OpenAI is facing another lawsuit as tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has taken action against the maker behind the large-language model (LLM) ChatGPT.
As reported by the Associated Press, the X/Twitter owner filed a lawsuit on Thursday in the San Francisco County Superior Court. The lawsuit claims OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, have breached its founding agreement to research and use artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. The lawsuit claims OpenAI is instead using AI to make a profit, citing the company's partnership with Microsoft as one of the reasons. Last year, Microsoft announced a multi-million dollar investment into OpenAI.
"OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft," the complaint mentions. "Under its new Board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI [artificial general intellgience] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity."
OpenAI was established in 2015 as a nonprofit company founded by several individuals, including Altman and current OpenAI president Greg Brockman. Musk was one of a few co-founders of OpenAI before he departed in 2018.
Musk touted he put $100 million into OpenAI in a few tweets published nearly a year ago. However, in an interview with CNBC last May, he said the amount of money he invested in OpenAI was around $50 million. Musk's other AI endeavors include launching an AI startup called xAI and its first product, Grok, an AI chatbot.
Musk's lawsuit is one of many OpenAI is currently facing. Last July, Sarah Silverman and three other authors announced they were suing OpenAI. That August, legal action was filed against OpenAI, accusing the company of violating the EU's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). In September, 17 authors, including Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, announced they had filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement. In December, The New York Times announced it was suing OpenAI and Microsoft for "unauthorized use of published work" to train its AI technologies.
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Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
