Artificial intelligence generates misgivings in society due to the fear that it will end up posing a threat. A vision that seems to be shared by one of the staunchest defenders of this technology, Elon Musk, who has just filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The magnate, who was a co-founder of the company, considers that it has abandoned its founding objective of developing this new non-profit technology, accusing it of putting profits before the benefit of humanity.
The complaint alleges that CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman originally proposed to Musk to create a nonprofit open source company. However, he maintains that now the company, with the support of Microsoft, has the objective of making money, which is a violation of the founding contract. In addition, he blames him for keeping the design of GPT-4, the most advanced AI model, “completely secret.”
“To this day, OpenAI’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all humanity.’ However, in reality, OpenAI has been transformed into a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the world’s largest technology company: Microsoft,” the lawsuit reads.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left the board three years later. Later, in November 2023, the company forced Altman’s resignation, accusing him of lack of honesty in his communications with the company. However, a few days later Altman returned along with a renewed direct board.
The Tesla leader argues that Altman and Brockman, along with Microsoft, worked together to remove the majority of the board of directors that had ensured compliance with the original mission of developing technology for the benefit of humanity. Instead, they selected members who were business-savvy, big fans of Altman, and more focused on profits than AI ethics and governance.
“With this restructuring, OpenAI abandoned its non-profit mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity at large, thus keeping it out of the reach of a large for-profit corporation in which great power would be unduly concentrated,” it states. states in the lawsuit filed in San Francisco, California.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, became the world’s fastest-growing software application six months after its launch in November 2022. It also sparked the launch of rival chatbots from Microsoft, Alphabet and a group of startups that They took advantage of the enthusiasm to secure billions in financing.
Since its debut, ChatGPT has been adopted by companies for a wide range of tasks, from summarizing documents to writing computer code, sparking a race among big tech companies to launch their own generative AI-based offerings.
