Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman of OpenAI. It's about the development of artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman
The owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X, Elon Musk, is suing OpenAI and the company's CEO, Sam Altman. As we read in the motion filed in the Supreme Court of California for the County of San Francisco, Musk claims that OpenAI's cooperation with Microsoft has deviated from the basic principles of open-source artificial general intelligence development. The original assumptions of both companies were to help humanity. Today it's about the commercial aspect of the process. In other words, the funny robot R2D2 was replaced by the Terminator.
Musk is pushing OpenAI to return to the idea of open code and wants the new technology not to be used commercially.
The case files show that the launch of ChatGPT-4 in March 2023 significantly deviated from the original principles followed by OpenAI. Despite being billed as a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence, GPT-4 is a closed model, unlike earlier versions of this chatbot. Musk argues that this brings significant financial benefits to Microsoft, which goes against OpenAI's original non-profit mission.
OpenAI Profits
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory. However, everything changed after 2020, after the establishment of his business department. The people behind the project decided that there was money to be made from AI. And that's why we have the most popular chatbot on the market today, but better versions of it are paid.
But what profits does AI ChatGPT generate for Open? According to the Financial Times, which spoke to two people with knowledge of the company's finances, the company's full-year revenue exceeded $2 billion.
The question is, however, whether Musk is actually outraged by the commercialization of AI, or whether it is just about striking a blow to the competition. Sam consistently views artificial intelligence as a significant threat to humans. He was in favor of research on this new technology, but everything was to be done under supervision, so that something would not accidentally escape from the laboratory and take on a life of its own.
Musk was a member of the OpenAI board until 2018. He left when, in his opinion, business thinking began to prevail in the project.