Two weeks after the Elon Musk v. OpenAI lawsuit began, OpenAI has hit back at Musk’s foundational claim he made in the Elon Musk v. OpenAI lawsuit he filed against the startup earlier this month. For context, Musk claimed that OpenAI breached the founding agreement contract he founded with him and two other OpenAI co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, back in 2015.
In his lawsuit, Musk claimed that the new AI lab would be a non-profit for the benefit of humanity and that it would not keep information private for commercial welfare. Moreover, he stated that the release of ChatGPT-4 was the starting point of breaching the contract. He pointed out that OpenAI released the Generative AI without disclosing scientific details for public consumption, leading to copyright infringement claims from The New York Times and many others.
Not taking the non-evidence basis claim, OpenAI made its response public as the company stated in a document on file with California’s superior court for San Francisco County: “There is no Founding Agreement, or any agreement at all with Musk, as the complaint itself makes clear. The Founding Agreement is instead a fiction Musk has conjured to lay an unearned claim to the fruits of an enterprise he initially supported, abandoned, then watched succeed without him.”
OpenAI’s View in the Elon Musk v. OpenAI Feud
Besides hitting back at Musk’s claim of a founding agreement as a figment of his imagination, OpenAI alleged that Musk wanted OpenAI to merge with Tesla or take control of the organisation himself. In a post authorised by Sam Altman and co-founders, it wrote: “We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.”
The statement continued: “Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself. So he brings this action accusing Defendants of breaching a contract that never existed and duties Musk never owed, demanding relief calculated to benefit a competitor to OpenAI. We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, telling us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him.”
As for Musk’s claim of OpenAI becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary”, Ilya Sutskever, the Chief Scientist and co-founder of the company, responded with: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it’s built, but it’s totally OK not to share the science”, to which Musk sarcastically replied: “Yup.”
Related: Sora: OpenAI’s New AI Tool Can Instantly Create Videos From Text Prompts
Elon Musk Throws Another Punch in the Elon Musk v. OpenAI Feud
The Elon Musk v. OpenAI feud has just received a new chapter as Elon Musk stated on X that his artificial intelligence startup xAI would open-source its ChatGPT challenger “Grok” and would give the public free access to experiment with the code behind the technology and align xAI with firms such as Meta (META.O), opens new tab and France’s Mistral, both of which have open-source AI models.
Obviously, the coincidence of timing was the Tesla CEO’s latest swipe in the Elon Musk v. OpenAI feud, as Musk had previously said little about the business model for Grok or xAI, as the chatbot was made available only to Premium subscribers to X. Now, after claiming ChatGPT has diverted to close-source from its initial open-source vision, Musk must have felt compelled to open source his own chatbot to show that he is committed to his own statement.
However, despite its coincidental announcement during the Elon Musk v. OpenAI feud, open-sourcing Grok could help Musk drum up interest in his company’s AI and even provide xAI with data it can use to improve its technology. Unfortunately, it may spark another feud besides Elon Musk v. OpenAI as the debate between the risks and benefits of open source v. closed source.
The Complete Timeline Between Elon Musk v. OpenAI
The Beginning
If observed from a broader view, the Elon Musk v. Open AI feud seemed to resemble movies where two friends argue and face off on opposite ends. In this case, Musk was like a mentor figure to Altman in the early 2010s, and the two began emailing around 2014 about AI and its dangers before deciding they should join hands in guiding the public. Then, the two recruited many current co-founders to create OpenAI, with Musk as the largest investor.
However, after years of praising each other’s craft, bad blood began to boil, especially with Musk resigning in 2018. For example, while Musk claimed his resignation was due to a conflict of interest, Altman stated that Musk felt that OpenAI fell behind other players like Google and instead proposed to take over the company himself, which the board promptly rejected, which led to his exit.
Regardless, the relationship between the two was never the same as the company moved in the opposite direction to what Musk philosophised with creating a for-profit AI entity. According to OpenAI’s latest claims, it was a scenario Musk never predicted, and he grew jealous of the financial and technological success since he departed.
The Launch of ChatGPT
When asked about the lighting fuse behind the Elon Musk v. Open AI feud, the launch of ChatGPT was undeniably the one. For instance, the pair did not exchange any more conflict until 2022, when ChatGPT released a global revolution on AI. The case transpired when an X user asked the AI tool to imitate Musk’s tweeting style, and Musk stated that ChatGPT had access to X’s database and pulled the plug on it. It was also the first time Musk uttered the phrase: “OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither is still true.”
Musk then continued his relentless onslaught throughout 2023, when he made several posts targeting his former company. The most notable being when he claimed that OpenAI has become a closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft, deviating from its name of OpenAI.
Musk even singled out his old student Altman in the New York Times event last November: “I have mixed feelings about Sam. The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power. He is also recklessly developing artificial intelligence that will harm humanity and setting OpenAI’s founding principles aflame.”
The Lawsuit For the Future of AI
Therefore, after a decade-long accumulation of conflict of interests, the two will now settle their dispute in this Elon Musk v. Open AI lawsuit. While it may seem like children fighting on the surface, never forget that OpenAI is worth tens of billions of dollars, and this fight may result in potentially changing the course and future of AI being open-source or closed-source.
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