The war between Elon Musk and Sam Altman is increasing in intensity. The owner of Tesla filed a lawsuit last night against OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, its CEO Sam Altman, and other high-ranking officials of the organization, such as Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI), for abandoning the original mission of the company he co-founded: to contribute selflessly and non-profitably to the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Musk believes this is completely impossible given OpenAI's agreement with Microsoft, the world's largest company by market capitalization, which has invested $13 billion in its partner.
Musk's lawyers claim that since partnering with OpenAI, Microsoft has changed its goal and focused on making money, which is contrary to its founding agreement. “OpenAI, Inc. has become a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” says the lawsuit filed in San Francisco. “Under his new board, he is not only developing an AGI, but also refining it [IA general, la que pueda igualar o superar las capacidades humanas] to maximize Microsoft’s profits and not for the benefit of humanity.”
Musk's legal team also cites as an example that the company subjected the design and development of GPT-4, the most advanced model to date to the market, to “absolute secrecy.” And he adds a quote from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella from November last year: It wouldn't matter “if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.” (…) We have its skills, its people, its computers, its data. We have everything”.
Elon Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization that aimed to contribute to the scientific development of AI. The owner of Tesla, SpaceX or X (the old Twitter) donated $50 million of his personal wealth to make the launch possible.
Unofficially, OpenAI was an attempt by Musk and other Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Peter Thiel, one of the first Facebook investors and founder of Palantir, to counter Google's dominance in the development of this technology at the time. One of the necessary triggers for the emergence of OpenAI, whose name was Musk's brainchild, was Google's purchase in 2014 of DeepMind, one of the world's leading laboratories for deep learning, the most powerful AI technique. “Musk was deeply concerned about this. “He believed (and continues to believe) that artificial intelligence in the hands of a private, for-profit company like Google poses a danger to humanity,” the text of the lawsuit says.
It was Musk himself who put Altman in charge of OpenAI. However, that relationship was severed a few years later: he left the organization in 2018, which he admitted was one of the biggest mistakes of his career. Outside of OpenAI, he already wrote a letter calling for a six-month moratorium on AI research and, in the meantime, developed his own project xAI, with which he presented Grok, his alternative to ChatGPT, at the end of last year.
Altman, for his part, has become the visible leader of the generative AI revolution, driven largely by his company. The managing director was suddenly fired by the OpenAI shareholders meeting last year. However, under pressure from the workforce, who even threatened to move en masse to Microsoft, he was rehired in less than a week.
ChatGPT is one of the most successful applications in history. Launched in November 2022, it reached 100 million users in two months, an unprecedented record, and today it has around 200 million users. Its emergence sparked a race in the technology sector to lead so-called generative AI. Microsoft soon partnered with OpenAI itself, an alliance still under review by U.S. and EU competition regulators, while Google reorganized itself internally to accelerate the adoption of AI-based tools.
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