Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for breach of contract. Musk says that the start-up broke its promise to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) for humans.
The lawsuit says that OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft broke a deal to make a major AI breakthrough “freely available to the public.” Instead, the lawsuit says, the two companies focused on secret technology to make the biggest company in the world as much money as possible.
This lawsuit makes an already long-running fight between Musk, who started his own AI company called X.AI, and OpenAI, which Microsoft invested $13 billion in. Musk says that OpenAI’s newest AI model, GPT4, went beyond the level of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which means that computers can now do things at or above the level of human intelligence.
As the case says, OpenAI’s board is “ill-equipped” to decide if GPT4 should already be considered AGI, so the court should make that decision. In the file, it is also said that OpenAI is making a model called Q* that will be even stronger and more useful than GPT4. Musk has known for a long time that AGI is a very serious threat to humanity and that OpenAI has become a closed-source branch of Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world.
OpenAI says it hasn’t reached AGI yet, even though its models are good at language and logic tasks. The case also tries to “compel” OpenAI to follow the terms of its founding agreement. Microsoft did not respond to this request for comment. Jason Kwon, the chief strategy officer of OpenAI, doesn’t agree with the lawsuit’s main point. He also says that GPT4 wasn’t AGI and that OpenAI is a separate company.