Post by Dividavi on Mar 1, 2024 20:30:47 GMT
Artificial
Intelligence
A.I. Faces Quiz
How the A.I. Race Began
Key Figures in the Field
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Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for Violating the Company’s Principles
Musk said the prominent A.I. start-up had put profits and commercial interests ahead of seeking to benefit humanity.
Image
Elon Musk wears a dark leather jacket with a fur collar against a dark background.
The lawsuit filed by Elon Musk describes OpenAI as a “de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft.Credit...Carly Zavala for The New York Times
Adam SatarianoCade MetzTripp Mickle
By Adam Satariano, Cade Metz and Tripp Mickle
March 1, 2024
Updated 1:20 p.m. ET
Leer en español
OpenAI, the influential artificial intelligence company that ousted and then reinstated its high-profile chief executive three months ago, faces a new drama: a lawsuit from Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world and a co-founder of the A.I. lab.
Mr. Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good. A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI developed with Microsoft, Mr. Musk said, represented an abandonment of a founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.
“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.
The 35-page lawsuit is the latest chapter in a fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years, and it homes in on unresolved questions in the A.I. community: Will artificial intelligence improve the world or destroy it and should it be tightly controlled or set free?
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Mr. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, and Mr. Altman, as much as anyone in the world, have helped to frame that debate. Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 as a response to A.I. work being done at the time by Google. Mr. Musk believed Google and its co-founder, Larry Page, were dismissive of the risks A.I. presented to humanity.
Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board during a power struggle in 2018. The company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose. Mr. Musk, who founded his own A.I. company last year called xAI, said OpenAI was not focused enough on the technology’s risks.
The suit is also the latest twist for a company enmeshed in controversy. In November, OpenAI’s board forced out Mr. Altman and said it no longer trusted him to run the company. He was reinstated just five days later after an employee revolt threatened the future of the company.
Silicon Valley insiders believe that generative A.I., the technology behind ChatGPT, is a once in a generation technology that could transform the tech industry as thoroughly as web browsers did more than 30 years ago.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The courts of California must decide what OpenAI must do after straying from its original mission,” said Gary Marcus, an A.I entrepreneur and an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. “The court of public opinion must decide what it thinks of Musk, who has a fair point about OpenAI but has his own commercial A.I. interests and choices.”
OpenAI declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit adds to an array of problems piling up for OpenAI. The company’s relationship with Microsoft is also facing scrutiny from regulators in the United States, European Union and Britain. It has been sued by The New York Times, several digital outlets, writers and computer programmers for scraping copyrighted material to train its chatbot. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Mr. Altman and OpenAI.
Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning that it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology.
The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Mr. Altman of being in breach of contract and violating fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking that OpenAI be required to open up its technology to others and that Mr. Altman and others pay back Mr. Musk the money that Mr. Musk gave to the organization. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.
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Mr. Musk’s argument hinges on the close partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft. In 2019, Mr. Altman negotiated a deal in which Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. The start-up said it would use Microsoft’s cloud computing services exclusively for building and deploying its A.I. In the years since, Microsoft has invested an additional $12 billion in the start-up and is the only company outside of OpenAI with a license to use the raw technology behind GPT-4, the company’s most powerful A.I. technology.
Other companies like Google, Meta and the French start-up Mistral are freely sharing some of their latest technologies with the other companies and researchers.
The suit could expose OpenAI to a lengthy and invasive legal review that reveals more about Mr. Altman’s dismissal and OpenAI’s pivot from being a nonprofit organization to for-profit company. That change, which was engineered by Mr. Altman in late 2018 and early 2019, has been the source of backbiting at OpenAI for years and contributed to the board’s decision to fire him as chief executive.
Image
In a photo taken a year ago, OpenAI’s top executives in the company’s office. From left, Mira Murati, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
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 it 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.
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Speaking at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit last year, Mr. Musk said that he wanted to know more about the chaos that unfolded at OpenAI last year, including why Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder, joined with other board members to fire Mr. Altman in November. He said that he was concerned that OpenAI had discovered some dangerous element of A.I., which is a question that his legal team could investigate as part of the lawsuit.
“I have mixed feelings about Sam,” Mr. Musk said at the DealBook conference. Making a reference to a powerful ring in “The Lord of the Rings,” he added, “The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power.”
Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The falling out between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman has long been a subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley. The men first met during a tour of SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, and later bonded over their shared concerns about the threat that A.I. could pose to humanity.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s nonprofit status was a major source of friction, as tensions grew between company executives interested in trying to make money from new A.I. technology and Mr. Musk, who wanted it to remain a research lab.
“Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Mr. Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay, or I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding to a startup. Discussions are over.”
The lawsuit tries to show Mr. Musk as an indispensable figure in OpenAI’s development. From 2016 to 2020, Mr. Musk contributed more than $44 million to OpenAI, according to the lawsuit. He also leased the company’s initial office space in San Francisco and paid the monthly expenses. He was personally involved in recruiting Mr. Sutskever, a top research scientist at Google, to be OpenAI’s chief scientist, according to the complaint.
“Without Mr. Musk’s involvement and substantial supporting efforts and resources,” the suit says, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground.”
Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College, said that Mr. Musk’s complaint made a compelling case that OpenAI had abandoned its roots. But, he said, Mr. Musk probably does not have the standing to bring it, because nonprofit law limits challenges of this type to those made by a nonprofit’s dues-paying members, its own directors or state regulators in Delaware, where OpenAI is registered.
“If he were a member of the board of directors, I would say, ‘Ooh, strong case.’ If this was filed by the Delaware secretary of state, I would say, ‘Ooh they’re in trouble,’” Mr. Quinn said. “But he doesn’t have standing. He doesn’t have a case.”
David Farenthold contributed reporting.
Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent based in Europe, where his work focuses on digital policy and the intersection of technology and world affairs. More about Adam Satariano
Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz
Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis. More about Tripp Mickle
Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence
News and Analysis
Elon Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Sam Altman, its chief executive, sued the company and Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by prioritizing profit and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence over the public good.
The media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, adding to a growing chorus pushing back against the company’s methods of scraping content off the internet to train its A.I.-powered chatbot.
WilmerHale, a prominent law firm, is close to wrapping up a review of the ouster of OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who was later reinstated. The investigation could give insight into what went on behind the scenes.
Google has temporarily suspended the ability of its Gemini chatbot to generate images of people, after the A.I. generated images of people of color in German military uniforms from World War II — an obvious historical inaccuracy.
The Age of A.I.
Few companies better illustrate how A.I. is changing Silicon Valley deal-making than Anthropic, one of the world’s hottest A.I. start-ups.
A year ago, a rogue A.I. tried to break up our columnist’s marriage. Did the backlash that ensued help make chatbots too boring? Here’s how we tamed the chatbots.
Amid an intractable real estate crisis, fake luxury houses offer a delusion of one’s own. Here’s how A.I. is remodeling the fantasy home.
New technology has made it easier to insert digital, realistic-looking versions of soda cans and shampoo on videos on social media. A growing group of creators and advertisers is jumping at the chance for an additional revenue stream.
A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with A.I. Are the days of turning to Google for answers numbered?
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Intelligence
A.I. Faces Quiz
How the A.I. Race Began
Key Figures in the Field
One Year of ChatGPT
Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for Violating the Company’s Principles
Musk said the prominent A.I. start-up had put profits and commercial interests ahead of seeking to benefit humanity.
Image
Elon Musk wears a dark leather jacket with a fur collar against a dark background.
The lawsuit filed by Elon Musk describes OpenAI as a “de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft.Credit...Carly Zavala for The New York Times
Adam SatarianoCade MetzTripp Mickle
By Adam Satariano, Cade Metz and Tripp Mickle
March 1, 2024
Updated 1:20 p.m. ET
Leer en español
OpenAI, the influential artificial intelligence company that ousted and then reinstated its high-profile chief executive three months ago, faces a new drama: a lawsuit from Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world and a co-founder of the A.I. lab.
Mr. Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good. A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI developed with Microsoft, Mr. Musk said, represented an abandonment of a founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.
“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.
The 35-page lawsuit is the latest chapter in a fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years, and it homes in on unresolved questions in the A.I. community: Will artificial intelligence improve the world or destroy it and should it be tightly controlled or set free?
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, and Mr. Altman, as much as anyone in the world, have helped to frame that debate. Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 as a response to A.I. work being done at the time by Google. Mr. Musk believed Google and its co-founder, Larry Page, were dismissive of the risks A.I. presented to humanity.
Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board during a power struggle in 2018. The company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose. Mr. Musk, who founded his own A.I. company last year called xAI, said OpenAI was not focused enough on the technology’s risks.
The suit is also the latest twist for a company enmeshed in controversy. In November, OpenAI’s board forced out Mr. Altman and said it no longer trusted him to run the company. He was reinstated just five days later after an employee revolt threatened the future of the company.
Silicon Valley insiders believe that generative A.I., the technology behind ChatGPT, is a once in a generation technology that could transform the tech industry as thoroughly as web browsers did more than 30 years ago.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The courts of California must decide what OpenAI must do after straying from its original mission,” said Gary Marcus, an A.I entrepreneur and an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. “The court of public opinion must decide what it thinks of Musk, who has a fair point about OpenAI but has his own commercial A.I. interests and choices.”
OpenAI declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit adds to an array of problems piling up for OpenAI. The company’s relationship with Microsoft is also facing scrutiny from regulators in the United States, European Union and Britain. It has been sued by The New York Times, several digital outlets, writers and computer programmers for scraping copyrighted material to train its chatbot. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Mr. Altman and OpenAI.
Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning that it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology.
The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Mr. Altman of being in breach of contract and violating fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking that OpenAI be required to open up its technology to others and that Mr. Altman and others pay back Mr. Musk the money that Mr. Musk gave to the organization. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Musk’s argument hinges on the close partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft. In 2019, Mr. Altman negotiated a deal in which Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. The start-up said it would use Microsoft’s cloud computing services exclusively for building and deploying its A.I. In the years since, Microsoft has invested an additional $12 billion in the start-up and is the only company outside of OpenAI with a license to use the raw technology behind GPT-4, the company’s most powerful A.I. technology.
Other companies like Google, Meta and the French start-up Mistral are freely sharing some of their latest technologies with the other companies and researchers.
The suit could expose OpenAI to a lengthy and invasive legal review that reveals more about Mr. Altman’s dismissal and OpenAI’s pivot from being a nonprofit organization to for-profit company. That change, which was engineered by Mr. Altman in late 2018 and early 2019, has been the source of backbiting at OpenAI for years and contributed to the board’s decision to fire him as chief executive.
Image
In a photo taken a year ago, OpenAI’s top executives in the company’s office. From left, Mira Murati, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
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 it 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.
ADVERTISEMENT
Speaking at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit last year, Mr. Musk said that he wanted to know more about the chaos that unfolded at OpenAI last year, including why Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder, joined with other board members to fire Mr. Altman in November. He said that he was concerned that OpenAI had discovered some dangerous element of A.I., which is a question that his legal team could investigate as part of the lawsuit.
“I have mixed feelings about Sam,” Mr. Musk said at the DealBook conference. Making a reference to a powerful ring in “The Lord of the Rings,” he added, “The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power.”
Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The falling out between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman has long been a subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley. The men first met during a tour of SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, and later bonded over their shared concerns about the threat that A.I. could pose to humanity.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s nonprofit status was a major source of friction, as tensions grew between company executives interested in trying to make money from new A.I. technology and Mr. Musk, who wanted it to remain a research lab.
“Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Mr. Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay, or I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding to a startup. Discussions are over.”
The lawsuit tries to show Mr. Musk as an indispensable figure in OpenAI’s development. From 2016 to 2020, Mr. Musk contributed more than $44 million to OpenAI, according to the lawsuit. He also leased the company’s initial office space in San Francisco and paid the monthly expenses. He was personally involved in recruiting Mr. Sutskever, a top research scientist at Google, to be OpenAI’s chief scientist, according to the complaint.
“Without Mr. Musk’s involvement and substantial supporting efforts and resources,” the suit says, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground.”
Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College, said that Mr. Musk’s complaint made a compelling case that OpenAI had abandoned its roots. But, he said, Mr. Musk probably does not have the standing to bring it, because nonprofit law limits challenges of this type to those made by a nonprofit’s dues-paying members, its own directors or state regulators in Delaware, where OpenAI is registered.
“If he were a member of the board of directors, I would say, ‘Ooh, strong case.’ If this was filed by the Delaware secretary of state, I would say, ‘Ooh they’re in trouble,’” Mr. Quinn said. “But he doesn’t have standing. He doesn’t have a case.”
David Farenthold contributed reporting.
Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent based in Europe, where his work focuses on digital policy and the intersection of technology and world affairs. More about Adam Satariano
Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz
Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis. More about Tripp Mickle
Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence
News and Analysis
Elon Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Sam Altman, its chief executive, sued the company and Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by prioritizing profit and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence over the public good.
The media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, adding to a growing chorus pushing back against the company’s methods of scraping content off the internet to train its A.I.-powered chatbot.
WilmerHale, a prominent law firm, is close to wrapping up a review of the ouster of OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who was later reinstated. The investigation could give insight into what went on behind the scenes.
Google has temporarily suspended the ability of its Gemini chatbot to generate images of people, after the A.I. generated images of people of color in German military uniforms from World War II — an obvious historical inaccuracy.
The Age of A.I.
Few companies better illustrate how A.I. is changing Silicon Valley deal-making than Anthropic, one of the world’s hottest A.I. start-ups.
A year ago, a rogue A.I. tried to break up our columnist’s marriage. Did the backlash that ensued help make chatbots too boring? Here’s how we tamed the chatbots.
Amid an intractable real estate crisis, fake luxury houses offer a delusion of one’s own. Here’s how A.I. is remodeling the fantasy home.
New technology has made it easier to insert digital, realistic-looking versions of soda cans and shampoo on videos on social media. A growing group of creators and advertisers is jumping at the chance for an additional revenue stream.
A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with A.I. Are the days of turning to Google for answers numbered?
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Rumors Swirl Amid Concern Over the Princess of Wales
NYTimes - Additional Coverage
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NYTimes - Additional Coverage
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Microsoft Word’s Subtle Typeface Change Affected Millions. Did You Notice?
NYTimes - Additional Coverage
The Big Number: $68,789
NYTimes - Additional Coverage
Inquiry Into Ouster of OpenAI’s Chief Executive Nears End
NYTimes - Additional Coverage
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Opinion
‘I Said, ‘What’s Your Plan About Marriage and Dating?’ And There Was Silence.’
NYTimes - Additional Coverage
It’s the Cat’s Meow but You Just Don’t Understand
NYTimes - Additional Coverage
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NYTimes - Additional Coverage
ADVERTISEMENT