Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, along with its CEO Sam Altman and others, alleging a departure from the company’s original mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than profit.
Musk claims that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman initially approached him to establish an open-source, non-profit organization.
According to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco, the company’s focus on profitability violates the original agreement, and they have maintained secrecy around the design of GPT-4, their most advanced AI model.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but resigned from its board in 2018. While also managing Tesla and SpaceX, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022.
In the previous year, OpenAI’s former board terminated the appointment of the CEO, Altman, citing the defense of the company’s mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. Altman later returned with a new initial board. According to reports, OpenAI is set to appoint several new board members in March.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, achieved rapid global popularity within six months of its launch in November 2022, becoming the fastest-growing software application. Its success led to the introduction of competing chatbots by Microsoft, Alphabet, and various startups, capitalizing on the hype to secure substantial funding.
ChatGPT has been widely adopted for tasks ranging from summarizing documents to writing computer code, sparking a competitive race among major tech companies to launch their own generative AI-based offerings.
