Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X/Twitter and CEO of Tesla, has voluntarily dismissed his breach of contract claims against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman.
The Financial Times reports that the lawsuit, filed three months ago in a San Francisco court, accused OpenAI of compromising its original mission to benefit humanity by entering into a multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft. Musk alleged that the $86 billion start-up behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT was working on “proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world.”
Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., speaks with members of the media during the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, US, on Wednesday, July 12, 2023. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
OpenAI, however, rejected Musk’s claims, calling them “incoherent” and “frivolous.” The company published a blog post in March that included several of Musk’s emails from the early days of the company, which appeared to show he acknowledged the ChatGPT maker needed to raise large sums of money to fund the computing resources required to develop AI models.
Musk’s relationship with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, has been strained for some time. Despite co-founding the company in 2015 and donating $44 million to the group, Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018 due to disagreements with Altman over the direction of its research. A year later, OpenAI established a for-profit division, which attracted significant investment from Microsoft.
In response to the growing competition in the AI industry, Musk launched his own AI start-up, xAI, last year. The company has since raised $6 billion from venture capital and sovereign wealth funds to support its development. Despite his involvement in the AI sector, Musk has repeatedly warned about the potential dangers of the technology, calling it an “existential threat” to humanity in the past.
The dismissal of the lawsuit comes amidst Musk’s criticism of a new partnership between OpenAI and Apple. In a recent post on X/Twitter, Musk stated that if OpenAI’s technology is integrated into iPhones, Apple devices would be banned at his companies. He went as far as to say, “Visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”
Read more at the Financial Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
