OpenAI hits back at Elon Musk blog post published on its website Tuesday, responding to a lawsuit by one of its co-founders and former benefactors.
Musk filed a lawsuit last week in San Francisco against the company, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, alleging it has strayed from its mission to create responsible AI. OpenAI said in a statement that Musk lashed out at him after he failed to make the company part of Tesla Inc.
“We are sad that it came to this with someone we deeply admire,” writes OpenAI, “someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, founded a competitor, and then sued us when we began making significant progress toward OpenAI’s mission without him.”
Tesla’s billionaire CEO, co-founder of OpenAI, who is no longer involved with the company, claims in his lawsuit that the startup’s close relationship with Microsoft Corporation undermined its original mission to create open source technologies free from undue corporate influence.
“To this day, the OpenAI Inc. website continues to state that its charter is to ensure that AGI “benefits all mankind,” the suit says. “However, in reality OpenAI Inc. has become a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a type of AI that does not yet exist, but which could theoretically perform a number of tasks better than humans.
Musk is suing for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and allegations of unfair business practices, among other things. He filed the lawsuit as a donor to the parent nonprofit as recently as 2019 and is trying to force San Francisco-based OpenAI to stop benefiting Microsoft and Altman personally.
OpenAI did not publicly comment on Musk’s lawsuit when it was originally filed on February 29. reviewed by BloombergThe company said it “strongly disagrees” with the lawsuit.