Elon Musk Sues OpenAI

All that is going down in this digital battle.

Building Startups by Ajay Yadav

The ‘No-BS’ BS Newsletter

Elon Musk Sues OpenAI: All That is Happening

Hello, welcome back👋 
And a very Happy Women’s Day to all women reading🫧🚺️ 

Last week has been eventful, to say the least. Let’s get started👇️ 

Elon Musk is not the quiet type.😶 
Be it tweets, replies, memes, even lawsuits, if he has something to say, he will ensure it is known.

Last week, Musk filed a lawsuit against two of his OpenAI co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
X is seeing Musk have his fun while he sues, also stating that he will drop the suit if they change the name of the company to “ClosedAI”.

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For context, OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Musk, Altman, Brockman and others. Musk eventually left the company in 2018 due to “conflicts of interest.”

Musk’s suit accuses Altman and Brockman of "flagrant breaches" of the trio's original agreement to develop artificial intelligence openly and without pursuing profits, by having “transformed into a de facto subsidiary of the world’s largest technology company: Microsoft.”🤖 

Musk's major aim with this lawsuit is to force OpenAI to comply with the Funding Agreement and return to its previous position as a non-profit, open-source AI lab.

🛑 The Firing and Reinstating of Sam Altman

Another part of Musk’s suit talks about the firing and reinstating of Sam Altman last year.

According to the suit, Altman was sacked by the non-profit Board and when he was reinstated, the board members who had participated in the coup were pressured to quit. ❌ 

Altman allegedly "hand-picked a new Board" and as a result of these incidents, "OpenAI's corporate structure that had been designed as a system of checks and balances between the nonprofit arm, for-profit arm, the Board, and the CEO to ensure the non-profit mission was being carried out, collapsed overnight."

According to Musk, “under its new board of directors, the company is not only developing, but actually refining an artificial general intelligence (AGI) to maximise Microsoft’s profits, rather than for the benefit of humanity.” 🤖 

OpenAI Responds, Releases Old Email Communication

Late on Tuesday, OpenAI disclosed semi-redacted emails between Musk, Altman, Brockman, and others that offer a counter-narrative, and also declared that it intends to “move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”

Now if you go through the emails, the underlying theme is that OpenAI started as a mission counter Google’s dominance in AGI.

According to the released emails, Musk was open to OpenAI becoming more profit-focused early on, which kinda undermines his own claim that it diverged from its original objective.

The emails also imply that Musk was not firm on OpenAI’s responsibility to freely share its developments with everyone. Take a look at this exchange between Ilya Sutskever and Musk, where the former proposed a certain definition for OpenAI and Musk responded “Yup.” 👀 

Image credit: OpenAI, OpenAI and Elon Musk

Whatever the outcome may be, the bonds shown in the emails between OpenAI's cofounders have since severed.

What do you think about Musk’s suit? Do you think this is a sour-grapes situation, or has he got a point here? 🤔 

That’s it for today’s newsletter!

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