In a groundbreaking legal move, Elon Musk, renowned CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has taken legal action against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, for breaching initial non-profit commitments, potentially shaking the foundations of AI development and cryptocurrency markets alike.
This lawsuit highlights a significant pivot from OpenAI's original mission, stirring debates on the ethical implications of AI commercialization and its ripple effects on associated cryptocurrency values, specifically Worldcoin (WLD).
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Elon Musk Files Lawsuit Against OpenAI
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, known for the development of ChatGPT, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and co-founder of the cryptocurrency Worldcoin (WLD), for breach of contract.
OpenAI is a non-profit research institute specializing in artificial intelligence (AI), known for developing interactive chat services like ChatGPT and the video generating AI "Sora".
Musk supported the establishment of OpenAI in 2015 and donated over $44 million between 2016 and September 2020. He has now filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco court, claiming that "OpenAI has acted in violation of the contract at the time of its establishment".
Accusations of Profit-Seeking Behavior by OpenAI as a Breach of Contract
Sam Altman, at the time of OpenAI's establishment, explained to Elon Musk that he was setting up an open-source, non-profit company to develop AI for humanity.
Musk's side argues that "OpenAI's pursuit of profit, funded by Microsoft, is a breach of contract".
After co-founding OpenAI with Altman in 2015, Musk resigned from the board in 2018, stating that "OpenAI is dominated by Microsoft, which has made substantial investments in the company".
Musk has expressed that "OpenAI has essentially become a subsidiary of Microsoft, the world's largest tech company, and its technology, including GPT-4, has become proprietary, contributing to Microsoft's profits".
In the lawsuit, Elon Musk's side makes the following claims:
OpenAI: Essentially a Microsoft Subsidiary
Until now, OpenAI's website has continuously claimed that its mission is to "ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity". However, in reality, OpenAI has transformed into a closed, de facto subsidiary under the umbrella of the world's largest technology company, "Microsoft".
Under a new board of directors, the company is developing and improving AGI to maximize Microsoft's profits, shifting its activities away from benefiting humanity. Technologies, including GPT-4, have been made closed-source, primarily for Microsoft's exclusive commercial benefits.
GPT-4: The Antithesis of "Open AI"
Despite the founding agreement stipulating development "not for the profit of companies or individual gain, but for the benefit of humanity", the defendants have fundamentally deviated from this mission upon reaching a certain level of AGI development.
GPT-4 is a completely closed model. Its internal design remains secret, and its code is not public. OpenAI has not published any papers explaining any aspect of its internal design, only issuing press releases boasting about its performance. The details of GPT-4 are known only to OpenAI and Microsoft.
Therefore, GPT-4 represents the antithesis of "Open AI", becoming closed for commercial reasons. Microsoft aims to profit massively by selling GPT-4, but this would be impossible if OpenAI made the technology freely available to the public.
The defendants have chosen to use GPT-4 as proprietary technology "to maximize the profits of the world's largest company" rather than for the benefit of humanity, in violation of the founding agreement.
Moreover, the entirety of OpenAI's development is now shrouded in secrecy, with the general public only able to access rumors and fragmented information about what will be released next.
An Analogy with Environmental Conservation
Imagine if you donated to a non-profit organization committed to protecting the Amazon rainforest, only to find that the organization has established a for-profit logging company using your donations to begin deforesting the Amazon.
This is the story of OpenAI.
Impact on Worldcoin (WLD) Price?
News related to OpenAI is known to potentially affect the price of the cryptocurrency project Worldcoin (WLR), co-founded by Sam Altman. The cryptocurrency industry has reported a decrease in WLD price following this news.
Although Worldcoin (WLD) and OpenAI's business are unrelated, the announcement of the video generating AI "Sora" by OpenAI on February 16, 2024, saw WLD's price surge from around $2 to nearly $8.
The drop in price following this news was about 5%, but further declines could be seen, leading to increased caution in the cryptocurrency industry regarding WLD's price movements.
