Musk's legal complaint against OpenAI
I'm reading through it, and there's some fascinating bits in there.
Musk is basically alleging Altman and Brockman tricked him into providing start-up funding for a nonprofit, and then began subverting the nonprofit's mission immediately. It's a breach of contract case. He said, "Here's some money. Go build a nonprofit." They took the money, and used it to build a for-profit company for themselves, and their friends, instead.
It includes language from the certificate of incorporation, which promises to "irrevocably" tie the company to the mission of benefiting humanity, and creating open-source technology.
It says after he initially rejected their attempt to convert the nonprofit to a for-profit, in 2017-2018, they started going behind his back, instead.
Which ties back to Musk's point, I think: which is that a nonprofit whose founders or employees can turn it into a for-profit whenever they want, was never really a nonprofit at all.
He's also saying Altman made side-deals with other companies, including Reddit and Microsoft. That harmed OpenAI, but made money for Altman, and for those other companies. It says he (Altman) owns some large share of Reddit, and that one side-deal alone netted him $69 million in profits.
And there's this:
>214. Defendants have also caused OpenAI, Inc. to exclusively license and/or furnish its now-closed technology to Microsoft, in partnership with Defendants, including its recent GPT-4, GPT-4T, and GPT-4o models for Defendants and Microsoft’s private gain, in contravention of the repeated representations to Musk and other contributors that its technology would be predominantly open source for the benefit of the public and humanity.
And this:
>276. Defendants knowingly and repeatedly accepted Musk’s contributions in order to develop AGI, with no intention of honoring those conditions once AGI was in reach. Case in point: GPT-4, GPT-4T, and GPT-4o are all closed source and shrouded in secrecy, while Defendants actively work to transform the non-profit into a thoroughly commercial business.
The lawyers have submitted a tangled web of theories regarding theories of liability and potential remedies. But they include, among others, disgorgement and specific performance. Which could mean the 4x models could be made public.
The trial starts Monday.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.433688/gov.uscourts.cand.433688.1.0_1.pdf