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Elon Musk Sues OpenAI, Sam Altman, Saying They Abandoned Founding Mission

Draugoth

Gold Member
GHkupnlaMAAQZnI.jpg


via ABC

Elon Musk has sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, saying they abandoned the startup's original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit. The lawsuit filed late on Thursday in San Francisco puts the billionaire at loggerheads with the startup that he co-founded and is now the face of generative AI, partly due to the billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft (MSFT.O)

Musk alleged a breach of contract, saying Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman originally approached him to make an open source, non-profit company, but the startup established in 2015 is now focused on making money. He sought a court ruling asking OpenAI to make its research and technology available to the public and prevent the startup from using its assets, including its most advanced AI model GPT-4, for the financial gains of Microsoft or any individual.
 

sankt-Antonio

:^)--?-<
Looks like they used training data that's not even theirs, only fair thing would be for it to become open source. Hate Musk, but hope he wins this.
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
He's not the only one with this view; plenty of researchers / workers in the field of AI look at OpenAI's trajectory with extreme disappointment and concern. They were supposed to be open, not a tool for a few corporate players to consolidate a complete takeover of critical technological innovation. This was their promise in the early days, and they have progressively alienated many who previously supported them, with moves like aligning so closely to Microsoft's ambitions.
 

E-Cat

Member
He's not the only one with this view; plenty of researchers / workers in the field of AI look at OpenAI's trajectory with extreme disappointment and concern. They were supposed to be open, not a tool for a few corporate players to consolidate a complete takeover of critical technological innovation. This was their promise in the early days, and they have progressively alienated many who previously supported them, with moves like aligning so closely to Microsoft's ambitions.
You can’t innovate and drive SoTA frontier models these days without extreme scale, and that means billions, soon tens of billions dollars of funding. Nothing can provide that aside from the profit motive.
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
You can’t innovate and drive SoTA frontier models these days without extreme scale, and that means billions, soon tens of billions dollars of funding. Nothing can provide that aside from the profit motive.
That doesn't, however, mean going completely closed on all their recent innovations.

For comparison, Meta has open-sourced impressive Llama models, and Mistral (French; has some former OpenAI devs, extremely promising group) has fully open-sourced models that are as powerful as GPT 4 for many contexts and uses.

But OpenAI, despite being founded explicitly to lead open innovation, has gradually become the most questionable of all.
 

decisions

Member
Hope Elon wins. Honestly Altman seems like a hack who is obsessed with going down as the next Steve Jobs without thinking twice about whether whatever he is building is actually beneficial for humanity in any way.
 

E-Cat

Member
That doesn't, however, mean going completely closed on all their recent innovations.

For comparison, Meta has open-sourced impressive Llama models, and Mistral (French; has some former OpenAI devs, extremely promising group) has fully open-sourced models that are as powerful as GPT 4 for many contexts and uses.

But OpenAI, despite being founded explicitly to lead open innovation, has gradually become the most questionable of all.
I agree it would be nice if they open-sourced some of their stuff. But that would be ceding some of their competitive advantage to Google, and may lead to investors looking elsewhere.
 

PSYGN

Member
[...] saying Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman originally approached him to make an open source, non-profit company, but the startup established in 2015 is now focused on making money.

I mean if he can prove that then there might be some meat to it. The name "open" in the name and Sam being fired out of the blue... if anything maybe we'll learn more about what happened.
 
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Two thoughts:

If you think you're the Paul Bunyon who will be able to out-perform the machine, I think you're in for a rude awakening within the next decade.

Populist move it may be, I'm in that population, and I don't want this tech under corporate control. But history and its current trajectory tells me that's exactly where it'll end up.
 

Chittagong

Gold Member
A hundred million dollar lawsuit is a small option price to pay for the chance of derailing a hundred billion competitor. Billionnaire dick fencing, you love to see it
 
Elon helped fund them (and got one of the original co-founders pregnant, but let's gloss over that..), the whole Open in OpenAI was because it was intended to be an fully open source project to bring AI to everyone, now it's basically a Microsoft subsidiary, Elon has every right to be pissed.
 

Auto_aim1

MeisaMcCaffrey
Non profit open source means others can use it for their own profit. Makes no sense. It was a cool statement at the start but not really feasible as so many companies are into AI now.
 

Sakura

Member
I don't think a non profit etc company has a legal obligation to be that way forever. It's not like they are still pretending to be open source and non profit.
 

Salz01

Member
I’m starting to get confused between grok and groq. lol. Honestly becoming more and more interested in open source only. All these companies are going to charge a boat load of money to charge on api usage. That being said anybody know any good current open source TTS package that plays well with M series Apple silicon? I’m having a hard time getting open source checkpoints to work on my local.
 

Ozriel

M$FT
man’s been wasting money in multiple frivolous lawsuits for a while now.

I guess the legal bills are cheap compared to the adulation of his fanbase.
 

Nobody_Important

“Aww, it’s so...average,” she said to him in a cold brick of passion
It'll be a miracle if that case ever goes to trial but im very interested to see how she argues that a company that fired her 5 years ago wasn't allowed to do so lmfao
Yeah she isn't going to win that. Companies are allowed to fire people if they do something to harm the image of the company.

There is decades of precedent for that.
 

Aces High

Member
I had a norovirus infection last week.

It was so boring being in bed all day and so I checked Elon's twitter account and read his last 100 - 200 tweets.

Like opening a can of worms.

That dude is seriously crazy.

Let that sink:

He has a platform where he can present himself 100% unfiltered in the best possible way without any intervention from other media.

And he decides to go batshit crazy.
 

Tieno

Member
The video below gives a good analysis of the case, I think, and me realise how interesting the case could be. I understand now where Elon's coming from and the case makes some interesting points


A funnier 3 minute version by the always great Fireship
 
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Nobody_Important

“Aww, it’s so...average,” she said to him in a cold brick of passion
I had a norovirus infection last week.

It was so boring being in bed all day and so I checked Elon's twitter account and read his last 100 - 200 tweets.

Like opening a can of worms.

That dude is seriously crazy.

Let that sink:

He has a platform where he can present himself 100% unfiltered in the best possible way without any intervention from other media.

And he decides to go batshit crazy.
Yep. The guy destroyed any and all illusions surrounding him and his intellect.


People (myself included) treated him like a real world Tony Stark and in reality he is just an ignorant egotist that was given access to a very large bank account.
 

thief183

Member
Yep. The guy destroyed any and all illusions surrounding him and his intellect.


People (myself included) treated him like a real world Tony Stark and in reality he is just an ignorant egotist that was given access to a very large bank account.
Totally agree, he keeps ignoring that he is playing with ppl lives, I will never forgive him for the dogecoins.
 
Yep. The guy destroyed any and all illusions surrounding him and his intellect.


People (myself included) treated him like a real world Tony Stark and in reality he is just an ignorant egotist that was given access to a very large bank account.
The book on him by Walter Isaacson puts forward a very different case, and the writer obviously didn't like Musk.
 

UltimaKilo

Gold Member
Elon helped fund them (and got one of the original co-founders pregnant, but let's gloss over that..), the whole Open in OpenAI was because it was intended to be an fully open source project to bring AI to everyone, now it's basically a Microsoft subsidiary, Elon has every right to be pissed.

I understand that, of course everyone would. However, OpenAI needs a lot of money.

There’s plenty of other projects on the horizon over the next 3 years that are better funded by companies with deep pockets. They needed MS.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
I had a norovirus infection last week.

It was so boring being in bed all day and so I checked Elon's twitter account and read his last 100 - 200 tweets.

Like opening a can of worms.

That dude is seriously crazy.

Let that sink:

He has a platform where he can present himself 100% unfiltered in the best possible way without any intervention from other media.

And he decides to go batshit crazy.
It works since you care.
 
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