Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times,
A contentious battle years in the making between Tesla owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman begins this week before a federal court in Oakland, California, wherenine jurors will be asked to decide whether Altman and others betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit artificial intelligence (AI) lab dedicated to the public good.
The outcome could have a profound impact, not just for OpenAI—the creator of ChatGPT, currently valued at $852 billion and poised for a public offering—but for the broader, dizzyingly high-stakes race to advance AI technology and dominate the commercial market.
Musk, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 and served as an early investor,suedcofounders Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging that they bilked him out of tens of millions of dollars with the false promise that the project would remain an open-source nonprofit—and act as a safety hatch on the “grave threat” posed by profit-driven advancement of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AGI is generally understood as the hypothetical point at which AI reaches or surpasses human cognitive abilities and can operate autonomously, which many experts warn poses an existential threat to humanity.
Musk claims that Altman and Brockman secretly planned to convert to a for-profit corporation with backing from Microsoft, a major investor to which OpenAI exclusively licensed its flagship product.
“Mr. Altman caused OpenAI to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public,”Musk alleged in the lawsuit.
“Altman set the bait and hooked Musk with sham altruism then flipped the script as the non-profit’s technology approached AGI and profits neared,” the lawsuit claims.
OpenAI counters that Musk agreed that a for-profit structure would be necessary to raise sufficient capital but walked away when other founders disagreed that he should be the one to lead it.
“Motivated by jealousy, regret for walking away from OpenAI and a desire to derail a competing AI company, Elon has spent years harassing OpenAI through baseless lawsuits and public attacks,” the company wrote on the OpenAI website in a runningcommentaryon the feud.
Source: ZeroHedge News
