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Source: e Company

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has once again set his sights on his old rival OpenAI.

According to the New York Times, Musk recently restarted the lawsuit against OpenAI. Like the previous lawsuit, the new lawsuit claims that OpenAI and its two founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, put commercial interests above the public interest and violated the company's founding contract. The lawsuit also claims that the two violated their promise to share or open source the company's technology for free and chose to provide Microsoft with an exclusive license for the technology.

The industry believes that this case may become an important test for OpenAI's rapid development.

In fact, on February 29 of this year, Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for breach of contract, but withdrew the lawsuit in June.

Specifically, the indictment at the time showed that Musk accused OpenAI of violating the "Founding Agreement" when OpenAI was founded in 2023.

The "Founding Agreement" states that OpenAI is a "non-profit organization that develops general artificial intelligence and aims to benefit humanity, rather than a for-profit organization that maximizes shareholder interests"; at the same time, "it will open source code and will not keep its technology confidential for private commercial reasons except for security reasons."

Based on the Establishment Agreement, Musk invested most of the founding capital in the first few years and played a crucial role in recruiting chief scientist Ilya Sutskever from Google's DeepMind for OpenAI.

Musk emphasized in the indictment that OpenAI exclusively licensed its large model GPT-4 to Microsoft, an investor, which violated its original non-profit mission. At the same time, OpenAI did not disclose the details of GPT-4's architecture, hardware, training methods, and training calculations to the public, and charged fees for GPT-4's use by the public, in order to protect its own and Microsoft's private commercial interests.

Musk made demands in the indictment: including requesting to prohibit OpenAI, Microsoft or any other individual or entity from seeking economic benefits, and requesting a judicial determination on whether GPT-4 constitutes artificial general intelligence and therefore exceeds the scope of the license granted by OpenAI to Microsoft.

Public information shows that OpenAI was first established as a non-profit organization in 2015. Musk is one of the main founders of OpenAI and also one of its important investors.

On March 5, OpenAI released an official statement on its official website saying that the company firmly opposes all false accusations made by Musk and will take legal action to protect the company's rights and interests.

OpenAI attached to its statement copies of internal emails between OpenAI executives and Musk between 2015 and 2018.

OpenAI revealed in the statement: At the end of 2017, OpenAI and Musk decided that the next step was to create a for-profit entity. Musk hopes to obtain majority ownership and initial board control and serve as CEO.

However, the two sides failed to reach a consensus on the profit terms. OpenAI believes that any individual's absolute control over OpenAI will go against the company's original intention and mission. In the end, Musk withdrew all the funds halfway through the negotiations.

Musk did not respond to OpenAI's rebuttal statement. The biography of Elon Musk by American biographer Walter Isaacson revealed that Musk's development of AI capabilities in his own companies directly led to his breakup with OpenAI in 2018. He tried to persuade Sam Altman to integrate OpenAI into Tesla, but was rejected.

Just after Musk withdrew from the OpenAI board in 2018, in 2019, OpenAI changed its organizational structure, that is, under the main body of a non-profit organization, a new for-profit company with a "profit cap" was established. Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company and invested another $12 billion in the following years. In return, OpenAI provided a number of AI services to customers of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing products.

In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in a human-like manner. This triggered competition for AI across the industry.

Musk's own company, xAI, is a direct competitor to OpenAI and launched its first product, a chatbot called Grok, in December last year.

The original lawsuit came to a halt, however. Musk withdrew it without explanation about seven weeks ago, one day before a judge was to decide whether to dismiss it.

The new lawsuit alleges that after co-founding OpenAI with Musk in 2015 and promising to carefully develop AI for the benefit of humanity, Altman and Brockman abandoned that mission and entered into a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, meaning Musk was betrayed by Altman and his associates.

OpenAI has not yet commented on this.