Silicon Valley moguls are weighing in on Elon Musk's battle with OpenAI and it's getting cattier than a 'Real Housewives' reunion
Business InsiderFeb 22
Elon Musk Sues OpenAI Again
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Above: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speak onstage during "What Will They Think of Next? Talking About Innovation" at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California. Image copyright: Michael Kovac/Contributor/Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images
The Facts
After withdrawing a similar lawsuit earlier this year, Elon Musk, for the second time, has sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for what he describes as falling away from the "founding agreement" of the nonprofit he helped cofound in 2015.
This lawsuit claims that after he left OpenAI's board in 2018, the organization and "namesake objective," to which he "lent his name" and "invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital, and recruited top AI scientists" for, were "betrayed by Altman and his accomplices."
The Spin
Narrative A
While no one knows the exact truth of this case, Musk has made a compelling argument against OpenAI. If he's telling the truth, he, Brockman, and Altman originally created OpenAI to combat the growing powers of for-profit Google by building their own system with limitations. Unfortunately, Altman shifted his focus solely toward profit, ended ChatGPT's open source nature, teamed up with Microsoft, and pushed technological advancements with no care for how it will impact human beings.
Narrative B
It's remarkable that Elon Musk will try this lawsuit again, given the publicly available evidence against him. While Musk claims Altman is responsible for going private, it was actually he who wanted to do so, but his demand was to merge it with Tesla and give him sole control. Musk is also on the record agreeing with his former partners that open source doesn't mean all the science behind AGI should be open source. Musk was a true believer in OpenAI's altruistic mission before he was blinded by his own greed.
