Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/musk-v-altman-openai-complaint-sf.pdf

by modeless • 2 years ago

1462 1204 2 years ago

achow• 2 years ago

Microsoft gained exclusive licensing to OpenAI's GPT-3 language model in 2020. Microsoft continues to assert rights to GPT-4, which it claims has not reached the level of AGI, which would block its licensing privileges.

Not sure this is a common knowledge - MSFT licence vis-a-vis AGI.

rickdeckard• 2 years ago

It's described here: https://openai.com/our-structure

Quote:

  Fifth, the board determines when we've attained AGI. Again, by AGI we mean a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Such a system is excluded from IP licenses and other commercial terms with Microsoft, which only apply to pre-AGI technology.

> "Musk claims Microsoft's hold on Altman and the OpenAI board will keep them from declaring GPT-4 as a AGI in order to keep the technology private and profitable."

Well.....sounds plausible...

jp_nc• 2 years ago

If he thinks GPT-4 is AGI, Elon should ask a team of GPT-4 bots to design, build and launch his rockets and see how it goes. If “economically valuable work” means creating terrible, wordy blog posts then yeah I guess it’s a risk.

ks2048• 2 years ago

I'm surprised such an important legal issue here is based on the definition of "AGI", seems really hard to define (I really think the concept is flawed). Does this consider that "most economically valuable work" is physical? And more importantly, with such money on the line, no one will agree on when AGI is attained.

sokoloff• 2 years ago

Does anyone credibly believe that GPT-4 "outperforms humans at most economically valuable work"?

ggm• 2 years ago

Contracts probably need to be defended. If he has evidence of intent in a deal, he should sue to the deal's intent being enacted. hate the man not the act.

standfest2• 2 years ago

i think this is the logical next step of a feud which only recently re-gained momentum two weeks ago https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2024/02/16/musk-reig...

seydor2• 2 years ago

Somebody had to do it. It's very dangerous for what could be the world's biggest company to have such a unique and peculiar legal nature.

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

Here's the main filing for those who are interested. There's a lot of backstory incorporated https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?SessionID=94896165E...

dang8• 2 years ago

(This was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39560965, but we merged that thread hither)

okhuman• 2 years ago

AI is going to continue to have incremental progress, particularly now in hardware gains. No one can even define what AGI is or what it will look like, let alone be something that OpenAI would own? Features progress is too incremental to suddenly pop out with "AGI". Fighting about it seems a distraction.

root_axis4• 2 years ago

There's also no reason to believe that incremental progress in transformer models will eventually lead to "AGI".

snapcaster2• 2 years ago

Yes, but I think everyone would agree that the chance isn't 0%

xiphias22• 2 years ago

Progress is definitely not inremental, it's exponential.

The same performance (training an LLM with a given perplexity) can be achieved 5x cheaper next year while the amount of money deep learning infrastructure gets increases exponentially right now.

If this method is able to get to AGI (which I believe but many people are debating), human intelligence will just be mostly ,,skipped'', and won't be a clear point.

blibble2• 2 years ago

how long do you think the "exponential" (that looks very linear to me) growth in funding can continue?

until it's more than US GDP? world GDP? universe GDP?

either way you're close to the point it will have to go logistic

CatWChainsaw• 2 years ago

In nature, exponential curves reveal themselves to be sigmoidal on a long enough time scale. Since you're on HN you probably have a mathematical bent, and you should know that.

aamoyg• 2 years ago

It's kind of rich coming from him, but he has a point.

I guess this approach can still work if it's made sure that whatever successors to LLMs there are have rights, but I still get sharecropper vibes.

helsinkiandrew4• 2 years ago

OpenAi is also being investigated by the SEC. If "Altman hadn’t been consistently candid in his communications with the board" is interpreted as being misleading then that could be interpreted as misleading investors and therefore securities fraud.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/sec-investigating-whether-openai-in...

klysm2• 2 years ago

Isn’t everything securities fraud though

rmbyrro• 2 years ago

When the SEC wants it to be, yes.

dartos4• 2 years ago

The only way to truly make a ton of wealth is to break rules that others follow.

ericjmorey• 2 years ago

Even this comment?

meesles• 2 years ago

Sure is, in an oligarchy disguised as a free market.

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

the statements made by the board were likely sufficient to trigger invesigation and the current iteration of the government (2010+) wants to have dirt on anything this big

screenobobeano• 2 years ago

Still not as big as Halliburton, I feel it’s the opposite the government isn’t detaining these obvious frauders and now they run amock.

emodendroket17• 2 years ago

Nothing I've read about that whole kerfuffle suggests that "investors" were the main people the ousted board members cared about. Kind of seems like reading back significance not intended into the original text.

helsinkiandrew4• 2 years ago

In a company (it may be complicated due to OpenAIs structure) the boards sole purpose is to represent all shareholders. If they don’t that’s usually asking for a SEC investigation or private law suit.

davedx2• 2 years ago

The SEC doesn’t protect investors in private companies. OpenAI isn’t a public company

helsinkiandrew4• 2 years ago

The SEC is responsible for anything that issues securities - shares in a private or public company.

https://www.sec.gov/education/capitalraising/building-blocks...

bloopernova2• 2 years ago

Has there been a successful suit against a company for "abandoning their founding mission"?

Does anyone think that this suit will succeed?

Another article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/01/elon-musk...

nightowl_games• 2 years ago

Maybe the discovery process will benefit Musk and/or harm OpenAI sufficiently to consider it a "win" for Musk. Or perhaps it's just Musk wanting to make a statement. Maybe Musk doesn't expect to actually win the suit.

pquki4• 2 years ago

I wonder if the lawsuit will simply be dismissed.

jimbokun4• 2 years ago

But in this case, it wasn’t a company, but a nonprofit.

staticautomatic3• 2 years ago

Nonprofit is a tax status, not a corporate structure.

justinclift• 2 years ago

Has there been a successful suit against a company for "abandoning their founding mission"?

Probably depends on how much money the person behind the suit is willing to spend.

Elon could likely push stuff a lot further along than most.

ZiiS• 2 years ago

When the world’s richest man sues you, being a saint wouldn't be a reliable defence.

mullingitover• 2 years ago

Wait, Bernard Arnault is suing them too?

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

Kind of getting tired of litigious billionaires.

dclowd9901• 2 years ago

In the publicly traded world, it would be considered securities fraud, an umbrella under which you can pretty much sue a company for anything if you’re a shareholder.

I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent in the private world, but if he gave them money it’s possible he simply has standing for that reason (as a shareholder does).

russdill3• 2 years ago

lol, I invested in Google when they had the "Do no evil" thing. Now they removed it and are doing evil. I'm going to sue them!

catskul2• 2 years ago

Perhaps you should.

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

Has there been a successful suit against a company for "abandoning their founding mission"?

Yes, especially nonprofits.

65• 2 years ago

Such as?

ungreased06752• 2 years ago

I do wonder if OpenAI is built on a house of cards. They aren’t a nonprofit, aren’t open, and stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material to get started.

But, by moving fast and scaling quickly, are they at the Too Big to Fail stage already? The attempted board coup makes me think so.

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

Why would OpenAI be "too big to fail"? They seemed pretty close to failing just some months ago.

tiahura2• 2 years ago

Right, and then a bunch of unclearly identified forces came in and swept it all under the rug.

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

I think that is actually quite illustrative of the opposite point.

bdjsiqoocwk2• 2 years ago

When people say too big to fail, normally they're referring to companies which if they fail they would bring down other important parts of society's infrastructure (think biggest banks), and so someone (the gov) will last minute change the rules around to ensure they don't fail.

The openai fails, absolutely nothing happens other than its shareholder losing their paper money. So no, they're not too big to fail.

svnt2• 2 years ago

If they fail, other entities with little to no American oversight/control potentially become the leading edge in artificial intelligence.

rvba5• 2 years ago

OpenAI doesnt even have shareholders, so the company would just bankrupt and few hundred people would be out of jobs.

Probably Microsoft would hire them to some AI shop, because Microsoft is the one deploying the stuff. But Microsoft has rights to use it and the code, so for them OpenAI is only a research partner.

Maybe research would get slower.

a_humean• 2 years ago

Openai isn't even close to too big to fail. Bank of America fails the entire banking system collapses and the entire real economy grinds to a halt. If GM fails hundreds of thousands lose their jobs and entire supply chains collapse. If power utilities fail then people start actually dying within hours or days.

If OpenAI fails nothing actually important happens.

yunwal2• 2 years ago

I mean, there's about a hundred thousand startups built on top of their API. I'm sure most could switch to another model if they really needed, but if copyright is an issue, I'm not sure that would help.

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

you cannot erase that much value and say "nothing important happens", market cap is largely a rough proxy for the amount of disruption if something went under

clbrmbr• 2 years ago

Yet. But we are getting close to an event horizon, once enough orgs become dependent of their models.

Open source models are actually potentially worse. Even if OAI is not TBTF because of the competition, we have a scenario where AGI sector as a whole becomes TBTF and too big to halt.

ungreased06752• 2 years ago

When their product is embedded at the OS level in every Windows 11 computer, would that be too big to fail?

magoghm• 2 years ago

"stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material" <- nobody stole anything, even if it's eventually determined that there was some form of copyright infringement it wouldn't have been stealing

Terretta• 2 years ago

built on a house of cards

The "house of cards" is outperforming everyone else.

It would have to come out that the slow generation times for GPT-4 are a sweatshop in Egypt tired of typing.

Either that, or something inconceivable like that board coup firing the CEO as a material event triggering code and IP escrow to be released to Microsoft...

PS. “Too big to fail” generally is used to mean a government+economy+sector ecosystem will step in and fund the failed enterprise rather than risk harm to the ecosystem. That's not this. Arguably not Tesla or even Google either. That said, Satya's quote in this filing suggets Microsoft already legally contracted for that eventuality: if this legal entity fails, Microsoft keeps the model online.

hereme888• 2 years ago

Has Musk at least been able to profit from the $50-100MM he put in?

standfest2• 2 years ago

i think this is the logical next step of a feud which only recently re-gained momentum two weeks ago https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2024/02/16/musk-reig...

andsoitis• 2 years ago

Many would argue, reasonably so, that OpenAI is now a de facto subsidiary of the largest company in the world by market cap, Microsoft (Apple is second and Saudi Arabian Oil is third).

xiphias22• 2 years ago

Actually NVIDIA just took over Saudi Aramco, but they are sharing 3rd position.

TechPlasma• 2 years ago

I read this comment as "NVIDIA just took over Saudi Aramco" and was briefly confused in what could possibly be their reasoning for that acquisition?! Perhaps they decided to get some weird lower price on fuel for their gpus.... Anyways it was a brief but fun bit of confusion.

jedberg2• 2 years ago

The value of Saudi Aramco can't really be trusted. It's listed on their own stock market which the company controls. It has no reporting requirements, and the float is a single digit percent of the company.

It would be the same as me creating my own market, issuing 10,000,000,000 shares, and then convincing 1000 people to buy a share at $100 and then claiming my company is worth $1T.

SahAssar2• 2 years ago

Are you arguing for it being undervalued or overvalued or just unknowable? It seems like it was valued at similar figures when it was fully private.

thereisnoself• 2 years ago

Allowing startups to begin as non-profits for tax benefits, only to 'flip' into profit-seeking ventures is a moral hazard, IMO. It risks damaging public trust in the non-profit sector as a whole. This lawsuit is important

carlosjobim• 2 years ago

I think the public already considers non-profit = scam.

mrWiz• 2 years ago

I don't think the public is quite that cynical, broadly. Certainly most people consider some non-profits to be scams, and some (few, I'd reckon) consider most to be scams. But I think most people have a positive association with non-profits as a whole.

abfan1127• 2 years ago

if you're not profitable, there should be no tax advantage, right?

mistrial9• 2 years ago

no that is not the test for nonprofit status

hx8• 2 years ago

OpenAI was a 501C3. This meant donors could give money to it and receive tax benefits. The advantage is in the unique way it can reduce the funders tax bill.

permo-w13• 2 years ago

I completely agree. AGI is an existential threat, but the real meat of this lawsuit is ensuring that you can't let founders have their cake and eat it like this. what's the point of a non-profit if they can simply pivot to making profit the second they have something of value? the answer is that there is none, besides dishonesty.

it's quite sad that the American regulatory system is in such disrepair that we could even get to this point. that it's not the government pulling OpenAI up on this bare-faced deception, it's a morally-questionable billionaire

renegade-otter2• 2 years ago

Nuclear weapons are an existential threat - that's why there are layers of human due diligence. We don't just hook it up to automated systems. If we hook up an unpredictable, hard-to-debug technology to world-ending systems, it's not its fault, it's ours.

The AGI part is Elon being Elon, generating a lot of words to sound like he knows what he is talking about. He spends a lot of time thinking about this stuff when he is not busy posting horny teenager jokes on Twitter?

nradov3• 2 years ago

There is no reliable evidence that AGI is an existential threat, nor that it is even achievable within our lifetimes. Current OpenAI products are useful and technically impressive but no one has shown that they represent steps towards a true AGI.

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

The key thing is that the original OAI has no investors and they are not returning profits to people who put in a capital stake.

It is totally fine and common for non profits to sell things and reinvest as capital.

s1artibartfast8• 2 years ago

Most people simply don't understand what non profit means. It doesn't and never meant the entity can't make money. It just means that it can't make money for the donors.

Even with open AI, there is a pretty strong argument that donors are not profiting. For example, Elon, one of the founders and main donors won't see a penny from OpenAI work with Microsoft.

eightnoteight3• 2 years ago

once it converts into profit-seeking venture, it won't get the tax benefits

one could argue that they did R&D as a non-profit and now converted to for-profit to avoid paying taxes, but until last year R&D already got tax benefits to even for-profit venture

so there really is no tax-advantage of converting a non-profit to for-profit

svnt2• 2 years ago

The tax advantage still exists for the investors.

andrewflnr2• 2 years ago

But it keeps the intangible benefits it accrued by being ostensibly non-profit, and that can easily be worth the money paid in taxes.

Otherwise, why do you think OpenAI is doing it?

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

The public has no idea what non-profits are and a lot of things that people call 'profit seeking ventures' (ie. selling products) are done by many non-profits.

jimbokun4• 2 years ago

I think the public is well aware that “non profit” is yet another scam that wealthy elites take advantage of, not available in the same way to the common citizen.

PH95VuimJjqBqy2• 2 years ago

why do people in our industry always make the assumption that everyone else are morons?

The populace understands what a non-profit is.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

Most frequently "The CEO gets paid $X! Doesn't sound like a non-profit to me!"

I hear this all the time. As if the people working there shouldn't be paid.

jimbokun4• 2 years ago

I live in Pittsburgh, and UPMC’s nonprofit status as they make billions in profits and pay their executives fortunes, is a running joke. With the hospitals and universities as the biggest employers and land owners here, a big chunk of the cities financial assets are exempt from contributing to the city budget.

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

If they are non-profit, they do not make billions in profits. I suspect you mean revenue :)

Exec compensation is another thing, but also not a concern I am super sympathetic to given that for profit companies of similar magnitude generally pay their execs way more they just are not required to report it.

delfinom3• 2 years ago

In NYC, NYU and Columbia University are increasingly owning larger parts of Manhattan because they as universities have massive property tax exemptions. There is a big push right now to terminate those exemptions which currently amount to over $300 million per year.

At the same time they are getting these tax cuts, the CUNY public university system is struggling financially and getting budget cuts.

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

Public trust non-profit should rightfully get damaged. A lot of non profits like hospitals, churches or many “charities” are totally profit oriented. The only difference is that they pay the profits to their executives and their business friends instead of shareholders.

krisboyz7813• 2 years ago

Didn't Visa start as a non proftit?

Zigurd• 2 years ago

Dual license open source software, taking new versions of open source projects off open source licenses, and open source projects with related for-profit systems management software that makes it more likely enterprise customers will pay, are common practice. How would you distinguish what OpenAI has done?

rchaud2• 2 years ago

You are right, but regulatory sleight of hand is what passes for capitalism now. Remember Uber and Airbnb dodging regulations by calling themselves "ride-sharing" and "room-sharing" services? Amazon dodging sales taxes because it didn't have a physical retail location? Companies going public via SPAC to dodge the scrutiny of a standard IPO?

standardUser2• 2 years ago

This is not new. Companies have always done everything they can legally, and sometimes illegally, to maximize profit. If we ever expect otherwise shame on us.

breadwinner3• 2 years ago

In what capacity is Musk suing OpenAI? Musk may have co-founded the company, but then he left (to avoid any potential future conflict of interest with his role as CEO of Tesla, as Tesla was increasingly becoming an AI-intensive company). Is he a shareholder, if not what gives him any say in the future of the company?

username3322114• 2 years ago

He's a donor to the OpenAi non-profit organization.

breadwinner3• 2 years ago

A donor usually is only able to say how his donation will be used. For example, if you donate to Harvard University, you can say the money will be earmarked for scholarships, but you don't get a say on how the university is managed. You can at best say you will no longer donate based on how the university is managed.

FrustratedMonky• 2 years ago

Which is funny.

If you are shareholder of the non-profit, do you not get to share any of the fat gains by the profit side?

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

Would he have standing by having a company competing in the same space as OpenAI?

breadwinner3• 2 years ago

He would have the opposite of a standing, right? It seems he wants to slow down OpenAI so that his competing company can catch up.

sixQuarks• 2 years ago

He funded it in the first place, so it could achieve AGI. Why would he want to stop that? Because the whole point of donating was to make sure it was an open sourced AGI that anyone could have access to. grok as a response to open AI going both Woke and for profit.

tiahura2• 2 years ago

If only there was a document that you could refer to to inform your post.

jcranmer3• 2 years ago

The essential theory of the case is that OpenAI is misusing the funds Musk donated to it.

reads prayer for relief

For a judicial determination that GPT-4 constitutes Artificial General Intelligence

Okay, WTF? I'm going to have to read the entire complaint now.....

SonOfLilit• 2 years ago

I assume this is because OpenAI committed to do certain things if and when they build AGI.

empath-nirvana• 2 years ago

Man is that a big juicy meatball if you're a judge, though. Who would not love to hear that case.

bloggie• 2 years ago

I think OpenAI has been using the excuse that GPT-4 is not AGI, and therefore can remain closed-source.

manquer3• 2 years ago

AGI as defined narrowly by OpenAI, Microsoft et al for their contracts, not what scientists would define it as .

While I don’t think we are close to AGI, we also have to acknowledge that term is forever changing meaning and goal posts , even 10 years back a Turing test would be considered sufficient, obviously not anymore .

The scientific, public understanding is changing constantly and a court would have difficulty in making a decision if there is no consensus , it only has to see if the contractual definition has been met

Thrymr3• 2 years ago

He is suing for breach of agreement, namely the founding agreement that formed OpenAI as a nonprofit.

wyantb• 2 years ago

Breach of contract seems to be the major one - from https://www.scribd.com/document/709742948/Musk-vs-OpenAI page 34 has the prayers for relief. B and C seem insane to me, I don't see how a court could decide that. On the other hand, compelling specific performance based on continual reaffirmations of the founding agreement (page 15)...seems viable at a glance. Musk is presumably a party to several relevant contracts, and given his investment and efforts, I could see this going somewhere. (Even if his motivations are in fact to ding Microsoft / spite Altman).

IANAL

gamblor9564• 2 years ago

The "reaffirmations" referred to on page 15 don't mean anything. Altman merely said he was "enthusiastic" about the nonprofit structure, not that he was limiting OpenAI to it. And notably, the "I" is that quote is bracketed, meaning that Altman did not actually say "I" in his response to Musk (in legal documents, brackets in quotes mean that the quote has been altered between the brackets). Furthermore, despite the headline to that section claiming "repeat" reaffirmations, based on the facts as presented by Musk's own lawyers, Altman only potentially reaffirms the nonprofit structure once...

And the other individuals aren't even quoted, which is strong evidence that they didn't actually say anything even remotely in support of "reaffirming" the nonprofit structure (especially given that his lawyers were heavy handed with including quotes when they could be even remotely construed in favor of Musk's position) and that Musk is unilaterally characterizing whatever they actually said to support his claims, however reasonable or unreasonable that may be.

Due to the money at stake, and given that both Musk and Altman have serious credibility issues that would make a trial outcome impossible to predict, I expect this to be settled by giving Musk a bunch of stock in the for-profit entity to make shut up.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

B and C seem insane to me, I don't see how a court could decide that.

If it's part of a legal document, they're certainly the ones to decide that (relying on precedent, expert testimony, logical reasoning, etc.)

AlwaysRock3• 2 years ago

The filing is listed with all the reasons for the suit here: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/mu...

neom5• 2 years ago

imo the most interesting page is page 40 if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39562778

baking2• 2 years ago

I assume you mean Exhibit 2, the email from Sam to Elon.

alickz3• 2 years ago

From: Elon Musk

To: Sam Altman

Subject: AI Lab

Agree on all

On Jun 24, 2015, at 10:24 AM, Sam Altman wrote:

1. The mission would be to create the first general Al and use ti for individual empowerment ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest. More generally, safety should be a first-class requirement.

2. I think we'd ideally start with a group of 7-10 people, and plan to expand from there. We have a nice extra building in Mountain View they can have.

3. I think for a governance structure, we should start with 5 people and I'd propose you,[blank] and me. The technology would be owned by the foundation and used "for the good of the world", and in cases where it's not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide. The researchers would have significant financial upside but ti would be uncorrelated to what they build, which should eliminate some of the conflict (we'll pay them a competitive salary and give them YC equity for the upside). We'd have an ongoing conversation about what work should be open-sourced and what shouldn't. At some point we'd get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn't be on the governance board.

4. Will you be involved somehow in addition to just governance? Ithink that would be really helpful for getting work pointed in the right direction getting the best people to be part of it. Ideally you'd come by and talk to them about progress once a month or whatever. We generically call people involved in some limited way ni YC "part-time partners" (we do that with Peter Thiei for exampie, though at this point he's very involved) but we could call ti whatever you want. Even fi you can't really spend time on ti but can be publicly supportive, that would still probably be really helpful for recruiting.

5. I think the right plan with the regulation letter is to wait for this to get going and then! can just release ti with a message like "now that we are doing this, I've been thinking a lot about what sort of constraints the world needs for safefy." Im' happy to leave you of as a signatory. Ialso suspect that after it's out more peopie will be willing to get behind it.

Sam

dang8• 2 years ago

(This was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39559597, but we merged that thread hither.)

Jun8• 2 years ago

"I think for a governance structure, we should start with 5 people and I'd propose you, [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and me. Technology would be owned by the foundation and used "for the good of the world", and in cases where it's not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide."

You can find the number of letters of the redacted text and then guess who they are. It's fun!

emodendroket17• 2 years ago

"for the good of the world", and in cases where it's not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide."

It's hard not to be a bit cynical about such an arrangement.

scintill76• 2 years ago

Off-topic, but what are the  doing there? I gather it's some MSOffice HTML stuff, but did it actually show up in the rendered email, or is it some artifact of the archival process(?) for legal discovery?

neom5• 2 years ago

Looks like it's about html to pdf:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/help-us-to-test-the-html-pastin...

Solvency3• 2 years ago

At worst this just adds sandbags to Altman's personal conquest for money/power, which I'm cool with. At best it puts a bigger spotlight on the future perils of this company's tech in the wrong hands.

yodsanklai• 2 years ago

Can this complaint lead to anything?

photochemsyn3• 2 years ago

This is good news. OpenAI's recent decision to dive into the secretive military contracting world makes a mockery of all its PR about alignment and safety. Using AI to develop targeted assassination lists based on ML algorithms (as was and is being done in Gaza) is obviously 'unsafe and unethical' use of the technology:

https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/perspective/20231212-un...

dash22• 2 years ago

Note that the France24 story on Gaza is about an unrelated technology, there's no claim that OpenAI was involved.

photochemsyn3• 2 years ago

If you have any links detailing the internal structure of the Israeli 'Gospel' AI system or information about how it was trained, that would be interesting reading. There doesn't seem to be much available on who built it for them, other than it was first used in 2021:

"Israel has also been at the forefront of AI used in war—although the technology has also been blamed by some for contributing to the rising death toll in the Gaza Strip. In 2021, Israel used Hasbora (“The Gospel”), an AI program to identify targets, in Gaza for the first time. But there is a growing sense that the country is now using AI technology to excuse the killing of a large number of noncombatants while in pursuit of even low-ranking Hamas operatives."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/19/israels-military-techno...

mempko• 2 years ago

The cynic in me believes this is motivated by not Musk's love for the "mission", but by xAI, his attempt to build OpenAI's competitor. I'm guessing this is just a way to weaken a competitor.

tailspin20192• 2 years ago

You're probably right, but either way it will be interesting to see this tested in court. I think it's good to have some extra scrutiny over how OpenAI is operating regardless of the underlying motivations that led to the action!

baobabKoodaa5• 2 years ago

Ahh, selfish motivations leading to common good as an unintended consequence. Capitalism at work.

hobofan• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's his second/third try. OpenAI was already his way to "commoditize your complement" so that Tesla's AI division could catch up to DeepMind etc..

Now that this accidentally created something even more powerful (and Tesla's autopilot plans don't seem to be panning out), he's trying to stifle the competition so that xAI can catch up. SPOILER: They won't.

ilaksh• 2 years ago

I assume if there is a jury trial then actually the fact that Musk has his own for-profit AI company now could play a huge part. Even if for some reason they tell the jury to "disregard that fact" or something.

I feel like we now have a reasonable expectation that his AI effort becomes open source. Not that I actually expect it, but seems reasonable in this context.

klabb3• 2 years ago

I agree, but if the bar for cynicism is “not taking a billionaire at their word”, then we’re at peak gullibility. Especially if said actor has a track record of deception for economic, social or political gain.

This requires less cynicism than seeing through that Putin invaded to denazify Ukraine, or that your corporate employer rewarded you with pizza because they care about you.

BitWiseVibe• 2 years ago

Wouldn't you have to prove damages in a lawsuit like this? What damages does Musk personally suffer if OpenAI has in fact broken their contract?

boole1854• 2 years ago

He doesn't have access to the GPT-4 source code and data because they decided to keep that proprietary.

cynusx• 2 years ago

They will probably try to unearth that in the discovery phase

tw600040• 2 years ago

that AGI, instead of benefitting the whole world, in which Musk is a part of, will end up only benefitting Microsoft, which he isn't a part of?

AlbertCory4• 2 years ago

I don't think that qualifies as "standing", but IANAL.

dmix• 2 years ago

"AGI"

WolfeReader• 2 years ago

This is no AGI. An AGI is supposed to be the cognitive equivalent of a human, right? The "AI" being pushed out to people these days can't even count.

laristine2• 2 years ago

You can sue for many reasons. For example, when a party breaks a contract, the other party can sue to compel the contract to be performed as agreed.

otterley3• 2 years ago

Specific performance is a last resort. In contract law, the bias is towards making the plaintiff whole, and frequently there are many ways to accomplish that (like paying money) instead of making the defendant specifically honor the terms of the original agreement.

aCoreyJ• 2 years ago

Well Elon was forced to buy Twitter that way

KeplerBoy• 2 years ago

A non-profit took his money and decided to be for profit and compete with the AI efforts of his own companies?

a_wild_dandan9• 2 years ago

Yeah, OpenAI basically grafted a for-profit entity onto the non-profit to bypass their entire mission. They’re now extremely closed AI, and are valued at $80+ billion.

If I donated millions to them, I’d be furious.

foofie2• 2 years ago

You would have an argument if Elon Musk didn't attempted to take over OpenAI, and proceeded to abandon it after his attempts were rejected and he complained the organization was going nowhere.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...

I don't think Elon Musk has a case or holds the moral high ground. It sounds like he's just pissed he committed a colossal error of analysis and is now trying to rewrite history to hide his screwups.

Kranar4• 2 years ago

The statement of claims is full of damages. It claims that Musk donated 44 million dollars on the basis of specific claims made by the plaintiffs as well as the leasing of office space and some other contributions Musk made.

riku_iki4• 2 years ago

it sounds like small amount in grand scheme of things..

TeeMassive• 2 years ago

I didn't read the suit, but they used (and abused?) Twitter's api to siphon data that was used to train an AI which that made them very very rich. That's just unjust enrichment. Elon's money paid for the website and using the API at that scale cost Twitter money while they got nothing out of it.

zoogeny2• 2 years ago

I don't know how comparable it would be, but I imagine if I donated $44 million to a university under the agreement that they would use the money in a particular way (e.g. to build a specific building or to fund a specific program) and then the university used the money in some other way, I feel I ought to have some standing to sue them.

Of course, this all depends on the investment details specified in a contract and the relevant law, both of which I am not familiar with.

mikeyouse3• 2 years ago

Yeah - Had you donated the funds as "restricted funding" in the nonprofit parlance, they would have a legal requirement to use the funds as you had designated. It seems that Musk contributed general non-restricted funding so the nonprofit can more or less do what they want with the money.. Not saying there's no case here, but if he really wanted them to do something specific, there's a path for that to happen and that he didn't take that path is definitely going to hurt his case.

MiscIdeaMaker99• 2 years ago

Was it a donation? Or was it an investment?

AlwaysRock3• 2 years ago

It's worth reading the actual filing. It's very readable.

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/mu...

QuantumG4• 2 years ago

It's literally the title.

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

Wouldn't you have to prove damages in a lawsuit like this?

Not really; the specific causes of action Musk is relying on do not turn on the existence if actual damages, and of the 10 remedies sought in the prayer for relief, only one of them includes actual damages (but some relief could be granted under it without actual damages.)

Otherwise, its seeking injuctive/equitable relief, declaratory judgement, and disgorgement of profits from unfair business practices, none of which turn on actual damages.

delfinom3• 2 years ago

Non-profit status is a government granted status and the government is we the people.

Abuse of non-profit status is damaging to all citizens.

prepend5• 2 years ago

The damages are clearly the valuation of the current organization vs the percent of original funding Musk provided.

The exact amount will be argued but it will likely be in the billions given OpenAI’s recent valuations.

thepasswordis• 2 years ago

Could they just give him back the $60M or whatever?

That seems like nothing to them, or Elon.

robbrown4512• 2 years ago

Imagine if a regular for profit startup did that. It gets 60 million in initial funding, and later their valuation goes up to 100 billion. Of course they can't just give the 60 million back.

This is different and has a lot of complications that are basically things we've never seen before, but still, just giving the 60 million back doesn't make any sense at all. They would've never achieved what they've achieved without his 60 million.

stubish8• 2 years ago

How much money have competitors been spending to keep up, reproducing the technology that was supposed to be released to the public benefiting everyone. All of that could conceivably be claimed as damages. Money they should not have needed to spend.

Even all of the money spent to access ChatGPT. Because, if OpenAI had been releasing their tech to the public, the public would not have had to pay OpenAI to use it.

Or the value of OpenAI-for-profit itself could be considered damages in a class action. Because it gained that value because of technology withheld from the public, rather than releasing it and allowing the public to build the for-profit businesses around the tech.

Lots of avenues for Musk and others' lawyers to get their teeth into, especially if this initial law suit can demonstrate the fraud.

xcv1239• 2 years ago

They scammed him out of tens of millions of dollars and a significant amount of his time and energy.

r721• 2 years ago

What happened with the ranking? Were there people who flagged all the stories, even the first (obviously newsworthy) one?

dang8• 2 years ago

The 30 or so submissions of this story all set off a bunch of software penalties that try to prune the most repetitive and sensational stories off the front page. Otherwise there would be a lot more repetition and sensationalism on the fp, which is the opposite of what HN is for (see explanations via links below if curious).

The downside is that we have to manually override the penalties in the case of a genuinely important story, which this obviously is. Fortunately that doesn't happen too often, plus the system is self-correcting: if a story is really important, people will bring it to our attention (thanks, tkgally!)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

tailspin20192• 2 years ago

Thanks for the explanation - I was just wondering the exact same thing as the parent.

SilasX4• 2 years ago

Sometimes I wish you'd prune the users (at least from submission privileges) who can't be bothered to search first, which is how you get these n-fold submissions.

netcraft• 2 years ago

ideating out loud, I wonder if thered be a way to "collapse" all of the different articles submitted within some short time frame within one story, and maybe share the karma between them? In the case of breaking news it sucks to submit an article and you not being the one that gets "blessed", and different articles could conceivably have different valuable viewpoints. I'm sure it would be more complicated than that when it came to it though.

mise_en_place2• 2 years ago

This is an admirable lawsuit, however, Musk is no longer on the board. That means he has as much say in the direction of the company as a random crackhead living on the BART train. The article states he left the board in 2018.

hoistbypetard2• 2 years ago

he has as much say in the direction of the company as a random crackhead living on the BART train

He donated 8 figures to the nonprofit. So he deserves as much say in the direction as a random crackhead living on the BART train who donated $44M to the nonprofit.

mise_en_place2• 2 years ago

It doesn't work like that. You can donate millions or invest millions in a company as the founder or lead investor. As soon as you leave the company as a board member, and are not a shareholder, your official relationship with the company is terminated.

nuz5• 2 years ago

I'd hate to bet against elon winning - @sama

https://twitter.com/sama/status/618265660477452288

paxys5• 2 years ago

Because of Twitter's amazing new UI I have no idea what Sam is replying to and what the context is, so the link by itself is meaningless.

nuz5• 2 years ago

New? Looks the same as it has been for years. Also sam is clearly speaking in general terms.

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

no it is because the op is private

baobabKoodaa5• 2 years ago

2015

dash22• 2 years ago

A truly altruistic general intelligence would be deeply concerned for the future of humanity in the face of a devastating existential threat.

Tragically I, a mere Neanderthal with a primitive lizard brain, can only settle back and reach for the biggest ever bowl of popcorn.

modeless• 2 years ago

TL;DR for those wondering, as I was, why Musk would have any kind of plausible claim against OpenAI, the main claim is breach of contract on the "Founding Documents" of OpenAI, Inc. (the original nonprofit funded by Musk).

Plaintiff contributed tens of millions of dollars, provided integral advice on research directions, and played a key role in recruiting world-class talent to OpenAI, Inc. in exchange and as consideration for the Founding Agreement, namely, that: OpenAI, Inc. (a) would be a non-profit developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits; and (b) would be open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations, and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons. This Founding Agreement is memorialized in, among other places, OpenAI, Inc.’s founding Articles of Incorporation and in numerous written communications between Plaintiff and Defendants over a multi-year period [...]
Defendants have breached the Founding Agreement in multiple separate and independent ways, including at least by: a. Licensing GPT-4, which Microsoft’s own scientists have written can “reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system,” exclusively to Microsoft, despite agreeing that OpenAI would develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the private commercial gain of a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits, much less the largest corporation in the world. b. Failing to disclose to the public, among other things, details on GPT-4’s architecture, hardware, training method, and training computation, and further by erecting a “paywall” between the public and GPT-4, requiring per-token payment for usage, in order to advance Defendants and Microsoft’s own private commercial interests, despite agreeing that OpenAI’s technology would be open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations. c. [...]

And what is he suing for?

An order requiring that Defendants continue to follow OpenAI’s longstanding practice of making AI research and technology developed at OpenAI available to the public, and
An order prohibiting Defendants from utilizing OpenAI, Inc. or its assets for the financial benefit of the individual Defendants, Microsoft, or any other particular person or entity;
For a judicial determination that GPT-4 constitutes Artificial General Intelligence and is thereby outside the scope of OpenAI’s license to Microsoft;

And some money, of course. And he requests a jury trial.

ulnarkressty• 2 years ago

Microsoft's takeover of Mistral makes a lot more sense if this lawsuit has a chance to succeed.

epistasis3• 2 years ago

The defendant list is a bit bewildering. How usual is a corporate structure like this? Which, if any of these, is the nonprofit?

  OPENAI, INC., a corporation, 
  OPENAI, L.P., a limited partnership, 
  OPENAI, L.L.C., a limited liability company, 
  OPENAI GP, L.L.C., a limited liability company, 
  OPENAI OPCO, LLC, a limited liability company, 
  OPENAI GLOBAL, LLC, a limited liability company, 
  OAI CORPORATION, LLC, a limited liability company, 
  OPENAI HOLDINGS, LLC, a limited liability company,

zitterbewegung• 2 years ago

The organization consists of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC. (From Wikipedia)

debacle2• 2 years ago

A non-profit can have a for-profit subsidiary?

simonw• 2 years ago

The NYT lawsuit lists the same organizations: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...

According to https://openai.com/our-structure the non-profit is "OpenAl, Inc. 501(c)(3) Public Charity".

epistasis3• 2 years ago

Thanks, that's very helpful, I had not seen the diagram on OpenAI's website before.

It explains at least three of the entities, but I do wonder about the purpose of some of the other entities. For example, a limited partnership is quite odd to have hanging around, I'm wondering what part it plays here.

zuminator• 2 years ago

*defendant list

epistasis3• 2 years ago

Oops, that's a bit embarrassing! Thanks for the correction.

manquer3• 2 years ago

Depends on the sector, size and age of the corporation.

In crypto these kind of complex structures are fairly common ,FTX has some 180 entities. Real estate companies like evergrand have similar complexities.

Companies which do lot of acquisitions will have lot of entities and for accounting may keep them .

Consulting companies including the big ones have similar complex structures each business has their own partners who get a cut of the profits directly and pay only some back to the parent.

Hollywood also does such complex accounting for variety of reasons

Compared to peers in the AI space this is probably unusual, but none of them started as non profit . The only somewhat comparable analogy is perhaps Mozilla (nonprofit tech with huge for profit sub) they are not this complex, they also don’t have the kind of restrictions on founding charter /donor money like openAI does

BoppreH2• 2 years ago

Probably not common, since that aspect is part of the complaint. See "E. OpenAI’s Shifting Corporate Structure":

70. In the years following the announcement of the OpenAI, L.P., OpenAI’s corporate structure became increasingly complex.

hattmall2• 2 years ago

It's incredibly common, there are probably even more but these are the most asset rich companies. If properly structured even something like a local gym is going to be 6-8 entities. I took multiple entire classes dedicated to corporate structure. Multiple entities are needed to maximize liability protection and tax avoidance purposes.

SahAssar2• 2 years ago

If properly structured even something like a local gym is going to be 6-8 entities.

Can you explain that? It seems outrageous to me.

paxys5• 2 years ago

While I have no doubt everything in the complaint is correct, it's hard to see it as Elon being genuinely concerned about open and safe AI vs just having FOMO that he isn't part of it anymore and doesn't get to call the shots. For example his own AI startup is exactly as closed off and unregulated as OpenAI. Why is that not equally concerning?

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

I don't want to be in the position of defending Elon Musk, but in this case his complaint seems to be that OpenAI claims one thing and does another. If X.ai started out telling everyone it's for-profit and closed off, then it's not hypocritical at all for it to be that. It's something else, sure.

krisboyz7813• 2 years ago

But Musk claims X is the free speech town square but it isn't

paxys5• 2 years ago

From x.ai's home page:

At xAI, we want to create AI tools that assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge.

How is it doing that by being a closed, for-profit enterprise?

vajdagabor2• 2 years ago

Elon Musk is all about Elon Musk. One of the biggest hypocrites on Earth right now. He might be right about OpenAI not being open as they promised, but, if anyone, its not Musk who should sue them. He claims his goal is to save humanity, but he is actively working on destroying it for profit.

tombert2• 2 years ago

I don't really want to defend Elon, because I very much dislike him, but there's a bit if a difference between OpenAI vs his own AI startups, which is that his AI startup isn't called Open AI. There's no compunctions about it being a for-profit enterprise, unlike OpenAI which kind of gives a veil of a non-profit.

Like, if a doctor in Manhattan found out that Doctors Without Borders was charging Manhattan medical rates to all the people it was treating in Uganda, that doctor might criticize them for doing that, and I don't think it'd be a good excuse for DWB to say "You charge Manhattan medical rates at your practice, how is that not equally concerning???" because the obvious retort would be to say "Yeah but I'm not pretending to be a non-profit.".

paxys5• 2 years ago

His entire lawsuit rests on the premise that AI/AGI is dangerous for humanity and cannot be developed in secret by large corporations but should be fully open and regulated. Looking at xAI and several other of his efforts (like the Optimus robot), those arguments fall flat. He is seemingly perfectly fine with closed off corporate AI as long as he is the one holding the strings.

emadm• 2 years ago

where is Ilya

kbos873• 2 years ago

Unsurprising turn of events. Musk can't stand not being at the top of the food chain, and it's been widely reported on that he's felt "left out" as AI has taken off while he has been consumed by the disaster he created for himself over at X -

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-ai-boom-openai-wal...

I can imagine Musk losing sleep knowing that a smart, young, gay founder who refuses to show him deference is out in the world doing something so consequential that doesn't involve him.

kbos873• 2 years ago

Genuinely curious why I'm getting downvoted - similar comments don't appear to have met the same fate, and I'm by no means defending Altman or OpenAI.

If it's because I mentioned that Altman is gay - and I can't find another reason - I think that's relevant in context of Musk's recent hard shift rightward and his consistently aggressive, unprovoked behavior toward LGBTQ people. For some reason the topic looms large in his mind.

vik0• 2 years ago

I think you're reading too much into it lol

I think a more likely interpretation is that a lot of people here are Musk fans, and don't like it when he gets criticized, thus downvoting your comment

I'm neither an ultra fanboy nor someone who despises him

mycologos• 2 years ago

It seems like he's talked a lot about the T in LGBTQ, not so much the G? Evidence that he would be especially incensed at getting beat by a gay guy seems thin on the ground unless we insist on treating LGBTQ as a bloc.

(I don't exactly keep up with Musk's doings, though.)

ahmeneeroe-v2• 2 years ago

I didn't downvote you because I don't have downvote rights yet. I would have downvoted you, though, because in a sea of comments of questionable value, your comment stands out as actually having negative value.

perihelions• 2 years ago

Most important question: why did he file this lawsuit? What does he intend to gain out of it?

Is it a first step towards acquiring/merging OpenAI with one of his companies? He's offered it to buy once before, in 2018 [0]. (He's also tried to buy DeepMind—page 10 the OP filing).

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk... ("Elon Musk reportedly tried and failed to take over OpenAI in 2018")

debacle2• 2 years ago

The "source" for The Verge article is a sourceless hit piece. There's no actual source claiming he tried to take over OpenAI in 2018 anywhere, besides "people familiar with the matter."

jmyeet• 2 years ago

This lawsuit makes me wonder how much Elon Musk had to do with Sam Altman's firing as CEO. The complaint specifically wants OpenAI to focus on its (allegedly promised) nonprofit activities, not the for-profit company.

If Elon had been involved--which the lawsuit seems to imply--I imagine he had to have something to do with Altman's ouster.

redbell• 2 years ago

Maintaining the initial commitment becomes exceptionally challenging after attaining unforeseen success, a situation akin to a politician struggling to uphold pre-election promises once in office.

EXACTLY, a year ago, an alarm echoed with urgency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981

whimsicalism23• 2 years ago

Truly the only reason they failed at keeping their original mission is when they stopped paying employees in cash.

natch• 2 years ago

So, does this mean he’s setting up a third run-in with that same Delaware judge?

Tomte2• 2 years ago

GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm

That claim is audacious.

jeron• 2 years ago

Would be insane if the court case ended up hinging on whether AGI had been achieved internally or not

Tomte2• 2 years ago

It won‘t, that‘s pretty much a throwaway half-sentence, but it stood out to me.

You throw a lot of things at the judge and see what sticks.

Bjorkbat• 2 years ago

I mean, I definitely disagree with the statement that GPT-4 is an AGI, but OpenAI themselves define an AGI in their charter as an AI that is better than the median human at most economically valuable work.

Even when taking that into consideration I don't consider GPT-4 to be an AGI, but you can see how someone might make attempt to make a convincing argument.

Personally though, I think this definition of AGI sets the bar too high. Let's say, hypothetically, GPT-5 comes out, and it exceeds everyone's expectations. It's practically flawless as a lawyer. It can diagnose medical issues and provide medical advice far better than any doctor can. It's coding skills are on par with that of the mythical 10x engineer. And, obviously, it can perform clerical and customer support tasks better than anyone else.

As intelligent as it sounds, you could make the argument that according to OpenAI's charter it isn't actually an AGI until it takes an embodied form, since most US jobs are actually physical in nature. According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 45% of jobs required medium strength back when the survey was taken in 2017 (https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/physically-strenuous-jobs-...)

Hypothetically speaking, you could argue that we might wind up making superintelligence before we get to AGI simply because we haven't developed an intelligence capable of being inserted into a robot body and working in a warehouse with little in the way of human supervision. That's only if you take OpenAI's charter literally.

Worth noting that Sam Altman himself hasn't actually used the same definition of AGI though. He just argues that an AGI is one that's simply smarter than most humans. In which case, the plaintiffs could simply point to GPT-4's score on the LSAT and various other tests and benchmarks, and the defendants would have to awkwardly explain to a judge that, contrary to the hype, GPT-4 doesn't really "think" at all. It's just performing next-token prediction based on its training data. Also, look at all the ridiculous ways in which it hallucinates.

Personally, I think it would be hilarious if it came down to that. Who knows, maybe Elon is actually playing some kind of 5D chess and is burning all this money just to troll OpenAI into admitting in a courtroom that GPT-4 actually isn't smart at all.

zeroonetwothree• 2 years ago

My software engineer job officially says I need to be able to life up to 50 lbs but it seems unlikely that this is actually necessary in practice.

timeon3• 2 years ago

So what is the term for actual AI now? ASI?

VirusNewbie• 2 years ago

Why? AGI itself makes no claim of super intelligence or even super human capabilities.

tills132• 2 years ago

It's missing the "I" part -- it's a token prediction scheme using math.

sidcool2• 2 years ago

What would be a good way to ascertain if GPT 4 is AGI?

noncoml• 2 years ago

Now we know who was behind all the past OpenAI drama. Mask Off (pun unindented)

syngrog66• 2 years ago

grabs popcorn

iExploder6• 2 years ago

If I were you I would grab a GEP gun

sensanaty4• 2 years ago

I don't even particularly like Musk, but I definitely despise M$ and their comic-book tier villanous shenanigans even more. Here's to hoping M$ gets fucked in this.

swozey3• 2 years ago

The mental gymnastics that some tech bro has to go through to like Musk over Microsoft to the point that they still use the 2001 meme of "M$FT" is hilarious.

I know just about everything I could ever need to know about both companies and I have tons, tons of friends who absolutely love and have been at "M$FT" for 5-20 years.

I don't know a single person who likes working at Tesla or SpaceX and I used to live in Austin.

I'm also a literal linux kernel contributor so I don't have any bone in the game for Windows.

Musk is literally spitting right-wing nazi, anti-trans trash all over twitter and using his new news medium as a right wing mind meld tool while unbanning known anti-semites and racists like Kanye and Trump. Cool guy. I guess you might not care about that when you're a middle-class straight white tech bro on hackernews and might think M$FT is the big bad guy because Bill Gates locked you into Internet Explorer and adware 15 years ago.

sensanaty4• 2 years ago

Wow the people employed by the evil gigacorporation like working for the entity shoveling mountains of money at them, what a completely unexpected stance for them to have.

M$ is no different today than they were in the days of their EEE strategy, they've just fooled the techbros, as you put it, into believing they're still not the scum of the earth anymore.

shutupnerd0000• 2 years ago

Glad you're not a figurative linux kernel contributor

sahila3• 2 years ago

Liking the environment at Microsoft is very different than liking what the company does. I know far more people excited about space x than whatever Microsoft is doing and none uses any Microsoft products whereas tons of them opted into buying a Tesla!

Working at Microsoft is considered easy work whereas it's the opposite for Elon's companies. Doesn't make him a bad person.

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 2 years ago

Is it okay with you if I dislike both Microsoft and Musk?

I don't care if MS employees are the happiest people on the planet. That has nothing to do with why I hate Microsoft. I also don't care too much about some slight 15 years ago. What I hate is the damage they've done and continue to do to software freedom and computing literacy, and the way they continually try to seek monopolies using underhanded tactics.

Anarch157a• 2 years ago

Musk is even more cartoonishly villainous than MS. This is pretty much Lex Luthor against Darkseid. Unless it results in mutual destruction, doesn't matter who wins, everybody else loses.

My take is that Elon is suing OpenAI because he left OpenAI before they opened a commercial venture, which means he doesn't benefit from the companies current valuation, so he's using the courts to try to strong arm the foundation into giving him some shares, basically using the courts for harassment purposes.

I'm hoping for both to get fucked, and if this takes this whole "AI" hype away with them, so much the better.

sensanaty4• 2 years ago

Yeah that'd be the ideal turn of events, if both M$ and Elon got fucked by this

In my dream world we'd nuke M$ from orbit and splinter it into a trillion tiny little pieces... A man can dream

proteal• 2 years ago

I highly doubt this is the case. The guy has plenty of money, power and clout. There’s really no more for him to gain in those departments. It’s more likely he fears AGI will put humanity into a truly dystopian future if monopolized by a corporation and he wants to ward against that future by ensuring the company is incorporated properly as a nonprofit.

old-gregg• 2 years ago

My take is that Elon is suing OpenAI because he left OpenAI before they opened a commercial venture, which means he doesn't benefit from the companies current valuation

According to the Isaacson book, Sam offered Elon equity in the for-profit arm of OpenAI but he declined. He is clearly motivated by the original mission, i.e. the Open part.

hattmall2• 2 years ago

Musk is an arrogant psychopath that's unable to find joy or happiness in anyway similar to normal people. But I at least feel that he has a genuine vision of using technology to actually to improve normal people's lives.

siliconc0w• 2 years ago

There is a lot in here but turning a non-profit into a for-profit definitely should be challenged. Otherwise why wouldn't everyone start as a non-profit, develop your IP, and then switch to 'for-profit' mode once you got something that works? You don't pay income taxes and your investors get write offs.

emodendroket17• 2 years ago

They didn't "turn it into" a for-profit though, they created a separate for-profit arm. This one is unusually successful but that's not an unusual thing for even "regular" charities to do in order to engage in some activities that they wouldn't normally be able to.

justinzollars• 2 years ago

And transferred everything they did to that arm. I'm all for tax avoidance, but the rules should apply to everyone equally. Small ma and pa businesses don't have the money to hire armies of lawyers for these legal machinations

l2silver• 2 years ago

Creating a separate for-profit arm is trivially easy.

lumost2• 2 years ago

Perhaps the regular charity version of this should also be challenged. This case looks somewhat egregious as the for profit arm was able to fire the board of the non-profit parent. Likewise, openAI is selling "PPU" units, it's entirely unclear if anybody knows what these actually are.

It's highly likely in my uneducated opinion that OpenAI will be told to adopt a standard corporate structure in the near term. They will likely have to pay out a number of stakeholders as part of a "make right" setup.

pclmulqdq7• 2 years ago

They basically did, though. The nonprofit does nothing except further the interests of the for-profit company, and all employees get shares of of the for-profit company.

It's not unusual for nonprofits to have spinoffs, but it is unusual for the nonprofit to be so consumed by its for-profit spinoffs.

cush• 2 years ago

in order to engage in some activities that they wouldn’t normally be able to

What activities couldn’t they do with their charity arm that required this for-profit arm?

tapoxi• 2 years ago

I mean they effectively did. They created a for-profit, moved the bulk of employees there, and when the board attempted to uphold its founding principles they were threatened and forced to resign.

What's next? Can the OpenAI nonprofit shell divest itself of the for-profit OpenAI and spend the remainder of its cash on "awareness" or other nonsense?

behringer• 2 years ago

It should definitely be illegal.

V-eHGsd_• 2 years ago

i'm not disagreeing with you that going from non-profit to for-profit should be challenged, but doesn't openai still maintain their non-profit? they just added a for-profit "arm" (whatever that means).

sigmoid10• 2 years ago

This. Even when we ignore the whole ethical aspect of "AI for benefit of humanity" and all that philosophic stuff, there are very real legal reasons why OpenAI should never have been allowed to switch to for profit. They were only able to circumvent this with their new dual company structure, but this should still not be legal.

samstave6• 2 years ago

Imagine if as punishment, OpenAI were forced to OpenSource any and all IP that was developed in the non-profit phase of their company?

That would be a Nuke in the AI world.

yawnxyz• 2 years ago

didn't Firefox / Mozilla set that precedent already?

dkjaudyeqooe5• 2 years ago

The point of their charter is not to make money, it's to develop AI for the benefit of all, which I interpret to mean putting control and exploitation of AI in the hands of the public.

The reality: we don't even get public LLM models, let alone source code, while their coffers overfloweth.

Awesome for OpenAI and their employees! Every else goes without. Public benefit my arse.

jjjjj555552• 2 years ago

Isn't this how drugs get developed? Even worse, the research is done using public funds, and then privatized and commercialized later.

pleasantpeasant• 2 years ago

This is a huge problem in the US. Tax-payers are subsidizing a lot of medical advances, then the US government gives it to the private sector, privatizing whatever medical advances were paid by tax-dollars.

Socialism seems to create a lot of markets for the Capitalist private sector.

pclmulqdq7• 2 years ago

University spinoffs are pretty common, but the university tends to be a small minority owner of the spinoff (unless the shares are donated back to them later), exercise no control of the operation of the company, and don't transfer IP to the spinoff after the spinning-off has happened. OpenAI is not doing any of that with its for-profit.

jandrewrogers3• 2 years ago

The research is an inconsequential percentage of the development cost, essentially a rounding error. Those commercial development organizations foot almost the entire bill and take all of the risk.

ben_w7• 2 years ago

I'm not at all clear on what a "not for profit" status even does, tax wise. In any jurisdiction.

They are still able to actually make a profit (and quite often will, because careful balancing of perfect profit and loss is almost impossible and loss is bad), and I thought those profits were still taxed because otherwise that's too obvious as a tax dodge, it's just that profit isn't their main goal?

emodendroket17• 2 years ago

Well, you're confused because of your erroneous determination that they're "able to make a profit." They are not. They are able to have positive cash flow but the money can only be reinvested in the nonprofit rather than extracted as profit.

55555• 2 years ago

Nonprofits can make profits. They aren’t taxed, but they can’t issue dividends. In theory there is some reasonable limit (in the millions) of how much they can pay out via salary compensation etc. they can’t issue dividends because they have no shareholders and no equity. Therefore the profit must simply be used towards their goal, basically.

FrobeniusTwist• 2 years ago

It certainly can be confusing. I generally use the term "nonprofit" to mean a corporate entity formed under a nonprofit corporation act, e.g., one derived from the Model Nonprofit Corporation Act. This says nothing about the tax status of the entity, and unless other circumstances also apply the entity would be subject to taxes in the same way as a for profit company on its net income. But many nonprofits also take steps to qualify for one of several tax exemptions, the most well known being section 501(c)(3). Not all of the familiar tax advantages apply to all tax exempt organizations. For example, donations to an organization exempt under 501(c)(3) are deductible by the donor, but donations to a 501(c)(4) are not.

InitialLastName• 2 years ago

NAL, my understanding: The profits aren't taxed, and the shareholders aren't allowed to take dividends out (there effectively are no "shareholders" per se, just donors); all profits have to be reinvested back into the business.

In the case of many/most (honest) non-profits, the operating costs are paid out of a combination of the dividends of an invested principal (endowment, having been previously donated by donors) and grants/current donations. Any operating profit could then be returned to the endowment, allowing the organization to maintain higher operating costs indefinitely, thus giving the organization more capacity to further their mission.

takinola• 2 years ago

It would be hard to get investors though. Non-profits can only take donations and not investment. So you would have to develop your IP using your own funds. Plus, most companies are loss making in the early years so it is actually more tax-efficient to have an entity that can recognize those losses for tax purposes and offset them against future losses.

dkjaudyeqooe5• 2 years ago

The replies that say "well the profits go to the non-profit, all's good" miss the reality of these high profit nonprofits: the profits invariably end up in the pockets of management. Most of those are essentially scams, but it doesn't mean that OpenAI isn't just a more subtle scam.

The hype and the credulity of the general public play right into this scam. People will more or less believe anything Sam the Money Gushing Messiah says because the neat demos keep flowing. The question is what's we've lost in all this, which no-one really thinks about.

emodendroket17• 2 years ago

If your beef with this structure is that executives get paid handsomely I have bad news about the entire category of nonprofits, regardless of whether they have for-profit arms or not.

samstave6• 2 years ago

"Why is the NFL a non-profit:

https://www.publicsource.org/why-is-the-nfl-a-nonprofit/

The total revenue of the NFL has been steadily increasing over the years, with a significant drop in 2020 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic12. Here are some figures:

    2001: $4 billion

    2010: $8.35 billion

    2019: $15 billion

    2020: $12.2 billion

    2021: $17.19 billion

    2022: $18 billion

romeros• 2 years ago

The reality was that nobody could have predicted the A.I breakthroughs when OpenAI first got started. It was a moonshot. Thats why Musk gave $50m dollars without even asking for a seat at the board.

OpenAI had to start as a non profit because there was no clear path forward. It was research. Kind of like doing research with the goal of curing cancer.

The unexpected breakthroughs came a bit quicker than anticipated and everybody was seeing the dollar signs.

I believe OpenAIs intial intention at the beginning was benign. But they just couldn't let go of the dollars.

matt-p• 2 years ago

Also it /doesn't/ all go back to openAI. Microsoft for example will make 100X ROI.

treflop• 2 years ago

Not to speak about OpenAI specifically, but people who know what they’re doing still cost a buttload of $$$$.

Even I as a software engineer have a minimum salary I expect because I’m good at my job.

Just because it’s a non-profit doesn’t mean I’m going to demand a smaller salary.

And if the non-profit can’t afford me and gets a more junior dev and they’re not very good and their shit breaks… well, they should have paid full price.

That said, there ARE a lot of dirty non-profits that exist just to pay their executives.

tehjoker• 2 years ago

Non-profits, the big ones at least, are a scam by rich people to privatize what should essentially be nationalized government services. They get to pretend they're helping the public at a fraction of their capability to paper over their ill gotten gains elsewhere. It's like a drug lord buying a church, but they get to take the spend out of their taxes. Alternatively, they are a way to create a tax free pool of money for their children to play with by putting them on the board.

Non-profits weren't really as much of a thing until the neoliberal era of privatizing everything.

Of course, there are "real" non-profits, those kinds of activities are a real thing, such as organizing solely member funded organizations to serve the people, but in America, this is a marginal amount of the money in the system.

amelius• 2 years ago

Yes, that's the new capitalism. Privatizing profits while socializing risks.

kennywinker• 2 years ago

I think that's been part of the capitalist model since roughly the beginning.

stickfigure• 2 years ago

You misunderstand how taxes work.

Unprofitable businesses of every sort don't pay income taxes. Startups like OpenAI don't pay income taxes because they don't have income. And investors don't get a writeoff merely for investing in a nonprofit; it's not like a donation to a nonprofit (which would be deductable).

guhidalg2• 2 years ago

Startups like OpenAI don't pay income taxes because they don't have income.

Where is my $20/month for GPT-4 going then?

evanlivingston• 2 years ago

This is a great point but has me realizing I don't know how to square this with the idea that quite a few people are making enormous profits from unprofitable businesses.

It feels like there should be a way to tax these startups that exist as vehicles for cash grabs, but are not profitable.

sebastianconcpt2• 2 years ago

Actually a good point that exposes the potential opportunism of having used the work everyone involved added as mere MVP-product-market-fit until it can go big bucks (and big disruptive and unelected and societally disruptive power).

subsubzero• 2 years ago

Agree, I believe Elon gave $50M or so in 2018 with the intent that giving this money to the non-profit openAI was going to benefit people with open access to AI systems. Sam Altman has completely thrown out any semblance of law and how non-profits work and closed down the companies whitepapers(GPT papers after 2019 no longer published) and embedded it into Microsoft. This should be a slamdunk legal ruling against this ever happening again.

russdill3• 2 years ago

Ok, but that sounds like something that requires a change in legislation. Suing companies for doing something permissible under the current legal structure just doesn't make sense.

y1426i• 2 years ago

I think this is a different case. The purpose of OpenAI could not have been achieved had it not been converted to a for-profit organization. Profits are necessary since they incentivize the innovation that AI calls for. Non-profits can never achieve these.

Today we all benefit from OpenAI, but its the for-profit Open AI that made it possible. How else would they spend billions on compute and take those large risks, on whose money?

emodendroket17• 2 years ago

It seems like the lawsuit revolves around a claim that GPT-4 is "AGI." Seems kind of dubious but, of course, when these questions get to courts who knows what will happen.

iExploder6• 2 years ago

Could it lead to probing and discovery?...

emodendroket17• 2 years ago

Not sure what you mean to imply might happen.

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

Yes, unless it is dismissed at a very early stage, there will be discovery.

kordlessagain• 2 years ago

Discovery is the play here for both GPT4 and Q. It's a win/win for Elon Musk as he will either get money or get the knowledge how it's done/going to be done. I hold an opinion that GPT4 is simply an ensemble of GPT-3's with a bunch of filtering, deployment (for calculating things), and feedback mechanisms with a shitty UI tacked onto it. Q is probably that ensemble plugged into Sora somehow, to help tweak the wisdom understanding of a certain class of problems. That's why they need the GPUs so badly. And, we just saw the paper on quantization of models come out, so it's good timing to bring this claim to bear.

Elon Musk would do well to consider taking Tesla's ability to build hardware and apply it to building ASICs, because without the hardware, no amount of software discovery will net you AGI.

photochemsyn3• 2 years ago

In the rush to monetize their assets, OpenAI and Microsoft are turning to the government contracting spigot:

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-cha...

Interestingly, this is also how IBM survived the Great Depression, it got a lucrative contract to manage Social Security payments. However, AI and AGI are considerably more dangerous and secretive military uses of the technology should be a giant red flag for anyone who is paying attention to the issue.

I wouldn't be surprised if the decision to launch this lawsuit was motivated in part by this move by Microsoft/OpenAI.

Eji1700• 2 years ago

Well this will be an interesting circus for sure. Musk isn’t exactly batting 1000 vs other large tech companies in lawsuits but openAI sure as hell has done some sketchy bs

sema4hacker2• 2 years ago

A NY Times article says "Though Mr. Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for becoming a for-profit company, he hatched a plan in 2017 to wrest control of the A.I. lab from Mr. Altman and its other founders and transform into a commercial operation that would work alongside his other companies, including the electric carmaker Tesla, and make use of their increasingly powerful supercomputers, people familiar with his plan have said. When his attempt to take control failed, he left the OpenAI board, the people said."

That would let OpenAI lawyers keep this suit tied up for a very long time.

moralestapia• 2 years ago

Could he be the one behind the recent coup at OpenAI, as well?

kmeisthax3• 2 years ago

No. Elon Musk was not involved with the firing of Sam Altman as far as I'm aware.

The real story behind that is... complicated. First, Sam Altman allegedly does stuff that looks to be setting up a coup against the board, so the board fires Sam, but they don't provide proper context[0] and confuse everyone. So Sam gets Microsoft and a bunch of OpenAI employees to revolt and pressure the board to bring him back. He then fires the board and instates a new one, basically the original coup plan but now very much open and in the public eye.

[0] To be clear, most corporate communications try to say as little as possible about internal office politics. That can easily lead into defamation lawsuits.

baruz• 2 years ago

My impression from all the stuff I’ve looked at was that one board member wrote a paper praising Anthropic’s approach with implied (or not so implied?) criticism of OpenAI’s approach. This got Altman furious. So he was going to each board member and subtly (or not so subtly?) presenting a case for her removal, using whatever reasoning, sometimes contradictory, he could tack on, maybe trying to intimidate some into compliance. This approach may have rubbed them the wrong way? Those board members communicated with each other and noted the contradictions, so they summarily fired him without consulting lawyers and without gathering a workable case file to present to stakeholders and the public. Without Altman’s relationships with the largest funders, employees got nervous and wanted information the board was rather embarrassed not to have, exacerbating the anxiety in the workforce. I’m sure that whatever the charter says about investments as donations, Microsoft had the lawyers to ensure they did not have to sink hundreds of millions into a sinking ship.

No Musk required, the individuals at OpenAI did it to themselves.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

It suspicious, but the execution was utterly naive.

nuz5• 2 years ago

Yet interestingly kept donating to openai until september 2020 according to the document.

99_003• 2 years ago

That would let OpenAI lawyers keep this suit tied up for a very long time.

Why?

croes• 2 years ago

Same with Musk,'s warning about the dangers of AI but then he released one too.

gridspy• 2 years ago

The only real defense against dangerous AI is friendly AI.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

This is my main question, how open is Tesla's FSD "AI"? Why is it okay for his AI to be closed with a direct path of killing/harming people?

arandomusername• 2 years ago

if you can't fight them, join them

blah-yeah• 2 years ago

NY Times is unusually biased [1] and has been embroiled in strange activity over the years [2]

[1] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times-opinion-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_con...

stubish8• 2 years ago

I don't see why this is a problem for the case. It demonstrates that OpenAI had not released its tech to the public, which includes Elon Musk. He wouldn't have needed to try wresting control if they had done what the non-profit was supposed to do.

BoppreH2• 2 years ago

I find it interesting that there's no mention of private information after ~2020. No whistleblowers, private demos, chats with Altman, or anything not found in mainstream news.

Is that required for filing a case, or is Musk operating from the same information as all of us?

ricardobeat• 2 years ago

I think he had left the organization by 2019?

owenpalmer• 2 years ago

I uploaded the pdf into GPT4, and this is the output:

"Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, alleging breach of contract, promissory estoppel, breach of fiduciary duty, unfair competition under California Business and Professional Code, and accounting. Musk claims that OpenAI deviated from its founding principles, which emphasized developing artificial intelligence (AI) for the benefit of humanity, open-sourcing their technology, and not pursuing profit maximization. The suit highlights concerns over OpenAI's shift towards proprietary practices, particularly with the development and handling of GPT-4, and alleges that these actions contradict the organization's original mission and agreements."

nojvek2• 2 years ago

This is going to be an interesting trial.

Elon has a good case that OpenAI has long diverged from his founding principles.

Sam and his friends can side with Microsoft to build a ClosedAI system like Google/Deepmind and Apple.

There is a place for open research. StabilityAI and Mistral seem to be carrying that torch.

I don’t think SamA is the right leader for OpenAI.

iExploder6• 2 years ago

Google "Microsoft strikes deal with Mistral in push beyond OpenAI" bro...

elvennn• 2 years ago

Regarding Mistral recent announcements, I'm not so sure anymore.

pelorat2• 2 years ago

The large models can't be run by consumers, and why would a for profit company release a large model that can then be picked up by other startups?

JamisonM4• 2 years ago

Why do you think he has a good case?

To me OpenAI's response is simply, "It is our honestly held belief that given our available resources private partnership was the only viable way to ensure that we are in control of the most advanced AGI when it is developed. And it is our honest belief opening up what we are developing without a lot of log term due diligence would not be in the best interests of humanity and the best interests of humanity is the metric by which we decide how quickly to open source our progress."

To me you can't win a lawsuit like this that is essentially about a small difference in opinions about strategy, but I am not a lawyer.

jcranmer3• 2 years ago

IANAL, but here's my takeaways from reading the complaint:

* There is heavy emphasis on the "Founding Agreement" as the underlying contract. (This appears to be Exhibit 2, which is an email to which Musk replied "Agree on all"). Since I'm not a lawyer, I'm ignorant on the interpretation of a lot of contract law, and there may be finer points in case history that I'm missing, but... where's the consideration? The "Founding Agreement" in general reads to me not as contract but preliminary discussions before the actual contract is signed.

* The actual certificate of incorporation seems more relevant. Also, it's a Delaware corporation, which makes me wonder if Delaware wouldn't be a more appropriate jurisdiction for the dispute than California. Granted, I know Musk now hates Delaware because it's ruled against him, but that's not a reason you get to file suit in the wrong venue!

* I noticed that Musk's citation of the certificate of incorporation has an ellipsis on one of the articles in contention. The elided text is "In furtherance of its purposes, the corporation shall engage in any lawful act of activity for which nonprofit corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of Delaware." ... Again, I don't know enough to know the full ramifications of this statement in jurisprudence, but... that seems like a mighty big elastic clause that kind of defeats his case.

* Musk admits to having continued to contribute to OpenAI after he expressed displeasure at some of its activities (paragraph 68). That substantially weakens his case on damages.

* Much hay made of GPT being AGI and AGI being excluded from licenses. No citation of the license in question seems weak. Also, he pleads 'However, OpenAI’s Board “determines when we’ve attained AGI.”'

* Paragraph 98 asserts that OpenAI fired Altman in part due to its breakthrough in realizing AGI. But the conclusion I've seen is that Altman was fired for basically lying to the board.

* Paragraph 105: However, the OpenAI, Inc. Board has never had a fiduciary duty to investors. ... interesting theory, I'm not sure it's true. (Can some lawyers chime in here?)

* There are essentially two underlying causes of action. The first (comprising the first two causes) is that the Founding Agreement is a binding contract between Altman and Musk that OpenAI breached. I'm skeptical that the Founding Agreement actually constitutes a contract, much less one that OpenAI is a party to. The second (comprising the last three causes) is that, as a donor, Musk is entitled to see that his money is used only in certain ways by OpenAI, and OpenAI failed to use that money appropriately. There's no pleading that I can see that Musk specifically attached any strings to his donations, which makes this claim weak, especially given the promissory estoppel implied by paragraph 68.

* The prayers for relief include judicial determination that OpenAI attained AGI. Not sure that is something the court can do, especially given the causes of action presented.

Overall, I don't think this case is all that strong.

coliveira• 2 years ago

Typical grift from E. Musk. I'm pretty sure when he left Open-AI he had to sign something saying that he didn't have rights to technologies developed after that point. He's just trying to sue back his way into the company.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

Saw the headlines, but emotions aside is there any merit to the case thats being argued in the court dockets?

I’m in the non-profit space and there are certainly things about it that are ripe to change by Congress if people knew about them, and an insider also has the ability to snitch to the IRS if they think a tax exemption is being used improperly

The IRS has a bounty program for tax events over like $10m

lenerdenator6• 2 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, is it novel that someone's suing a corporate officer for breach of fiduciary duty as a result of trying to make the most money possible for shareholders?

Obviously that's strange for a non-profit, but when you hear of a breach of fiduciary duty suit it's usually because someone didn't do something to make more money, not less.

It almost feels more like an accusation of fraud than breach of duty.

pclmulqdq7• 2 years ago

This is not a for-profit company. The shareholders don't get any of the money that OpenAI makes by law, so its purpose is not to make a profit.

lenerdenator6• 2 years ago

So Musk's arguing that they had duty to protect his investment in OpenAI from being used for profiteering, and they didn't do that.

How's that going to float in an industry whose philosophy is that profit is a very useful abstraction for social benefit?

w10-1• 2 years ago

Musk is posturing as a savior.

For a promise to be enforceable in contract, it has to be definitive. There's nothing definitive here.

For a representation to be fraudulent, it has to be false or misleading and relied upon as material. Courts don't treat a later change of heart as making earlier statement false, and since Altman arguably knew less than Musk at the time, it's unlikely to be material.

More generally, investors lose all the time, and early minority investors know they can be re-structured out. These investments are effectively not enforced by law but by reputation: if you screw an investor, you'll lose access to other investors (unless your investor tribe is, well, tribal).

The detail and delay that evolved in law for the sake of truth and legitimacy is now being deployed for the sake of capturing attention and establishing reputation.

Musk's investment in twitter has been a catastrophe from an investment and business standpoint, but has amplified his icon status with king-maker aspects through control of attention in our attention-based economy and politics. If he can lead the charge against AI, he can capture a new fear and resentment franchise that will last for generations.

Hence: posturing.

We burrowing mammals can hope the dinosaurs fighting might make life quieter for us, but that's just hope.

password54321• 2 years ago

If he can lead the charge against AI

This doesn't make any sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)

holonsphere• 2 years ago

Most of you realize private equity firms ran your ”non-profit" colleges right? Unethical experiments involving collective intelligence have been fought over for years at CMU/MIT et all. How can yall read this and really not just wonder.

Beijinger• 2 years ago

Hi Holonsphere,

would you be so kind to drop me an Email? I would like to ask you something about your previous projects (the dating site).

holon.10.yr888@spamgourmet.com

kepano2• 2 years ago

Now that Google, Meta, Mistral, etc, all have great open source models, it seems rather untenable for OpenAI to

1. keep "open" in the name

2. stay closed source

3. pretend to be a non-profit

at least one of those things must go, right?

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

I don't think there are any laws about how you name your company right? they could just say "open" as in "open for everyone to use" and that would end that discussion

kepano2• 2 years ago

I didn't mean untenable legally, but from an public/internal perception.

skrbjc• 2 years ago

Maybe this is an elaborate ploy to make OpenAI truly private and clean up their corporate structure while making it seem like the fault of an evil billionaire/court system.

troupe3• 2 years ago

If OpenAI became a non-profit with this in its charter:

“resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person"

I don't think it is going to be hard to show that they are doing something very different than what they said they were going to do.

cpill• 2 years ago

yeah, the lawyers will have the whole case on those two words: "where applicable"

ant6n2• 2 years ago

Rather „not organized for the private gain of any person“

btown• 2 years ago

Yep - the very existence of a widespread concern that open sourcing would be counter to AI safety, and thus not "for the public benefit," would likely it very hard to find OpenAI in violation of that commitment. (Not a lawyer, not legal advice.)

99_003• 2 years ago

Is the charter legally binding?

Is it unchangeable?

A single quote doesn't tell us much.

troupe3• 2 years ago

Going to the IRS and saying, "This is how we plan to benefit humanity and because of that, we shouldn't have to pay income tax." and then coming back later and saying, "We decided to do the opposite of what we said." is likely to create some problems.

mminer237• 2 years ago

Yes, the charter is legally binding as OpenAI's primary fiduciary obligation. It's akin to a normal corporation's duty to shareholders.

Such mission statements are generally modifiable as long as the new purpose is still charitable. It depends on the bylaws though.

gamblor9564• 2 years ago

From the Articles of Incorporation:

"The specific purpose of this corporation is to provide funding for research, development and distribution of technology related to artificial intelligence. The resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable."

Based on this, it would be extremely hard to show that they are doing something very different from what they said they were going to do, namely, fund the research and development of AI technology. They state that the technology developed will benefit the public, not that it will belong to the public, except "when applicable."

It's not illegal for a non-profit to have a for-profit subsidiary earning income; many non-profits earn a substantial portion of their annual revenue from for-profit activities. The for-profit subsidiary/activity is subject to income tax. That income then goes to the non-profit parent can be used to fund the non-profit mission...which it appears they are. It would only be a private benefit issue if the directors or employees of the non-profit were to receive an "excess benefit" from the non-profit (generally, meaning salary and benefits or other remuneration in excess of what is appropriate based on the market).

ethbr17• 2 years ago

The "when applicable" is ambiguous, but IANAL.

Does it become applicable to open source when "The resulting technology will benefit the public"?

That seems the clearest read.

If so, OpenAI would have to argue that open sourcing their models wouldn't benefit the public, which... seems difficult.

They'd essentially have to argue that the public paying OpenAI to use an OpenAI-controlled model is more beneficial.

Or does "when applicable" mean something else? And if so, what? There aren't any other sentences around that indicate what else. And it's hard to argue that their models technically can't be open sourced, given other open source models.

Aloisius6• 2 years ago

Let's say for the sake of argument that they violated their original charter, it still wouldn't give Musk standing to bring the suit.

The charter is not a contract with Musk. He has no more standing than you or I.

pizzafeelsright2• 2 years ago

He has........ attention.

Matticus_Rex3• 2 years ago

If Musk's tens of millions in donations were in reliance on the charter and on statements made by sama, Brockman, etc., there's probably a standing argument there. Musk is very different than you or I -- he's a co-founder of the company and was very involved in its early work. I wouldn't guess that standing would be the issue they'd have trouble with (though I haven't read the complaint).

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

charter is not a contract with Musk

He was defrauded. If OpenAI fails, there is a good chance Altman et al get prosecuted.

CRConrad6• 2 years ago

The charter is not a contract with Musk.

How sure are you of that? Seems to me it could at least equally validly be claimed that that is precidsely what it is.

He has no more standing than you or I.

Did you finance OpenAI when it started? I didn't.

shp0ngle• 2 years ago

They claim that this is about the end result, but in the meantime, they can license the not-yet-done AI to Microsoft.

remram• 2 years ago

Arguably a lot of it is "done". They sell subscriptions to third parties...

jasonfarnon• 2 years ago

Their argument is that the profit from the license assists in reaching the end result. E.g. giving them compute power.

_heimdall5• 2 years ago

If that's the interpretation, its cpletely open ended and OpenAI has full rights to move goal posts for as long as they wish by redefining "done".

Technologies are never "done" unless and until they are abandoned. Would it be reasonable for OpenAI to only open source once the product is "done" because it is obsolete or failed to meet performance metrics?

And is that open sourcing of the training algorithm, the interpretation engine, or the produced data model?

FooBarBizBazz2• 2 years ago

OpenAI being a nonprofit is like Anthony Levandowski’s "Way of the Future" being a 501(c) (3) religious nonprofit. All of which is lifted from Stranger in a Strange Land and L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology.

(It wouldn't be the first time someone made a nerd-cult: Aum Shinrikyo was full of physics grad students and had special mind-reading hats. Though that was unironically a cult. Whereas the others were started explicitly as grifts.)

It's like they have no shame.

Geezus_42• 2 years ago

Say hello to "effective altruism".

neximo64• 2 years ago

Its easy to show this, since the the corporation itself is doing this.

The separate entity is the one going for revenue.

Jensson3• 2 years ago

You can't just give away all assets of a non-profit to a for-profit and say that now the old non-profit values no longer matters.

az226• 2 years ago

The $10M “equity” awards being vested flies in the face of private gain.

throwitaway222• 2 years ago

Unfortunately you can also easily show that they ARE doing these things too.

Open source. Check - they have open source software available.

Private Gain of any person. Check (Not hard to see it's a non-profit. People that make private money from a non-profit is obviously excluded) Now to me, personally, I think all non-profits are for-profit enterprises. The "mission" in nearly all cases isn't for the "people it serves". I've seen so many "help the elders" "help the migrants" but the reality is, money always flows up, not to the people in need.

_heimdall5• 2 years ago

I don't expect a case against OpenAI to be given the leeway to bring into question the entire notion of a nonprofit. There are long standing laws (and case law) for nonprofit entities, it won't all get thrown out here.

stubish8• 2 years ago

So much of the discussion here is about being a non-profit, but per your quote I think the key is open source. Here we have people investing in an open source company, and the company never opened their source. Rather than open source technology everyone could profit from, they kept everything closed and sold exclusive access. I think it is going to be hard for OpenAI to defend their behavior, and a huge amount of damages to be claimed for all the money investors had to spend catching up.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

It says "will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable" they have open sourced a number of things, Whisper most notably. Nothing about that is a promise to open source everything and they just need to say it wasn't applicable for ChatGPT or DallE because of safety.

richardw2• 2 years ago

I might be too generous, but my interpretation is that the ground changed so fast that they needed to shift to continue the mission given the new reality. After ChatGPT, every for-profit and its dog is going hard. Talent can join the only Mother Teresa in the middle, or compete with them as they stupidly open all the source the second they discover anything. You can’t compete with the biggest labs in the world who have infinite GPU, with selfless open sourcers running training on their home PC’s. And you need to be in the game to have any influence over the eventual direction. I’d still bet the goal is the same, but how it’s done has changed by necessity.

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

huge amount of damages to be claimed for all the money investors had to spend catching up

Huh? There's no secret to building these LLM-based "AI"s - they all use the same "transformer" architecture that was published by Google. You can find step-by-step YouTube tutorials on how to build one yourself if you want to.

All that OpenAI did was build a series of progressively larger transformers, trained on progressively larger training sets, and document how the capabilities expanded as you scaled them up. Anyone paying attention could have done the same at any stage if they wanted to.

The expense of recreating what OpenAI have built isn't in having to recreate some secret architecture that OpenAI have kept secret. The expense is in obtaining the training data and training the model.

orena• 2 years ago

They publish the source code for Whisper...

1vuio0pswjnm73• 2 years ago

What about damages. How difficult to show.

In case anyone is confused I am referring to 126, 132 and 135. Not 127.

"126. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants breaches, Plaintiff has suffered damages in an amount that is presently unknown, but that substantially exceeds this Courts jurisdictional minimum of $35,000, and, if necessary, will be proven at trial.

127. Plaintiff also seeks and is entitled to specific performance of Defendants contractual obligations.

132. Injustice can only be avoided through the enforcement of Defendants repeated promises. If specific enforcement is not awarded, then Defendants must at minimum make restitution in an amount equal to Plaintiffs contributions that have been misappropriated and by the amount that the intended third-party beneficiaries of the Founding Agreement have been damaged [how??], which is an amount presently unknown, and if necessary, will be proven at trial, but that substantially exceeds this Courts jurisdictional minimum of $35,000.

135. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants breaches of fiduciary duty, Plaintiff and the express intended third-party beneficiaries of the Founding Agreement have suffered damages in an amount that is presently unknown, but substantially exceeds this Courts jurisdictional minimum of $35,000, and if necessary, will be proven at trial."

The end result of this suit, if it is not dismissed, may be nothing more than OpenAI settling with the plaintiffs for an amount equal to the plaintiffs' investments.

According to this complaint, we are supposed to be third-party beneficiaries to the founding agreement. But who actually believes we would be compensated in any settlement. Based on these claims, the plaintiffs clearly want their money back. Of course they are willing to claim "the public" as TPBs to get their refund. Meanwhile, in real life, their concern for "the public" is dubious.

Perhaps the outcome of the SEC investigation into Altman's misrepresentations to investors, if any, may be helpful to these plaintiffs.

bwilliams18• 2 years ago

Elon's asking for specific performance (IE they uphold the agreement) not damages.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

Specfic performance is a behavior, eg go open source, fire Altman, break it off with MS, etc

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

The end result of this suit, if it is not dismissed, may be nothing more than OpenAI settling with the plaintiffs for an amount equal to the plaintiffs' investments.

Musk's money kept the lights on during a time when OpenAI didn't do much more than get a computer to play Dota. If he wants the proceeds of what his money bought, then they should write him a check for $0, or ship him a garbage can full of the taco wrappers eaten by the developers during that time period.

belter4• 2 years ago

Taking into account, the reported reason Elon Musk departed from the project, is because he wanted OpenAI to merge with Tesla, and he would take complete control of the project, this lawsuit smells of hypocrisy.

"The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI" - https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

But that was to be expected, from the guy who forced his employees to go work with Covid and claimed danger of Covid infection to show up at a Twitter aquisition deposition...

"Tesla gave workers permission to stay home rather than risk getting covid-19. Then it sent termination notices." - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/25/tesla-p...

"Musk declined to attend in-person Twitter deposition, citing COVID exposure risk" - https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3675282-musk-de...

loceng6• 2 years ago

Can you cite the specific line and source claiming "reported reason Elon Musk departed from the project"? Feels taken out of context from what I remembering reading before.

Not sure I'd trust Washington Post to present a story accurately - whether the termination notices were relevant to the premise presented.

Did he attend the Twitter deposition via video? Seems like a hit piece.

ramblerman• 2 years ago

You made exactly zero arguments based on the lawsuit itself. And just went after musks character.

The law doesn’t work that way. It’s not as simple as people I like should win and people I don’t should lose.

The fact you provided references and links implies you actually believe you are making a coherent case

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

Companies pivot all the time. You have to do more than show they are doing something different from what they originally said they would do if you want to win an investor lawsuit.

ph_dre3• 2 years ago

I uploaded the PDF to ChatGPT4 with the original name and got "Unable to upload musk-v-altman-openai-complaint-sf.pdf" multiple times

I changed it to "defnotalawsuit.pdf" and it worked...

russdill3• 2 years ago

I had zero problems, worked on the first try without any re-naming.

ph_dre3• 2 years ago

Update: it is working for me now under the original name. I had tried 4 times before (refreshing/new chat) and only was getting the error on the original file name.

warunsl• 2 years ago

Sorry, I am a n00b in this regard. But is the intention to get ChatGPT to summarize the pdf for you?

ph_dre3• 2 years ago

Yup - to summarize and to help translate legalese. Was quite helpful and was able to ask it for precedents of other non-profits -> for-profits. Seems like Mozilla and Blue Cross Blue Shield are interesting cases to understand better where this happened.

sohex• 2 years ago

The file uploading functionality of ChatGPT is just awful, it has nothing to do with the file name. You can test it yourself with any arbitrary file, the number of failures to upload you experience will be significantly higher than you would experience with, I'd hazard to guess, any other upload function around the internet. Now whether that's something with their processing pipeline or just their servers being perpetually overwhelmed I have no idea, but it's almost certainly a case of ineptitude, not malice.

jiggawatts2• 2 years ago

The coders at OpenAI are all ML people who only know Python. They have no idea how "proper" software is written, or how infrastructure works.

They had such glaring errors in their APIs for such a long time that it's almost comical. Such as when they increased the context window from 8K to 32K tokens, they forgot to increase the HTTP CDN WAF limit for a while. If you actually tried to submit that much data, you'd get a HTTP error code back. They never noticed because internally they don't go through a CDN.

Similarly, the "web browsing" feature was comically bad, with a failure rate exceeding 80% for months after it was released. Even when it worked it was glacially slow and would time out easily and fail. Meanwhile Phind was doing the same thing with 100% success rates and lightning fast response times... with a fraction of the budget and manpower.

rvba5• 2 years ago

The android app (and android web client) seem to have issues login in from time to time - I had a situation where you couldnt log in on two different phones

slim• 2 years ago

Elon Musk will want to settle this in an MMA cage again

Timber-65393• 2 years ago

At best a court forces OpenAI to be more transparent and clear about its for-profit motives (they couldn't hide behind the open, for-the-good-of-mankind mask forever anyways). Maybe even rebrand to stop misusing the terms 'open' and 'non-profit'.

At worst, court rules out the case and we see an OpenAI IPO and another evil company (very much like Google is born) founded on cutting every corner possible to solicit funds as a for-profit non-profit ?? all while stealing intellectual property and profiting their shareholders.

elwell• 2 years ago

AGI is a threat to humanity; so is existing tech: e.g., spending all day staring at various screens (phone, laptop, tv). You can also take the opposite view that AGI will save or expand humanity. It depends on how you define 'humanity'. Page's definition is understandably concerning to Elon, and probably most humans.

ayakang31415• 2 years ago

Finally something is being done about this that I have always wondered about: non-profit that operates like for-profit business

geniium• 2 years ago

TL;DR The document outlines a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against Samuel Altman, Gregory Brockman, and various OpenAI entities. The complaint includes allegations of breach of contract, promissory estoppel, breach of fiduciary duty, unfair competition, and demands for an accounting and a jury trial. Musk accuses Altman and others of deviating from OpenAI's founding principles, which were supposed to focus on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity and not for profit. The suit details the founding of OpenAI, Musk's significant contributions and involvement, and accuses the defendants of transforming OpenAI into a profit-driven entity contrary to its original mission, thereby violating the foundational agreement.

gregwebs• 2 years ago

This suit claims breach of the "Founding Agreement". However, there is no actualy Founding Agreement, there are email communications claimed to be part of a "Founding Agreement". IANAL, but I would suspect that these emails don't matter for much now that there are Ariticles of Incorporation. Those articles are mentioned, but the "Founding Agreement" implied by emails is mentioned more. The suit also seems alarmist by stating that GPT4 is AGI.

It seems like Elon could win a suit to the extent that he could get all of his donations back based on the emails soliciting donation for a purpose that was then changed.

But Elon's goal in this suit is clearly to bring back the "Open" in "OpenAI"- share more information about GPT4 and newer models and eliminate the Microsoft exclusive licensing. Whether this would happen based on a suit like this seems like it would come down to an interpretation of the Articles of Incorporation.

waterheater• 2 years ago

It likely depends on what constitutes a valid contract in this jurisdiction. For example, some states recognize a "handshake agreement" as a legally-binding contract, and you can be taken to court for violating that agreement. I'm certain people have been found guilty in a legal context because they replied to a email one way but acted in the opposite manner.

The Articles of Incorporation are going to be the key legal document. Still, the Founding Agreement is important to demonstrate the original intentions and motivations of the parties. That builds the foundation for the case that something definitively caused Altman to steer the company in a different direction. I don't believe it's unfair to say Altman is steering; it seems like the Altman firing was a strategy to draw out the anti-Microsoft board members, who, once identified, were easily removed once Altman was reinstated. If Altman wasn't steering, then there's no reason he would have been rehired after he was fired.

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

For example, some states recognize a "handshake agreement" as a legally-binding contract

Subject to limits on specific kinds of contracts that must be reduced to writing, all US jurisdictions (not just some states) recognize oral contracts provided that the basic requirements of a contract (offer, acceptance, consideration, etc.) are present.

codexb4• 2 years ago

Page 37 of the lawsuit has the certificate of incorporation. It says precisely what Musk claims it says. That’s the founding document he’s referencing.

jcranmer3• 2 years ago

It says precisely what Musk claims it says.

Almost. Musk uses an ellipsis in his copy in the text that elides some text that is rather detrimental to his claims:

In furtherance of its purposes, the corporation shall engage in any lawful act of activity for which nonprofit corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of Delaware.

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

The whole suit reads like amateur hour - sounds like some teenager whining about how he's been wronged. It reminds me of Hans Niemann's chess suit.

neom5• 2 years ago

These dudes[1] had a lawyer on today who talked about it, it's actually pretty interesting, but this is what they are arguing with: https://content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/I77e...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hWZJg_nda4

stainablesteel• 2 years ago

from what i've read about this drama, its not worth considering

i think this is meant to divert resources away from developing GPT so that musk can get ahead in the AI game, hes basically in a position to do so

neom5• 2 years ago

While researching OpenAI use of unique corporate governance and structures, I found these interesting resources:

OpenAI’s Hybrid Governance: Overcoming AI Corporate Challenges. - https://aminiconant.com/openais-hybrid-governance-overcoming...

Nonprofit Law Prof Blog | The OpenAI Corporate Structure - https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/nonprofit/2024/01/the-open...

AI is Testing the Limits of Corporate Governance (research paper)- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693045

OpenAI and the Value of Governance - https://www.glasslewis.com/openai-and-the-value-of-governanc...

light_triad• 2 years ago

Great resources - thanks for sharing!

You can also access their 990 form: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...

The critical issues for OpenAI is that structurally the cost of collecting data and training models is huge and makes the previous wave of software + physical business models (i.e. Uber, Airbnb, etc) look cheap to operate in comparison. That makes OAI more reliant on cloud providers for compute. Also their moat & network effect is dependent on a more indirect supply of user generated content. Perhaps there's an advantage of using IP to train on as a non profit as some of the articles above argue.

steveBK123• 2 years ago

Musk over the last few years seems to be trying to provide UBI to lawyers.

mfiguiere• 2 years ago

Sam Altman emails Elon Musk (2015): https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1763633741807960498

cljacoby• 2 years ago

Similar to the firing-unfiring of Sam Altman, so much of this seems to be boil down to OpenAI's puzzle-box organizational structure.

It seems like the whole "capped for-profit within a non-profit" is not going to to work long term.

JamisonM4• 2 years ago

A non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary is actually pretty common and it is probably one of the more "normal" things OpenAI has done.

https://www.marcumllp.com/insights/creating-a-for-profit-sub...

My personal opinion is that not creating a for-profit wing would have made a even bigger mess.

(But then I also think this suit is very obviously without merit and the complaint is written in a way that it sounds like lawyers sucking up to Musk to take his money - but people seem to be taking it very seriously!)

stubish8• 2 years ago

I don't think the problem is with having a for-profit wing. The problem is that only the for-profit wing got to use the technology developed by the non-profit, when the non-profit was explicitly tasked with releasing the technology to the public, allowing competition.

schappim• 2 years ago

A non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary is actually pretty common

Example: Raspberry Pi

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019, which is when they changed their corporate structure. It's now 2024.

If Musk had some ideological issue with OpenAI's new corporate structure then why didn't he sue right away?

ergocoder• 2 years ago

"Not suing right away" isn't a good argument in many cases. There are myriad of reasons why people don't sue immediately. I don't think the question is worth asking.

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

I'm not saying it has any legal implications to have waited so long (maybe it does - I've no idea), but if this is really about ideology then the timing seems very weird.

beAbU• 2 years ago

He was busy destryoing twitter?

codexb4• 2 years ago

Microsoft contributes to the python foundation, Linux, and lots of other non-profits with valuable IP. I’m sure if any of those nonprofits stopped releasing source code and began giving it only to Microsoft, there would be a lawsuit as well.

OpenAI was still effectively sharing their research until last year.

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

As I recall OpenAI started becoming more closed at least around the time of GPT-3 (2020). Remember them initially saying the large model was too dangerous to release?

chucke1992• 2 years ago

Musk is just salty that he could not get OpenAI stocks and his Grok is going nowhere. After all he was trying to restrict OpenAI development for 6 months or something (to try to give some time to Grok).

woopsn• 2 years ago

Mr. Altman was fired for cause last year. He then demonstrated very thoroughly and publicly that OpenAI is controlled by Microsoft, and only nominally had its own board and charter.

See general allegation "C. The 2023 Breach Of The Founding Agreement".

Andrex4• 2 years ago

Taking Musk's lawsuit on its face:

Microsoft's investment is not the issue. The corporate change is not the issue. They were the first steps needed to create the issue Musk is targeting. Before the Altman drama, Musk probably wasn't paying attention much. Hell, most of HN didn't care either, and we live this shit every day.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

Maybe he was busy

blurbleblurble• 2 years ago

The grifting can only be fueled by more grifting, it's a momentum game

huslage• 2 years ago

Billionaires fighting over trends is peak capitalism.

ChuckMcM• 2 years ago

As usual, I find Matt Levine's take on this quite fun and informative, unfortunately HN won't let me include it (comment to long) but it begins thusly;

Elon vs. OpenAI

I wrote yesterday about reports that the US Securities and Exchange Commission might be looking into whether OpenAI or its founder and chief executive officer, Sam Altman, might have misled its investors. Late last year, OpenAI’s board briefly fired Altman for not being “consistently candid,” and then reversed course and fired itself instead. So there is some reason to believe that somebody wasn’t candid about something.

I had my doubts that it would rise to the level of securities fraud, though. For one thing, OpenAI is a nonprofit organization, and even its for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global LLC, which has raised money from investors, isn’t all that for-profit. I wrote:

    At the top of OpenAI’s operating agreement, it warns investors: “It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world.” I still don’t know what Altman was supposedly not candid about, but whatever it was, how material can it possibly have been to investors, given what they signed up for? “Ooh he said it cost $50 million to train this model but it was really $53 million” or whatever, come on, the investors were donating money, they’re not sweating the details.

But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Nonprofits can defraud their donors. Generally that sort of fraud is not about financial results; it is about the nonprofit’s mission, and whether it is using the donors’ money to advance that mission. If I ask you to donate to save the whales, and you give me $100,000 earmarked to save the whales, and I spend it all on luxury vacations for myself, I probably will get in trouble. I suppose if Altman was not candid about OpenAI’s mission, or its pursuit of that mission, that really could have been a kind of fraud on OpenAI’s donors. I mean investors. It could have been donation/securities fraud on the donors/investors.

uptownfunk2• 2 years ago

Come on, we all know he’s just angry they got his comp in Delaware.

uptownfunk2• 2 years ago

I have huge respect for both of these individuals. Sad to see them going at each other. Humanity has immense potential to benefit from their innovation.

teamonkey• 2 years ago

Is this a wise move for Musk? What if Altman unveils a true AGI that ultimately takes control of the world’s systems and exacts revenge on anyone who has tried to stop its existence?

7thaccount• 2 years ago

I think we'll be fine from GPT taking over. These technologies seem far from AGI IMO even though they're all very impressive.

schaefer• 2 years ago

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

peter_d_sherman• 2 years ago

"B. The Founding Agreement Of OpenAI, Inc.

23. Mr. Altman purported to share Mr. Musk’s concerns over the threat posed by AGI.

In 2015, Mr. Altman wrote that the “[d]evelopment of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen . . . but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could.” Later that same year, Mr. Altman approached Mr. Musk with a proposal: that they join forces to form a non-profit AI lab that would try to catch up to Google in the race for AGI, but it would be the opposite of Google.

24. Together with Mr. Brockman, the three agreed that this new lab: (a) would be a nonprofit developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits; and (b) would be open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations, and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons (The “Founding Agreement”). Reflecting the Founding Agreement, Mr. Musk named this new AI lab “OpenAI,” which would compete with, and serve as a vital counterbalance to, Google/DeepMind in the race for AGI, but would do so to benefit humanity, not the shareholders of a private, for-profit company (much less one of the largest technology companies in the world).

[...]

"C. The 2023 Breach Of The Founding Agreement

29. In 2023, Defendants Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman, and OpenAI set the Founding Agreement aflame.

30. In March 2023, OpenAI released its most powerful language model yet, GPT-4. GPT-4 is not just capable of reasoning. It is better at reasoning than average humans. It scored in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam for lawyers. It scored in the 99th percentile on the GRE Verbal Assessment. It even scored a 77% on the Advanced Sommelier examination. At this time, Mr. Altman caused OpenAI to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public. GPT-4’s internal design was kept and remains a complete secret except to OpenAI—and, on information and belief, Microsoft. There are no scientific publications describing the design of GPT-4. Instead, there are just press releases bragging about performance.

On information and belief,

this secrecy is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety."

What an interesting case!

We'll see how it turns out...

(Note that I don't think that Elon Musk or Sam Altman or Greg Brockman are "bad people" and/or "unethical actors" -- quite the opposite! Each is a luminary in their own light; in their own domains -- in their own areas of influence! I feel that men of such high and rare intelligence as all three of them are -- should be making peace amongst themselves!)

Anyway, it'll be an interesting case!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

rossdavidh• 2 years ago

So, first thing that comes to mind is that this will confuse and perhaps thus hinder Sam Altman's fundraising efforts. Perhaps that is the whole point? But who knows; not me.

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

Any competent lawyer is going to get Musk on the stand reiterating his opinions about the danger of AI. If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given.

Not saying I agree that being closed source is in the public good, although one could certainly argue that accelerating the efforts of bad actors to catch up would not be a positive.

nicce7• 2 years ago

If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given.

Not really. It slows down like security over obscurity. It needs to be open that we know the real risks and we have the best information to combat it. Otherwise, someone who does the same in closed matter, has better chances to get advantage when misusing it.

FeepingCreature4• 2 years ago

This only holds if defense outscales attack. It seems very likely that attack outscales defense to me with LLMs.

patcon2• 2 years ago

When I try to port your logic over into nuclear capacity it doesn't hold very well.

Nuclear capacity is constrained, and those constraining it attempt to do so for reasons public good (energy, warfare, peace). You could argue about effectiveness, but our failure to self-annihilate seems positive testament to the strategy.

Transparency does not serve us when mitigating certain forms of danger. I'm trying to remain humble with this, but it's not clear to me what balance of benefit and danger current AI is. (Not even considering the possibility of AGI, which is beyond scope of my comment)

tw043• 2 years ago

Just like nuclear weapons?

The whole “security through obscurity doesn’t work” is absolute nonsense. It absolutely works and there are countless real world examples. What doesn’t work is relying on that as your ONLY security.

robbrown4512• 2 years ago

I don't see how opening it makes it safer. It's very different from security things, where some "white hat" can find a security, and they can then fix it so instances don't get hacked. Sure, a bad person could run the software without fixing the bug, but that isn't going to harm anyone but themselves.

That isn't the case here. If some well meaning person discovers a way that you can create a pandemic causing superbug, they can't just "fix" the AI to make that impossible. Not if it is open source. Very different thing.

starbugs5• 2 years ago

If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest

If that was true, then they shouldn't have started off like that to begin with. You can't have it both ways. Either you are pursuing your goal to be open (as the name implies) or the way you set yourself up was ill-suited all along.

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

Their position evolved. Many people at the time disagreed that having open source AGI - putting it in the hands of many people - was the best way to mitigate the potential danger. Note that this original stance of OpenAI was before they started playing with transformers and having anything that was beginning to look like AI/AGI. Around the time of GPT-3 was when they said "this might be dangerous, we're going to hold it back".

There's nothing wrong with changing your opinion based on fresh information.

brookst• 2 years ago

…unless you believe that the world can change and people’s opinions and decisions should change based on changing contexts and evolving understandings.

When I was young I proudly insisted that all I ever wanted to eat was pizza. I am very glad that 1) I was allowed to evolve out of that desire, and 2) I am not constantly harangued as a hypocrite when I enjoy a nice salad.

awb2• 2 years ago

The document says they will open source “when applicable”. If open sourcing wouldn’t benefit the public, then they aren’t obligated to do it.

That gives a lot of leeway for honest or dishonest intent.

Nevermark• 2 years ago

Other groups are going to discover the same problems. Some will act responsibly. Some will try to, but the profit motive will undermine their best intentions.

This is exactly the problem having an open non-profit leader was designed to solve.

Six month moratoriums, to vet and mitigate dangers including outside experts, would probably be a good idea.

But people need to know what they are up against. What can AI do? How do we adapt?

We don't need more secretive data gathering, psychology hacking, manipulative corporations, billionaires (or trillionaires), harnessing unknown compounding AI capabilities to endlessly mine society for 40% year on year gains. Social networks, largely engaged in winning zero/negative sum games, are already causing great harm.

That would compound all the dangers many times over.

seydor2• 2 years ago

Then the foundational document of openAi is Self-contradictory

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

Perhaps, but who knew? Nobody at that time knew how to build AGI, and what it therefore might look like. I'm sure people would have laughed at you if you said "predict next word" was the path to AGI. The transformer paper that kicked off the LLM revolution would not be written for another couple of years. DeepMind was still focusing on games, with AlphaGo also still a couple of years away.

OpenAI's founding charter was basically we'll protect you from an all-powerful Google, and give you the world's most valuable technology for free.

psychoslave4• 2 years ago

If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given.

Tell about a technology you think but dangerous, and I'll give you fifty way to kill someone with it.

Plastic bag for example, are not only potentially dangerous, they make a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity.

lukan3• 2 years ago

"Plastic bag for example, are not only potentially dangerous, they make a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity."

That is news to me, how exactly do they significantly contribute?

geor9e• 2 years ago

You don't even need to call him to the stand, it's not some gotcha, he writes it all over the complaint itself. "AGI poses a grave threat to humanity — perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today." I highly doubt a court is going to opine about open vs closed being safer, though. The founding agreement is pretty clear that the intention was to make it open for the purpose of safety. Courts rule on if a contract was breached, not whether breaching it was a philosophy good thing.

andy_ppp2• 2 years ago

You’re forgetting that any good lawyer would do something some random on hacker news made up to support their belief the lawsuit is about AI safety.

andy_ppp2• 2 years ago

Are you a lawyer or have some sort of credentials to be able to make that statement? I’m not sure if Elon Musk being hypocrite about AI safety would be relevant to the disputed terms of a contract.

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

I don't think it's about him being a hypocrite - just him undermining his own argument. It's a tough sell saying AI is unsafe but it's still in the public's best interest to open source it (and hence OpenAI is reneging on it's charter).

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given.

I contend that a threat must be understood before it can be neutralized. It will either take a herculean feat of reverse-engineering, or an act of benevolence on OpenAI's behalf. Or a lawsuit, I guess.

troyvit• 2 years ago

If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given.

Then what should we do about all the open models that are closing in on OpenAI's capabilities?

bamboozled5• 2 years ago

I have absolutely zero reason to believe "AI" is better of in the hands of Altman, Brockman etc and most of the public would feel similar.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

Who would most of the public trust with AI?

jrflowers2• 2 years ago

This is a good case. If openAI gives mr musk access to the gpt 4 weights he can tune it to solve the twitter bot problem

dorkwood4• 2 years ago

Musk already solved the Twitter bot problem. That was one of his main goals, and he did it by introducing the paid blue checkmark.

jrflowers2• 2 years ago

The blue checkmark made the bots post better ?

aleksandrh• 2 years ago

Indeed, as the November 2023 drama was unfolding, Microsoft’s CEO boasted that it would not matter “[i]f OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.” He explained that “[w]e have all the IP rights and all the capability.” “We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything.” “We are below them, above them, around them.”

Yikes.

This technology definitely needs to be open source, especially if we get to the point of AGI. Otherwise Microsoft and OpenAI are going to exploit it for as long as they can get away with it for profit, while open source lags behind.

Reminds me of the moral principles that guided Zimmermann when he made PGP free for everyone: A powerful technology is a danger to society if only a few people possess it. By giving it to everyone, you even the playing field.

sneak• 2 years ago

If we get to the point of AGI then it doesn’t matter much; the singularity will inevitably occur and the moment that AGI exists, corporations (and the concept of IP) are obsolete and irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if the gap between AGI existing and the singularity is ten hours, ten weeks, ten months, or ten years.

josh2600• 2 years ago

Just going to note that it is widely suspected that Hal Finney did much of the programming on PGP with Zimmermann taking the heat for him.

Veserv• 2 years ago

I can confirm that is true second-hand from his former boss at that time. Other biographies, profiles, and interviews also support it.

Jeff_Brown• 2 years ago

I don't trust OpenAI or Microsoft, but I don't have much faith in democratization either. We wouldn't do that with nukes, after all.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

I don't trust OpenAI or Microsoft, but I don't have much faith in democratization either. We wouldn't do that with nukes, after all.

Dangerous things are controlled by the government (in a democracy, a form of democratization). It's bizarre and shows the US government's self-inflicted helplessness that they haven't taken over a project that its founders and developers see as a potential danger to civilization.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

Nukes blow up cities.

anotherhue• 2 years ago

A powerful technology is a danger to society if only a few people possess it. By giving it to everyone, you even the playing field.

Except nukes. Only allies can have nukes.

EasyMark2• 2 years ago

I guess it you want a nuclear apocalypse then giving the tech to people that would rather see the world end than be "ruled by the apostates", that sounds like a great plan.

viraptor• 2 years ago

Is that really the case? Nukes are supposed to be deterrents. If only groups aligned with each other have nukes that sounds more dangerous than enemies having nukes and knowing they can't use them.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

Russia has nukes, China has nukes, Pakistan has nukes....

And yet, no countries with nukes have ever gone to war with each other.

jart• 2 years ago

Works already been done for the most part. Mixtral is to GPT what Linux was to Windows. Mistral AI has been doing such a good job democratizing Microsoft's advantage that Microsoft is beginning to invest in them.

bugglebeetle4• 2 years ago

Microsoft just bought off Mistral into no longer releasing open weights and scrubbing all references to them from their site…?

reducesuffering4• 2 years ago

A powerful technology is a danger to society if only a few people possess it. By giving it to everyone, you even the playing field.

That's why we all have personal nukes, of course. Very safe

archagon• 2 years ago

I shudder at a world where only corporations had nukes.

lagt_t• 2 years ago

The technologies that power LLMs are open source.

sebastianconcpt2• 2 years ago

Not just for profit. It's also about power.

EasyMark2• 2 years ago

Don't usually support Elon Musk at all, but this seems like a great thing to do, even if it is self serving for Elon. AI needs to be open and it's methods available for public scrutiny as it has great potential to stratify society even more so than it currently is between the haves and the have-nots.

amplex1337• 2 years ago

Sorry to say it, but nonprofits operate for profit businesses all the time a few different ways. Educational institutions, hospitals, charities, science, public safety, etc all can apply for 501c3. See healthcare orgs like Kaiser Permanente for example, they are 100% for profit 'medical groups'/partnerships, funded by the HQ, which operates under nonprofit status for tax purposes, by following all the laws re: 501c3. The private child operations are not considered part of the 501c3. The profit from the nonprofit parent is reinvested into the company 100%, but the private org 'partnerships' that are not hospitals are definitely for profit. OpenAI.org did the exact same thing. If you have a lot of money in the US, you don't have to pay tax thru creative accounting, which is non-competitive.

theGnuMe2• 2 years ago

Ikea is this way as well.

sidcool2• 2 years ago

GPT 4 is not AGI. Else OpenAI would have used it to fix their UI.

dctoedt• 2 years ago

FWIW, Musk's named lead counsel Morgan Chu is an extremely high-powered lawyer, one of the best-regarded IP trial lawyers around. (Decades ago we had a client in common.) One of his brothers is Dr. Steven Chu, Nobel laureate in physics and former Secretary of Energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Chu

sirmike_• 2 years ago

Man that is thick.

- Elon Musk founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would benefit humanity, not for-profit interests? - OpenAI was established as a non-profit with the goal of open-sourcing its technology when possible? - In 2020, OpenAI licensed its GPT-3 language model exclusively to Microsoft, going against its mission? - By 2023, Microsoft researchers said GPT-4 demonstrated early signs of AGI capabilities. However, OpenAI did not make it openly available? - In 2023, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei took actions that led to a change in OpenAI's board and direction towards profiting Microsoft over public benefit? - The plaintiff alleges this violated the original agreement between Musk, Altman and Amodei to develop AGI for humanity's benefit as a non-profit? - The plaintiff is seeking damages and to compel OpenAI to return to its original non-profit mission of developing safe and openly available AGI? - Key concerns are that for-profit interests now influence whether OpenAI technology is deemed an AGI and how it is used? - The change in direction away from the non-profit public interest mission damaged public trust in OpenAI? - The suit alleges OpenAI's actions constitute unfair business practices under California law?

I guess we will see if these are answered. Personally, I do not trust Musk nor Altman. Approach them from a corner is what I am saying. OpenAI while their idiot savant in chatGPT is interesting. It is hardly worth paying for with such vast gulfs between good and useable answers and the usual terrible or lazy ones you get normally. While it is important to have a basic ruleset for AI, not when it comes to making it pre-k playground rules. No innovation can be truly had with such onerous and too polite rules today. Narrow AI indeed.

Cheezmeister• 2 years ago

This is all fascinating, I'm sure, but frankly, I'm getting weary of tech drama viz. reality TV masquerading as reality.

Rocket Man and Orange Man have more in common than I _ever_ would have imagined if you'd asked me five years ago.

Have fun y'all. I'm resisting the clickbait and going back to building things and trying to get a stable paycheck.

nojvek2• 2 years ago

Is SamA now Orange Man, or are you referring to Trump?

6gvONxR4sf7o• 2 years ago

113. OpenAI’s conduct could have seismic implications for Silicon Valley and, if allowed to stand, could represent a paradigm shift for technology start-ups. It is important to reflect on what has transpired here: a non-profit startup has collected tens of millions of dollars in contributions for the express purpose of developing AGI technology for public benefit, and shortly before achieving the very milestone that the company was created to achieve, the company has become a closed, forprofit partner of the world’s largest corporation, thereby personally enriching the Defendants. If this business model were valid, it would radically redefine how venture capitalism is practiced in California and beyond. Rather than start out as a for-profit entity from the outset, “smart” investors would establish non-profits, use pre-tax donations to fund research and development, and then once their technology had been developed and proven, would slide the resulting IP assets into a new forprofit venture to enrich themselves and their profit-maximizing corporate partners. That is not supposed to be how the law works in California or anywhere else in this country, and this should not be the first Court to hold otherwise.
114. To further understand why this is important, if OpenAI’s new business model is valid, for every dollar that an investor “invests” by contributing to a non-profit, that investor gets approximately 50 cents back from the state and federal governments in the form of reduced income taxes, so the net cost to them of each $1 of investment is only 50 cents. However, with OpenAI’s new business model, they get the same “for profit” upside as those who invest the conventional way in for-profit corporations and thus do not get an immediate tax write off, financed by the government and, ultimately, the public. From an investment perspective, competing against an entity employing the new OpenAI business model would be like playing a game of basketball where the other team’s baskets are worth twice as many points. If this Court validates OpenAI’s conduct here, any start-up seeking to remain competitive in Silicon Valley would essentially be required to follow this OpenAI playbook, which would become standard operating procedure for start-ups to the detriment of legitimate non-profits, the government’s tax coffers, and ultimately the people of California and beyond. Notably, OpenAI’s for-profit arm was recently valued at nearly $80 billion.

I've always wondered about this. I briefly worked at a non-profit that turned over into a for profit once it found traction, and to my knowledge, the donors didn't get anything back. I learned a lesson too, taking a pay cut to work somewhere mission focused and not beholden to profit maximization. Not going to make that mistake again.

reso• 2 years ago

It's clear that OpenAI has become something that it wasn't intended to be at it's founding. Maybe that change happened for good reasons, but the fact that there was a change is not in doubt.

akerl_• 2 years ago

Generally speaking, changing what your company does is just “pivoting”. It’s not clear to me why Elon would having standing for this suit, or why a company changing their direction would be actionable.

This would be like suing Google for removing “Don’t be evil” from their mission statement.

lukan3• 2 years ago

There is a great difference between a for profit company "pivoting" - and a nonprofit changing direction of mission goals. Because a non profit accepts donation - and they are bound to the original mission. Also their profits usually are. Google never was a nonprofit, so adding and later removing their "don't be evil" was basically just PR (even though I do believe, that originally it was supposed to mean something, but not in a legally binding way).

mdasen• 2 years ago

I think non-profits change the argument here a bit. With a for-profit company, what your company is doing is trying to make money. If you change that, investors have a right to sue. With a non-profit, what the company is doing is some public service mission. Why does Musk have standing? Potentially because he donated millions to OpenAI to further their non-profit mission.

I'm not saying that Musk has a good case. I haven't read the complaint.

Still, with a non-profit, you're donating to a certain cause. If I create "Save the Climate" as a non-profit and then pivot to creating educational videos on the necessity of fossil fuels, I think it'd be reasonable to sue since we aren't performing our mission. There's certainly some latitude that management and the board should enjoy in pivoting the mission, but it isn't completely free to do whatever it wants.

Even with a for-profit company, if management or the board pivot in a way that investors think would be disastrous for the company, there could be reason to sue. Google removing "don't be evil" is a meaningless change - it changes nothing. Google deciding that it was going to shut down all of its technology properties in favor of becoming a package delivery company would be a massive change and investors could sue that it wasn't the right direction for the company and that Google was ignoring their duty to shareholders.

Companies can change direction, but they also have duties. For-profit companies are entrusted with your investment toward a goal of earning money. Non-profit companies are entrusted with your donations toward a goal of some public good. If they're breaching their duty, a lawsuit is reasonable. I'm not saying OpenAI is breaching their duty, just that they aren't free to do anything they want.

_fizz_buzz_• 2 years ago

If they started selling jelly beans, I would agree with you. But they changed from a non profit to a for profit model and from a open source to a closed source model. If they pivoted their product that would be one thing, but they completely shifted their mission.

amou234• 2 years ago

Elon Musk: actual billionaire

Sam Altman: fake billionaire (most equity is tied to openAI)

this should be a one sided battle

speedylight• 2 years ago

I thought Sam has no equity in OpenAI?

andruby• 2 years ago

Most of Elon’s wealth is also tied up in equity.

e_i_pi_2• 2 years ago

This type of thing makes me wish the only option was public defenders so you aren't able to just pay more and have better chances in court. That said - I still don't think Musk has a good chance here, he's lost cases against people with far less resources by just being confidently wrong, at some point paying more for lawyers doesn't help you

HarHarVeryFunny18• 2 years ago

At least 1/2 of Altman's net worth is invested in Helion energy (fusion energy startup).

TaylorAlexander3• 2 years ago

Intention is an interesting word. I wonder how many of the founders quietly hoped it would make them a lot of money. Though to be fair, I do believe that hope would have been tied to the expectation that they meet their stated goals of developing some form of AGI.

paulddraper14• 2 years ago

Well of course they'll make a lot of money. For some definition of "a lot."

l33tman• 2 years ago

It seems a bit weird to quietly hope that the money you put in an organization with the explicit goal of being a non-profit, would give you direct monetary returns though.. Maybe they hoped for returns in other ways, like getting some back-channel AGI love when it finally became conscious? :)

qwertox2• 2 years ago

Whatever his reason may be (like resentment for jumping off the ship too soon and missing out, or standing in for humanity), I like what I read in the sense that it contains all the stuff that needs to be spoken about publicly, and the court seems to be the optimal place for this.

It feels like Microsoft is misusing the partnership only to block other companies from having access to the IP. They said they don't need the partnership, that they have got all what they need, so there would be no need to have the partnership.

If this is the way Microsoft misuses partnerships, I don't feel good about Mistral's new partnership, even if it means unlimited computing resources for them and still have the freedom to open source their models.

Not seeing Mistral Large as an open source model now has a bitter taste to it.

I also wonder if this lawsuit was the reason for him checking out Windows 11.

boringg4• 2 years ago

I don't think he has any resentment about jumping off "too soon" as you say. He specifically abandoned ship because he didn't align with the organization anymore. I suspect this has been a long time coming given his public commentary on AI.

He's goal on OpenAI investments were to keep close watch on the development of AI. If you believe the public comments or not is an entirely different matter though I do feel like there is sincerity in Elons AI comments.

AndrewKemendo5• 2 years ago

I’d offer that Musk hasnt shown any consistent principle motivating his behavior other than gathering power, in the face of stated motivations.

So while he may genuinely believe what he is saying, the inherent philosophical conflicts in his consistent narcissistic actions, have poisoned any other possible position to such an extent that he has lost all moral credibility

Revealed preferences never lie

vineyardmike3• 2 years ago

Not seeing Mistral Large as an open source model now has a bitter taste to it.

A company needs a product to sell. If they give away everything, they have nothing to sell. This was surely always the plan.

(1) They can give away the model but sell an API - but they can’t serve a model as cheap as Goog/Msft/Amzn who have better unit economics on their cloud and better pricing on GPUs (plus custom inference chips).

(2) they can sell the model. In which case they can’t give it away for free. Unlike open source code, there probably isn’t a market for support and similar “upsells” yet.

treesciencebot2• 2 years ago

(1) They can give away the model but sell an API - but they can’t serve a model as cheap as Goog/Msft/Amzn who have better unit economics on their cloud and better pricing on GPUs (plus custom inference chips).

Which has a simple solution, release the model weights with a license which doesn't let anyone to commercially host them (like AGPL-ish) without your permission. That is what Stability.ai does it.

bamboozled5• 2 years ago

See The Linux Foundation, they don’t seem to have this problem.

rrdharan• 2 years ago

Unlike open source code, there probably isn’t a market for support and similar “upsells” yet.

_Like_ most open source code, there isn’t a market for support and upsells..

xcv1239• 2 years ago

Whatever his reason may be

The reason is that he was ruthlessly scammed by the sociopath CEO Sam Altman.

"Mr. Musk founded and funded OpenAI, Inc. with Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman in exchange for and relying on the Founding Agreement to ensure that AGI would benefit humanity, not for-profit corporations. As events turned out in 2023, his contributions to OpenAI, Inc. have been twisted to benefit the Defendants and the biggest company in the world. This was a stark betrayal of the Founding Agreement, turning that Agreement on its head and perverting OpenAI, Inc.’s mission. Imagine donating to a non-profit whose asserted mission is to protect the Amazon rainforest, but then the non-profit creates a for-profit Amazonian logging company that uses the fruits of the donations to clear the rainforest. That is the story of OpenAI, Inc."

"Plaintiff reasonably relied on Defendants’ false promises to his detriment, ultimately providing tens of millions of dollars of funding to OpenAI, Inc., as well as his time and other resources, on the condition that OpenAI would remain a non-profit irrevocably dedicated to creating safe, open-source AGI for public benefit, only to then have OpenAI abandon its “irrevocable” non- profit mission, stop providing basic information to the public, and instead exclusively dedicate and license its AGI algorithms to the largest for-profit company in the world, precisely the opposite of the promises Defendants made to Plaintiff."

buzzin__• 2 years ago

It's weird that you would say Altman is a sociopath without also mentioning that Musk is one as well. Musk is also a narcissist and you can't be one without also being a sociopath.

Are you perhaps a member of the Musk cult of personality?

Just trying to create informational balance.

asciii2• 2 years ago

Elon kept funding the non-profit even though they had begun talks/investor discussions about the for-profit. I think an extra $3 million?

Either way, I'm guessing he did not think the for-profit side would turn into a money printer.

loceng6• 2 years ago

He knew the discussion was in regards to for-profit? Companies like Microsoft probably constantly are being courted to fund non-profit orgs.

nova22033• 2 years ago

Finally!! Sam Altman has been promising robotaxis for over 6 years now and has failed to deliver. It's time someone sued him for misleading investors.

demondemidi• 2 years ago

Conspiracy hot take: Grok is awful and Musk doesn't want to pay Altman to license a better AI.

jmarbert• 2 years ago

Could this be a play to get OpenAI to release more information so Grok / xAI can benefit?

ajdude• 2 years ago

This is a lot of OpenAIs:

ELON MUSK,

an individual,

Plaintiff,

vs.

SAMUEL ALTMAN, an individual, GREGORY BROCKMAN, an individual, OPENAI, INC., a corporation, OPENAI, L.P., a limited partnership, OPENAI, L.L.C., a limited liability company, OPENAI GP, L.L.C., a limited liability company, OPENAI OPCO, LLC, a limited liability company, OPENAI GLOBAL, LLC, a limited liability company, OAI CORPORATION, LLC, a limited liability company, OPENAI HOLDINGS, LLC, a limited liability company, and DOES 1 through 100, inclusive

dorkwood4• 2 years ago

I don't know how to feel about this. These are my two favorite people, and likely the two greatest minds the world has ever seen. Every hour they spend in court is an hour they deprive humanity of the value they bring. This is the saddest day of the year so far for me.

krick2• 2 years ago

Reading this thread I've got kinda abstract question, so I might as well just ask it here:

Do you think the "market" of openly available models (LLMs, text-to-image, speach recognition, etc) would be significantly different today, if not for OpenAI?

Obviously, it's not like OpenAI is the only place on earth where people work on these, and it's the overall success of deep learning what started OpenAI, not vice-verse. But as for someone not really in the loop, it feels like every other state-of-the-art open source model available right now was inspired, if not developed (whisper), by OpenAI. Stable Diffusion, LLaMA, Mistral, etc. Would these exist if not for DALLE, GPT and OpenAI in general?

todd3834• 2 years ago

Kind of ironically I uploaded this to chatGPT to help me understand the details.

swat535• 2 years ago

We all know that Musk's intentions for this are not noble (who would be so naive to think otherwise anyway?) so I'll leave that aside for now but he has a good point by bringing on this lawsuit.

What I love is the fact that people here are trying to justify Sam's action by amusing mental gymnastics such as "AI Safety! Think of Humanity!".. seriously guys? At least we should be honest and call a spade a spade, "open" in "Open AI" is nothing more than Sam's attempt at scamming people with marketing gimmick and dodging taxes. The truth is that Altman knows other AI models are catching up quickly and he is trying seal the deal with regulatory capture as soon as possible.

OpenAI has already lost any credibility they had after the recent implosion with half the team threatening to leave as soon as they realized that their bank accounts might shrink by a few cents if Altman is not sitting at the helm. The best part is that Sam delivered by making them all supremely rich [0]

This company is a joke and it's all about the money.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-17/openai-de...

asciii2• 2 years ago

Does the argument that other startups can copy OpenAI's funding playbook--start as a non-profit with investor contributions valued at 50 cents per dollar and then reap profits on the for-profit venture side--hold any water?

Uptrenda• 2 years ago

Do I need to get into YC to learn to be a two-faced bullshitter or will Sam teach that skill to anyone?

1vuio0pswjnm73• 2 years ago

"In March 2023, OpenAI released its most powerful language model yet, GPT-4. GPT-4 is not just capable of reasoning. It is better at reasoning than average humans. It scored in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam for lawyers. It scored in the 99th percentile on the GRE Verbal Assessment. It even scored a 77% on the Advanced Sommelier examination."

One could argue a common characteristic of the above exams is that they each test memory, and, as such, one could argue that GPT-4's above-average performance is not necessarily evidence of "reasoning". That is, GPT-4 has no "understanding" but it has formidable reading speed and retention (memory).

While preparation for the above exams depends heavily on memorisation, other exams may focus more on reasoning and understanding.

Surely GPT-4 would fail some exams. But when it comes to GPT-4's exam performance, only the positive results are reported.

https://freeman.vc/notes/reasoning-vs-memorization-in-llms

romwell4• 2 years ago

Surely GPT-4 would fail some exams

Some? It does hilariously badly on basic math.

With confidence, though.

ethbr17• 2 years ago

hilariously badly on basic math. With confidence, though

How does it do on the GMAT? Sounds like a good candidate for an MBA program.

MacsHeadroom• 2 years ago

GPT-4 with code interpreter is better at math than elite Math undergrads.

shawabawa32• 2 years ago

Have you tried GPT recently on maths? Since they trained it to write code for maths questions it's got a lot better

gigglesupstairs• 2 years ago

One could argue a common characteristic of the above exams is that they each test memory, and, as such, one could argue that GPT-4's above-average performance is not necessarily evidence of "reasoning". That is, GPT-4 has no "understanding" but it has formidable reading speed and retention (memory).

I don’t think they will make this argument since it will heavily negate their (expected) argument that they’re not open-sourcing the model because of safety concerns.

knotthebest• 2 years ago

I’m not so sure of this. The fear generally isn’t that the model itself is dangerous, more so that how it is used by someone might be.

bastawhiz• 2 years ago

Surely GPT-4 would fail some exams. But when it comes to GPT-4's exam performance, only the positive results are reported.

The default is failing the exams. I'd be no less impressed if they came right out and said "This is a short list of the only exams it passes" simply because (IMO) it's remarkable that a machine could pass any of those exams in the first place. Just a couple years ago, it would have been outlandish for a machine to even have a double digit score (at best!).

If we've already found ourselves in a position where passing grades on some exams that qualify people for their careers is unremarkable, I'll honestly be a bit disappointed. 99th percentile on the GRE Verbal would make an NLP researcher from 2010 have a damn aneurysm; if we're now saying that's "not reasoning" then we're surely moving the goalposts for what that means.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 2 years ago

None of these exams are the basis for professional certification: passing them does not _on its own_ qualify anyone for any particular profession.

The Advanced Sommelier exam is part of a process that involves taking other exams and courses. The GRE Verbal is usually taken in combination with other GRE parts and used to apply for entry into a program where years of further study may be required. The UBE normally follows years of study in an approved program. (Back in the day, some people used to take the MBE, which is now a part of the UBE, while they were still in school because the exam was so easy: it was a standardised, multiple-choice test.)

The plaintiffs must make the argument that GPT-4 is "AGI" because the alleged agreement to form OpenAI was focused on "AGI" specifically, not simply development and improvement of LLMs. If OpenAI has not yet achieved AGI, then arguably the alleged agreement does not restrict whatever it is doing now. It only applies to "AGI".

atleastoptimal5• 2 years ago

Sour grapes. This is a power move. Elon wants to be the sole savior of humanity who just so happens to have more power than anyone in history. No coincidence this came out soon after OpenAI announced its partnership with Figure, making them a direct competitor to Tesla Optimus + Xai.

the_optimist3• 2 years ago

This is sorta a boring fanfic take. Please show us how you read the materials to establish your conclusion.

atleastoptimal5• 2 years ago

By materials you mean the filing? the wording of the filing fits the plaintiffs narrative. its the most biased possible source.

xcv1239• 2 years ago

How did you come to this idiotic conclusion after reading the article?

Elon Musk cofounded OpenAI as a non-profit organization in 2015 and provided the majority of funding until 2020. It wouldn't exist without his funding. Sam Altman lied and now GPT-4 is closed source and is controlled by Microsoft. How does that benefit humanity? OpenAI was meant to be open, sharing their research with all of humanity. Sam Altman is a fucking sociopath, a ruthless scammer. The lawsuit demands that OpenAI releases all of their research and technology to the public. Right now GPT-4 is only enriching Microsoft, the largest tech company on the planet.

atleastoptimal5• 2 years ago

Companies can change from the outset. if they didnt become closed source they couldn't have gotten funding to get the GPU hours needed for GPT-4 or the best talent. If Elon cared about humanity he would open source Grok and Optimus. in fact he only left OpenAI because he wanted to take over to integrate it into Tesla but failed.

justanotherjoe• 2 years ago

not an idiotic take but an obvious one. Musk is an ego driven individual and its clear he got his ego tangled up with sam if you see him talk about it lately. He makes points like 'im the reason openai exists' or 'openai is my biggest mistake'. Launching xai. This with his severe messiah complex.

rain_iwakura• 2 years ago

"Heartwarming: The Worst People You Know Are All Fighting"

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2535073-worst-person-you-kno...

theptip4• 2 years ago

An interesting nugget, Musk is here claiming that GPT-4 is already AGI, and therefore not covered by the MS licensing deal.

coffeebeqn• 2 years ago

Bold claim

dorkwood4• 2 years ago

We're going to need a new acronym once AGI is taken to mean "a really good LLM", and not, you know, AGI.

theptip4• 2 years ago

I think the DeepMind taxonomy is good; recognize that AGI is too broad a term, so add levels to make it specific.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

“Competent AGI” (or a little earlier) would be my guess for where OpenAI would not hand it over to MS. Honestly if they displaced 10% of workers I think they might call that the threshold.

pknerd• 2 years ago

Some Elon's Musk blind fanboy flagged my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39564947

advael6• 2 years ago

I find myself in the weird position of still thinking Musk is upset about this for pettier reasons than he alleges but still being super glad he's bringing this suit. OpenAI has clearly sold out in a big way to one of the most dangerous and irresponsible companies on the planet and someone with pockets this deep needed to bring this suit for there to be any chance of any accountability even being possible given the scale of the organization

atoav• 2 years ago

Anybody can be a useful idiot, why not Elon Musk?

Although I share your evaluation that he is likely in it for petty reasons.

advael6• 2 years ago

Never hurts to be useful, right?

oglop3• 2 years ago

“OpenAI has clearly sold out in a big way to one of the most dangerous and irresponsible companies on the planet”

Find a couch and lay down before the vapors get too strong.

advael6• 2 years ago

Listen I know that having an opinion and using superlatives when describing something makes me intrinsically uncool for breaking the all-encompassing kayfabe of total glibness required to be one of the Very Smart People on the Internet, but I think it's a warranted distinction for a company that has consistently been behind a lion's share of both legal and technological innovations that have pushed our world toward dystopia and catastrophe in the last 30+ years. They have been repeatedly shown to engage in anti-competitive and customer hostile behavior, often inventing tactics used by other tech monopolies after they proved that you can get away with them. Their lawyers both drafted the policies of the DMCA and put considerable pressure on a staggering number of nations to adopt similar laws. TPMs are their innovation as well. Their explicit ethos and business model is about maximizing the degree to which intellectual property law stifles innovation from competitors, and their founder has extended this model into connections made doing ostensibly charitble work, notably acting to prevent at least one major vaccine from being open-sourced and made publicly available during a global pandemic, a decision which not only likely killed millions of people directly, but also likely allowed the current state of affairs where the thing can constantly mutate in a large swath of the population of the world which can't produce vaccines quickly because they are legally barred from doing so.

But even a commitment to a strong concept of IP isn't an obstacle when new fuckery can be done. In the new wave generative AI, Microsoft continues to innovate. Even without including anything done by open OpenAI, they probably win most shady data scam to train AI from their acquisition of Github and subsequent indiscriminate use of private repos to train models that will then regurgitate snippets of code (again, this coming from a company that is very litigious about its own code's IP rights), as well as using lots of code open-sourced under licenses that explicitly prohibit commercial usage or require code built from it to be open-sourced in turn to train models that are both themselves directly sold as a commercial product without making its source (let alone weights or datasets) available, but that also will regurgitate code from those repos without replicating those licenses, thus essentially laundering any arbitrary violation of those licenses (After all, copilot might have suggested that snippet of code with the developer using it never knowing that it was from a GPL-licensed codebase). So to summarize, after building an entire business on code as IP and spending a ton on everything from press to litigation to lobbying strengthening the inviolability of this IP, they then created the world's most effective tool for ignoring IP law for proprietary corporate code and open-source code alike in order to effectively sell this capability as a service

I fully stand by calling Microsoft one of the most dangerous and irresponsible companies currently active on this planet. Perhaps you've got a better argument against this claim than an oblique comparison to sexist depictions of housewives in old movies. Feel free to share it if you like

Exendroinient23• 2 years ago

Elon was never serious about ai safety and benefiting humanity through it. Grog is proprietary. He is just butthurt of not being at the top.

SMAPP_AI• 2 years ago

The solution to this trial could be very simple… „Nomen est omen“… „Open“AI was intentionally founded and funded to be „Open“source.

chaseadam17• 2 years ago

Usually when you convert from a non-profit to a for-profit, the non-profit has a third party value its assets then sells them to the new for-profit.

Because you are acquiring assets from yourself, there are some protections, like you can’t have the same people run the non-profit and the new for-profit and the attorney general has to sign off on the transaction, which I believe happened with OpenAI.

Also, the non-profit has to use the funds it received in the acquisition to continue to further its original mission.

My gut is the lawsuit will come down to whether the for-profit paid a fair price, which in retrospect could look suspect given how much OpenAI is valued at now, but the government and a third party likely already approved the transaction long ago.

It may also come down to whether the non-profit used / is using the funds it received in exchange for the assets to continue to serve the public interest per OpenAIs original mission and not the interests of the new for-profit or any associated individuals.

This will be a good test for the legal strategies to convert non-profits to for-profits.

space_oddity• 2 years ago

Some says that he's doing it coz he had seperated from them in 2019...

tdhz77• 2 years ago

The owners of a company typically control and that includes the right to change the founding document. If they did it right the suit will fail.

EchoReflection• 2 years ago

"non-profit" and "not-for-profit" are super misleading terms. I worked for a "non-profit" for about a year, they made boatloads of money that just went into the hands of the staff and the head of the company, not sure about the board if directors...

https://www.nonprofitcollegesonline.com/non-profits/

oglop3• 2 years ago

Elon Musk is a fool and any argument derived from him is for fools. He just wants money. It’s not about any grand idea, that’s just a tool to manipulate an army of dorks.

Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

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