Elon Musk sues OpenAI
Third lawsuit this week
Breaking news: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI
The lawsuit makes a good read, giving a lot of the early history of OpenAI, and providing further evidence for the Board’s view, expressed in November, that Altman has not always been consistently candid.
A few excerpts:
Translation: we had a deal, Altman and Brockman reaffirmed it, and they welched. An alleged lack of candor is central to the lawsuit.
That point is made multiple times, throughout:
Since that deal, which Musk asserts Altman and Brockman reneged on:
OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,
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OpenAI, Inc.’s once carefully crafted non-profit structure was replaced by a purely profit-driven CEO and a Board with inferior technical expertise in AGI and AI public policy. The board now has an observer seat reserved solely for Microsoft,
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Musk is not asking for money.
He is asking for OpenAI to become open again, and for it to return to its original mission. Public Citizen’s January letter to the California attorney general asks for something different (a dissolution of the nonprofit) but is based on many of the same premises.
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I take the recital of facts in Musk’s lawsuit to be largely accurate. It is consistent with my own observations and with earlier reporting by The New York Times and The New Yorker. By any reasonable metric, OpenAI as a whole no longer works according to the mission that was originally set out. Elon did not get what he paid and worked for.
Whether the suit goes anywhere depends on the strength of its legal theory, which revolves in part around claims of breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. There is also an interesting claim of unfair business practices as related to the shift from nonprofit to (effectively) for profit mission.
I won’t predict who will win, but I will say that Elon has a point. And anyone making deals with Altman would be wise to read it.
The company Sam and Greg built has little to do with what was originally promised.
Gary Marcus has been complaining about OpenAI’s abandonment of its original mission for years.
I have a lot of moral issues with Elon Musk, separately, that are part of a different discussion--but a broken clock can be right twice a day.
People focused on the general intelligence bit are missing the real damage it is doing *right now* to privacy, job security, copyright, and human creativity. I think pointing out that openAI has strayed far from its original non profit structure, and what that means— could address multiple concerns.
Something funny to consider is that the plaintiffs (Musk) are arguing that GPT-4 is an AGI, and could make a somewhat compelling case to a judge that it is an AGI on the grounds that it is smarter than the median human by showing its performance on various exams like the SAT.
We might wind up with an amusing hypothetical where OpenAI has to explain to a judge that GPT-4 isn't actually smarter than the median human at all, contrary to the hype. Their defense could very well consist of numerous examples of bizarre hallucinations as they try to explain to a judge (who isn't particularly tech-savvy) that it doesn't even think. It's just next-token prediction based on large quantities of training data. "Your honor, we're nowhere even close to AGI!"
If didn't know any better I'd think this is some elaborate 5D chess move by Elon Musk to troll OpenAI into admitting in a courtroom that they are full of shit, which might be considered "misleading investors" by the SEC.