Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly abandoning OpenAI’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. “OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed late on Thursday in San Francisco.
“Under its new board, it is not just developing but is refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” claims the filing. “On information and belief, GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm.” Musk is one of the cofounders of OpenAI. The lawsuit claims he played a central role in establishing the company by contributing over $44 million between 2016 and 2020, paying for office space and convincing key team members, including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, to join the business. Musk did all this, the lawsuit claims, because he wanted to support a nonprofit that would develop AI to benefit humanit