Billionaire
Elon Musk
filed a lawsuit against OpenAI - the creator of ChatGPT - and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of having abandoned the society's original mission.
According to documents presented on Thursday in a San Francisco court, consulted on Friday by AFP, Musk accuses OpenAI - which allied itself with Microsoft - of having breached the initial agreement for the development of OpenAI, which was to remain a non-profit organization. profit that
would work for the good of humanity.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman, among others, with non-profit status working on "open source" artificial intelligence programs (accessible, editable, usable and redistributable to all), to prevent Google from dominating this important technology.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and is now one of the company's most critical, and also founded his own artificial intelligence company, Xai, in 2023.
OpenAI did not make public the code for its latest GPT 4 language model, "breaking the original contract," Musk's lawyers allege in the complaint.
"Unlike the initial agreement, the defendants chose to use GPT 4 not for the good of humanity, but as an exclusive technology to maximize the profits of the largest company in the world," that is, Microsoft.
Microsoft pledged $13 billion in investments to OpenAI.
Altman has since refocused OpenAI on a lucrative path, for which he was fired by a portion of the board in November.
With support from Microsoft, the head of OpenAI was reinstated five days later.
Elon Musk demands that GPT 4 be excluded from the license granted by OpenAI to Microsoft.
Sam Altman, founder of OpenIA.
AP Photo
Internal turbulence at OpenIA
In mid-February, hundreds of OpenAI employees
threatened on Monday to leave the
leading
artificial intelligence (AI) company after the dismissal of co-founder Sam Altman, Microsoft's newest hire, and to move to the latter if the board of directors does not resign.
In a letter published among others by the WIRED portal and The Wall Street Journal, some of the company's senior officials expressed their criticism and displeasure with the company's decision regarding Altmant: "His (the board's) actions
made it evident that is incapable of managing OpenAI."
Included in the list of signatories' names was Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and one of the members of the four-person board that voted to oust Altman.
Also listed is top executive Mira Murati, who was tapped to replace Altman as chief executive on Friday,
an offer she rejected over the weekend.
More than 500 of a total of 770 staff at OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot has led the rapid rise of AI technology, reportedly support the content of the letter.
If the board of directors does not resign, they maintain, they will go to Microsoft, a company that announced this Monday the hiring of Altman, after the OpenIA board removed him from his position as executive director on Friday.