news

Tencent Technology News, August 5, according to foreign media reports, on Monday local time in the United States, Elon Musk once again appealed to the Federal Court of Northern California.OpenAIand its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman filed the lawsuit.

In this lawsuit, Musk reiterated his previous allegations that OpenAI and its management violated the company's founding principles and agreements and put commercial interests above the public interest.

The lawsuit is another escalation of OpenAI's years-long legal dispute, highlighting the deep differences and ongoing tensions between Musk and OpenAI. Musk accused OpenAI of failing to fulfill its promises as a non-profit organization, especially in terms of open source technology and benefiting all mankind. He emphasized that OpenAI's actions violated its founding purpose of using artificial intelligence technology for public welfare rather than commercial profit.

Seven weeks ago, Musk unexpectedly dropped his initial lawsuit against OpenAI without explanation, a move that came just one day before a judge was due to rule on whether to dismiss the suit.

The new lawsuit details how Altman and Brockman founded OpenAI with Musk in 2015 with the goal of advancing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, but then departed from that goal and entered into a partnership with Microsoft worth more than $10 billion.

In the lawsuit, Musk said he was "betrayed by Altman and his team" and described this betrayal as "like a Shakespearean tragedy." So far, OpenAI has not made an immediate response to Musk's latest lawsuit.

It is worth noting that after Musk first filed the lawsuit, Altman and other members of OpenAI stated in a blog post that they planned to ask the court to dismiss the charges and reaffirm the company's mission to serve the public interest by developing general artificial intelligence (AGI), that is, machines that can perform all tasks that the human brain can perform.

They emphasized: "OpenAI's core mission is to ensure that the positive impact of artificial intelligence technology can benefit all mankind. This requires us to develop artificial intelligence systems that are both safe and practical, and to promote the reasonable distribution of its benefits at the broader social level."

Co-founded OpenAI

At the beginning of OpenAI, Musk, Altman, Brockman and several young artificial intelligence researchers conceived a research laboratory to serve as a necessary check on the research activities of giants such as Google in the field of artificial intelligence. Musk was deeply worried that Google and its founder Larry Page did not pay enough attention to the potential risks of artificial intelligence.

Like other visionaries in the field of artificial intelligence, Musk has warned that the future development of artificial intelligence technology may pose a threat to humanity and even lead to the destruction of humanity. This concern is also shared by Altman and other founders of OpenAI, who have therefore established OpenAI as a non-profit organization and promised to share research results free of charge to avoid the potential dangers of artificial intelligence technology being overly concentrated in the hands of a single entity (such as Google). They believe that the power of artificial intelligence is too powerful and full of unknowns, and it must be ensured that it develops under the participation and supervision of multiple parties.

In 2018, after a fierce power struggle, Musk parted ways with OpenAI and withdrew its financial support. Faced with financial difficulties, Altman decided to transform OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise and successfully obtained a capital injection of up to $13 billion from Microsoft.

In 2022, OpenAI launchedChatGPTThis revolutionary chatbot has shocked the industry with its ability to generate text and simulate human language communication, triggering fierce competition among technology giants including Google and Microsoft and emerging startups. At the same time, Musk has not stopped. He founded xAI and continued to warn about the potential risks of artificial intelligence technology.

Last November, there was a dramatic personnel change within OpenAI. The company's board of directors suddenly announced the dismissal of Altman on the grounds that he could no longer be trusted to complete OpenAI's mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of mankind. However, this decision was dramatically reversed just five days later, and Altman was reappointed as the CEO of OpenAI.

The first strange withdrawal of the lawsuit

Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in state court in San Francisco about two months later. The new complaint filed in federal court alleges that Altman and Brockman intentionally misled him about the company's founding.

"Musk v. Altman and OpenAI is a vivid textbook case of the struggle between altruism and greed," the lawsuit reads. "Altman, in concert with other defendants, deliberately pandered to and deceived Musk, exploiting his deep humanitarian concerns about the threat that artificial intelligence could pose to human survival."

In addition, the lawsuit also pointed out that Altman and Brockman violated their earlier commitment to share or open source the company's technology for free and instead granted Microsoft exclusive rights to use the technology.

Musk's legal adviser Marc Toberoff revealed in an interview that part of the reason Musk decided to file a new lawsuit in federal court was that the court had preliminarily determined that OpenAI was suspected of conspiring to defraud Musk, which violated federal extortion laws. Toberoff said: "The previous lawsuit lacked sufficient evidence. This time, we will take stronger legal action."

One of the core arguments of the new lawsuit is that the contract between OpenAI and Microsoft clearly stipulates that once the laboratory successfully develops artificial intelligence, Microsoft will no longer have exclusive rights to OpenAI technology. Therefore, the lawsuit asks the court to rule whether OpenAI's latest system has reached the standard of artificial intelligence, and whether its contract with Microsoft should be deemed invalid.

However, most experts have reservations about this. They believe that OpenAI's current technology has not yet reached the level of true artificial intelligence, and the scientific community is still exploring how to build such a system.

It is worth noting that at the end of May, OpenAI announced that it was working on a new generation of artificial intelligence models aimed at surpassing the GPT-4 technology that currently drives ChatGPT, and expected the new model to bring "higher-level functionality."

After the latest round of financing, OpenAI's valuation has soared to more than $80 billion, while Musk's xAI is valued at $24 billion. (Compiled by Jinlu)