Elon Musk has expanded his lawsuit against OpenAI and its founder Sam Altman to include Microsoft and LinkedIn co-founder Ried Hoffman. The amended 107-page lawsuit is an incredible document that tells Musk’s side of the story. To hear the richest man in the world tell it, he was seduced by Altman’s pitch of a world filled with safe AI and devastated to learn that OpenAI had teamed with Microsoft to make money.
“Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon—and in just eight years,” the lawsuit said. “Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public.”
The feud between Musk and Altman has been going on for years. Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 and dumped a bunch of money into the venture, some $44 million, before leaving the company in 2018. According to the lawsuit, Altman approached Musk and sold him on a non-profit vision of the company. It was to be a corporation that pursued AI with human safety in mind. Then, Altman betrayed Musk by turning to Microsoft and attempting to turn a profit.
“OpenAI, Inc., co-founded by Musk as an independent charity committed to safety and transparency—and nurtured in its infancy by Musk’s money, advice, recruiting efforts and connections—is, at the direction of Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft, fast becoming a fully for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft,” the lawsuit said. “Altman, in concert with other Defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the dangers posed by AI.”
Open AI has a weird structure. A non-profit corporate board controls the company and it was originally started with the idea that it would take donations, scale up, and develop artificial general intelligence safely and for the benefit of humanity. Then it realized it needed to make money and it started selling products like ChatGPT. The non-profit board is still in charge, but things are complicated.
According to the lawsuit, Musk is mad they decided to start making money at all. “As a result of their unlawful actions, Defendants have been unjustly enriched to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in value, while Musk has been conned along with the public,” the lawsuit said.
Musk also detailed the Terminator-style future he thinks AI will create in the lawsuit. “These dangers include, without limitation (or exaggeration), completely replacing the human workforce, supercharging the spread of disinformation, malicious human impersonation, and the manipulation of political and military systems (which military-related contracting OpenAI is now reported to be pursuing aggressively), ultimately leading to the extinction of humanity,” it said.
The lawsuit includes twenty-six separate accusations including two criminal violations of the Rico Act, which the feds use to bust up organized crime. The addition of Microsoft and Hoffman to the lawsuit is a new twist in a long and weird legal journey. Musk initially filed the lawsuit in March of this year, withdrew it in July, and then filed it again in August.
In response to the initial filing, OpenAI published emails Musk sent to the company when he was still a part of it. Its story is more simple than Musk’s. According to OpenAI, Musk tried to take over the company and forcibly merge it with Tesla. When he didn’t get his way, he left.
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