aspect of its internal design; it has simply issued press releases boasting about its performance. The internal details of GPT-4 are known only to OpenAI and, on information and belief, to Microsoft. GPT-4 is hence the opposite of ‘open AI.’” – Musk’s lawsuit vs. Altman and OpenAI
Musk now seeks to:
- Shun Openai from monetizing from LLMs.
- Restore its nonprofit operations or make restitutions to those whose funding was “misappropriated.”
- Shun Microsoft from accessing GPT-4 as it constitutes AGI and is thereby outside the scope of OpenAI’s license to Microsoft.
- Establish that Q* and other OpenAI next-generation LLMs are AGI and cannot be licensed to Microsoft.
In 2023, Musk launched his AI company xAI, which has developed the Grok chatbot. His $44 billion acquisition, X (formerly Twitter), has also ceased access to its data for OpenAI’s LLM training.
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” wrote Altman, Brockman, Sutskever, Schulman, and Zaremba.
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