Musk sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in court with a complaint, and the technology circle exploded again. From co-founding OpenAI in 2015 to today's court, the 46-page appeal focuses on the words "non-profit" and "open source." Musk believes that OpenAI regards profit above all else, and also moved out of the establishment agreement of OpenAI that year, claiming that OpenAI violated the agreement and demanded that Ultraman pay back the money. Once Musk wins the lawsuit, it will undoubtedly be a "catastrophe" for OpenAI.
If it loses profits, OpenAI will not be able to move an inch in the industry.
Contrary to the original intention. On February 29, Musk's paper was 46 pages long, 1The 40,000-word complaint took OpenAI, Ultraman, and President Greg Brockman to court. According to the filing, Musk accused OpenAI of deviating from its non-profit, open-source mission of open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI) committed to the public, instead forming an exclusive partnership with Microsoft, and secrecy GPT-4 as Microsoft's pursuit of commercial interests.
Musk also disclosed a heavyweight "secret email", the general content of which was that he had reached an agreement with Ultraman and Brockman: OpenAI is for the benefit of all mankind, and security should be the primary consideration. In OpenAI's non-joint-stock company registration certificate, it is also written in black and white that "the company is a non-profit organization", "no net income or net assets shall be owned by directors, officers or employees", "the company shall not have any share capital", and so on.
Musk claimed in the lawsuit that when he co-founded OpenAI with Altman and Brockman, he was based on a shared concern about the potential risks of AI technology and promised to ensure that the development of AI technology can benefit all mankind. However, as OpenAI's leading position in the AI field has been strengthened, especially after the development of the GPT-4 model, which is thought to be an early AGI, the company's direction has shifted radically. Musk believes that this shift is a blatant betrayal of OpenAI's non-profit nature and goes against the original purpose of its creation.
Musk's lawsuit asks the court to force OpenAI back to open source and prevent the company and its founders, as well as backers like Microsoft, from profiting from it. Musk's lawyers have accused OpenAI of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair competition, and have asked the court to take action.
At the moment, Musk, OpenAI, and Microsoft have not responded to the matter, and Musk has not even tweeted about it on X.
However, Altman posted a tweet in reply to a Twitter interaction with Musk in 2019, which seemed to be ironic for Musk's "stab in the back" for profit.
Some industry analysts believe that this lawsuit may be the biggest threat facing Ultraman after OpenAI's "Gong Dou". CNBC, a well-known financial institution in the United States, commented on this: "The sacredness of the contract signed by Musk and Ultraman when they sat down was violated, which is the essence of this lawsuit. ”
The beginning and end of the grievance. The lawsuit against Ultraman can be said to be a new chapter in the grudge between Musk and Ultraman. It's been nearly a decade since they met at a birthday party in California's wine country in 2015. At that time, Musk and Google CEO Larry Page had a heated argument, Musk argued that AI should not be in the hands of a few large companies, and that AI should be open to ensure that it can benefit all mankind.
A few weeks later, Musk had dinner with Altman, who was running a tech incubator at the time, and several researchers. With the support of the $1 billion raised by Musk and several Silicon Valley bigwigs, it will directly confront Page's artificial intelligence Deepmind, breaking the monopoly of large companies, with the ultimate goal of making AI benefit all mankind. Musk also gave the "non-profit organization" a name - OpenAI Nonprofit.
In order to "benefit all mankind" this beautiful vision, Musk was very "heart-to-heart" in the first few years of OpenAI's establishment. Not only did it contribute nearly $100 million in funding, but it also helped Ultraman recruit talent together. Ilya Sutskever, the core figure and chief scientist of OpenAI, was invited by Musk.
But the happy collaboration between the two ended at a fork in the road. Musk explained the reason why the two parted ways in his biography "Elon Musk's Biography". Musk wanted to integrate OpenAI into his other companies to facilitate feeding AI with a large amount of data, but this idea was rejected by the OpenAI team led by Ultraman. At that time, Ultraman had already started to create a for-profit division within OpenAI.
After "breaking up" with Ultraman, Musk gradually stopped donating to OpenAI (promising $1 billion) - which made OpenAI struggling in training, and finally accepted Microsoft's $1 billion investment and infrastructure technology, and together they built a supercomputer to train models, creating GhatGPT and later Dall-E, Sora and other large models.
November 2022, ChatGPT-35 was quietly launched, and then it sparked a global generative large model craze. And Musk has repeatedly launched a "mouth cannon" against OpenAI.
Motivation for sabotage. Regarding the lawsuit, Axios News** reported on March 1, citing a memo, that OpenAI's executives denied several allegations made by Musk in the lawsuit. "It's never going to be easy," Altman said, adding that similar lawsuits will continue.
Guo Tao, an angel investor and senior artificial intelligence expert, told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily that the key to the current lawsuit is actually around whether GPT-4 is AGI or not. If so, it would be beyond Microsoft's exclusive license agreement with OpenAI in September 2020, which did not open source GPT-4 and therefore violated the original agreement.
And in this lawsuit, there is another important interest link, that is, the competitive relationship between Musk's XAI and OpenAI. Musk founded XAI in March 2023 and has already released a conversational bot product called Grok. XAI has a grand goal – to understand the true nature of the universe.
As the founder of XAI, Musk has a clear "sabotage motive" for OpenAI. The billionaire is notoriously thin-skinned and has a reputation for holding grudges. He invested in Deepmind but failed to buy it, and in the years that followed, he trash-talked about the company's founders. After he tried to buy it but was rejected, he started his own artificial intelligence company. An American ** person commented.
In the opinion of some American legal experts, Musk's accusations are far-fetched, but he has the right to file a lawsuit. "What judge wouldn't see through that? A lawyer noted. Other legal experts say Musk's breach of contract allegations, based in part on an email between Musk and Altman, may not hold up in court.
Guo Tao said that the development of AI technology is inseparable from computing power and manpower. And these two often mean that strong financial support is needed. If OpenAI implements open source technology, it means that the last technical barrier will also be completely broken. The inference and application of AI large models are the result of a large amount of data feeding and manual continuous correction. If the court follows Musk's claim, this result will be a low-hanging fruit for other tech companies. OpenAI's biggest technological advantage in the market will no longer exist.
Beijing Business Daily reporter Zhao Tianshu.