Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman and OpenAI for profit-making

Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman for allegedly violating the agreement they signed when the three men founded OpenAI.

The lawsuit provides an interesting insight into the origins of the corporate, which has turn into a market leader in the event of cutting-edge AI models. It is predicated on OpenAI’s two important goals, which were documented in the corporate’s “Founding Agreement.”

The three men agreed that OpenAI can be “a nonprofit organization developing AGI for the good thing about humanity, quite than a for-profit company searching for to maximise the profits of its shareholders.”

They also agreed that OpenAI “can be open-source, would only have in mind countervailing security considerations, and wouldn’t keep its technology secret for proprietary industrial reasons.”

Musk feared, and still fears, that the profitable pursuit of AGI and the exclusive control of the technology by corporations like Google can be harmful to human society.

The idea behind the agreement was that OpenAI would create an open and secure AGI that might be freely available to humanity, eliminating the danger of for-profit corporations using the technology to the detriment of humanity.

The infringement

The undisputed leading AI model today is OpenAI’s GPT-4, but there’s nothing remotely open about it, whatever the name of the corporate that developed it. Unlike GPT-3, OpenAI has not even published a technical document detailing how GPT-4 works.

While the founding agreement stated that the corporate would pursue open source technology, only OpenAI and sure Microsoft have access to GPT-4’s code, weights and training data.

Running an organization like OpenAI costs money, so it’s no surprise that it charges users fees to make use of its products. But the exclusive licensing agreement with Microsoft means its models at the moment are getting used to generate profits for Big Tech. Exactly the other of the founding principles that Musk says everyone agreed to.

The lawsuit claims that “OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed right into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the most important technology company on this planet: Microsoft.” Under its recent board, it is just not only evolving an AGI, but is definitely refining it “To maximize profits for Microsoft and never for the good thing about humanity.”

Do we’ve AGI?

Microsoft’s license agreement applies only to OpenAI’s pre-AGI technology. If an OpenAI model is found to have reached the AGI level, the license agreement prohibits Microsoft from accessing it.

Musk’s lawsuit makes a daring claim by stating that “GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm” so Microsoft mustn’t have access to it. The lawsuit asks the court to rule that that is true. I’m undecided how the judge and jury are purported to do this when there is no such thing as a industry-accepted definition of what exactly AGI is.

The lawsuit also confirms the rumors about what OpenAI’s engineers have been working on. The lawsuit claims that “OpenAI is currently developing a model called Q* (Q Star) that has an excellent stronger claim to AGI.”

Ultimately, it’s the OpenAI Board that decides what counts as AGI under the Microsoft License Agreement. After Altman was fired, rehired and reassigned, that call now rests with the brand new board members appointed with Microsoft’s blessing.

Was this why Ilya Sutskever was faraway from the board and kept quietly in some back room? Has anyone heard from him in months? What did Ilya see?

Don’t expect the brand new board to rush to assert that AGI has been achieved, even when that’s the corporate’s explicitly stated goal.

AI fears

One of the stated reasons for the lawsuit is Musk’s ongoing fears that AGI could fall into the improper hands.

The lawsuit recounts how Musk met with DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis in 2012 to debate these fears, a few of which Hassabis shared.

It also states: “After meeting with Mr. Hassabis and DeepMind investors, one in all the investors remarked that the very best thing he could have done for humanity was to shoot Mr. Hassabis on the spot.”

When Musk discussed his fears with then-Google CEO Larry Page, Page said that a super-intelligent AI that might replace humans was merely “the subsequent stage of evolution” and claimed that Musk was pro-human together with his views Views of a “specialist”.

Is Musk being overly dramatic or should we be frightened?

The lawsuit is value a read should you need a behind-the-scenes have a look at how much of the industry got to where it’s today. However, it is just not likely that the case might be resolved any time soon.

OpenAI could well confirm Musk’s AI fears and use this as a important reason to not open source its models. For OpenAI’s already busy legal team, representing the corporate’s profit motive could also be a harder task.