Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for allegedly violating the contractual obligations they made when he helped found the company in 2015. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in San Francisco, claims that Altman and OpenAI’s co-founder, Greg Brockman, approached Musk to create a non-profit, open-source company that would develop AI technology for the betterment of humanity.
Musk’s lawyers argue that OpenAI’s focus on seeking profits goes against the original agreement. However, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Musk have yet to comment on the lawsuit. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but resigned from the board in 2018. He also runs Tesla, an electric vehicle company, and recently purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022.
OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, became the fastest-growing software application in the world within six months of its launch in November 2022. It has been adopted by numerous companies for various tasks, from summarizing documents to writing computer code. This has led to rival chatbots from Microsoft, Alphabet, and other startups, all competing for funding in the generative AI industry.