Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, saying the company behind ChatGPT has diverged from its original, nonprofit mission by partnering with Microsoft for $13 billion and keeping its code for its newest generative AI products a secret.
Musk, who co founded OpenAI in 2015, has since left and has formed his own AI company, xAI. His complaint, filed Thursday in California state court, said that company and its partnership with Microsoft violated OpenAI’s founding charter, representing a breach of contract. Musk is asking for a jury trial and for the company, Altman and co founder Greg Brockman to pay back the profit they received from the business.
OpenAI was founded as a check on what the founders believed was a serious threat artificial generative intelligence, or AGI, posed to humanity. The company created a board of overseers to review any product the company created and its products’ code was made public.
But Altman, Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever in 2019 formed OpenAI LP, a for profit entity that exists within the larger company’s structure. That for profit company took OpenAI from worthless to a valuation of $90 billion in just a few years †and Altman is largely credited as the mastermind of that plan and the key to the company’s success.
