cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/9303135
Huh, though the #ElonMusk clock is broken, this is one of the times of the day it’s still correct:
Elon Musk accused Sam Altman and OpenAI of pursuing profit over bettering humanity in a new breach of contract lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court yesterday, Feb. 29.
Musk helped Altman found OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 (Musk left the board of directors in 2018 and no longer has a stake). Central to the lawsuit is OpenAI’s “founding agreement,” which, per the lawsuit, stated the lab would build artificial general intelligence (AGI) “for the benefit of humanity,” not to “maximize shareholder profits,” and that the technology would be “open-source” and not kept “secret for propriety commercial reasons.”
Musk’s new lawsuit alleges that OpenAI has reversed course on this agreement, particularly through its $13 billion partnership with Microsoft. It further calls out the secrecy shrouding the tech behind OpenAI’s flagship Chat GPT-4 language model and major changes to the company’s board following Altman’s tumultuous hiring and re-firing last year.
“These events of 2023 constitute flagrant breaches of the Founding Agreement, which Defendants have essentially turned on its head,” the suit reads. “To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
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I believe this to be central here, as it was likely when OpenAI stopped pretending to be a non-profit.
I do think that both Elon and the board underestimated how charismatic that Altman must be to have so many people willing to walk out over him being fired. They (not claiming Elon was in this one) certainly tried to push things into one direction without realizing that they never could win.
I don’t know how much was charisma, and how much was the workforce looking for the success that comes from commercialising the tech over a non-profit entity giving the tech away. Not everyone is an altruist.
He wasnt that charismatic. Microsoft offered everyone at openai a spot in their top ai division if they signed that letter, with all the employee benefits and clout that microsoft employment can offer. Of course they signed it!
interesting, so it was really about the money
yeah, I wrote a “conspiracy theory” of sorts as a comment a few months ago about that as the situation developed. Turns out it was true, microsoft used OpenAI’s CEO to remove critical board members, so they get control over the non-profit part of the company that controls the patents/software.
I want to read it, can I get a link?