Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and several of its fellow co-founders, claiming that the company has deviated from its original principles in favor of Microsoft's "profit maximization" (first reported by the BBC) Open AI is best known for ChatGPT, and its largest investor is Microsoft. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in a long-term partnership with the company since 2019, and last year demonstrated its control by playing a leading role in the firing and rehiring of Altman by OpenAI's board.

Musk founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman (including Peter Thiel) to create artificial intelligence (AGI), and the three agreed on certain principles for the company inspired by going the opposite of Google: OpenAI's work is "for humanity ", it is non-profit, and it open-sources its technology freely. Musk will leave OpenAI in 2018.

The new lawsuit says that Musk agreed to co-found OpenAI only because of these conditions, but that the company now values profit over these principles. The lawsuit states:

"This lawsuit is brought to force OpenAI to comply with the founding agreement and return to its mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the personal benefit of individual defendants or the world's largest technology company."

The structure of OpenAI changed in 2019, when the nonprofit established a for-profit subsidiary, capped but nevertheless allowing serious money to begin flowing in. Microsoft invested $1 billion in the same year, and although the numbers are a bit fuzzy, it is now estimated that it has invested over $13 billion. To state the obvious, Microsoft is doing this because it thinks there is money in these hills.

The lawsuit also takes aim at the controversy surrounding Altman's firing last year, when OpenAI's board fired the CEO last November for inexplicably being "consistently less than candid in his communications." I like to imagine that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took a big sip of coffee before hearing this news. That's because Microsoft, in a highly unorthodox move, said it would hire Altman, essentially the majority of OpenAI's employees (who were broadly supportive of Altman). Faced with such opposition from its largest single investor, OpenAI's board threw in the towel, and days after being fired, Altman returned.

Musk's lawyers described these "surprising developments" as evidence of Microsoft's current influence over OpenAI (a relationship already under scrutiny by EU and US regulators). The lawsuit further states that as a result, OpenAI's "technology, including GPT-4, has been closed-sourced primarily for Microsoft's exclusive commercial benefit.

Complicating matters, Musk founded another AI startup, xAI, last year. So far, the company's only public product is a chatbot called Grok, which was designed rather in Musk's own image.

Musk's lawsuit for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices asks for a lot: that OpenAI be returned to its original nonprofit status, that the court order OpenAI to open source its AI advances, and yes, he wants money too! . At this point, one might wonder about the true motives of this billionaire troll. Musk now has a competitor in OpenAI, and some of his other ventures are not looking very rosy.

On the other hand, there is no denying that Musk has a point: OpenAI was founded on certain principles, but his co-founders abandoned them by accepting Microsoft's investment, and the fact that GPT-4 was not open source "burned up the founding agreement," he says. " The lawsuit states that OpenAI is now "closed-source and a de facto subsidiary of the world's largest technology company: Microsoft. Under its new board of directors, it is not only developing AGI, but actually improving it, not for the benefit of humanity, but to maximize Microsoft's profits.

The lawsuit emphasizes that AGI is a potential "threat to humanity" and that Microsoft sees it as a "source of profit and power." Lest Google feel left out, Musk's attorneys state that AGI is a "particularly serious and harmful danger" to us meatheads in the hands of such a high-tech company. He also mentions the rumored Q*, an OpenAI project from GPT-4 that is light years beyond ChatGPT's capabilities, and claims that OpenAI has no expertise to know if they are developing Skynet.

When Altman was fired, there were many rumors surrounding the reasons for his dismissal, with Q*'s potential capabilities and OpenAI's revenue division being the most persistent rumors.

Perhaps this will clarify, but in any case, it will be a clash of titans. Both sides in this debate can afford lawyers from around the world, and the stakes are not only very high, but also ideological. It just reminds me of the immortality of "Alien vs. Predator," though.