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Elon Musk: He once co-founded OpenAI
Photo: Guglielmo Mangiapane / REUTERS
Tech billionaire Elon Musk is escalating his feud with OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman: On Thursday evening, a lawsuit was filed in his name against the ChatGPT developer company in a San Francisco court.
Musk himself is one of the founders of OpenAI, but he withdrew from the company in 2018.
The legal dispute essentially concerns the accusation that OpenAI is now working as a profit-oriented company, contrary to what was agreed upon when it was founded in 2015.
Major investor Microsoft in particular is now benefiting, the lawsuit says.
This is a “flagrant violation” of the original founding agreement, according to which OpenAI should work primarily for the benefit of humanity.
Musk also claims that he came up with the name OpenAI.
Warning of dangers
The billionaire pointed out in the lawsuit that OpenAI was expressly founded as a counterweight to the tandem of Google and the AI company DeepMind, which was acquired by the Internet company.
The trigger was the idea that artificial intelligence, with its potential dangers, should not be left to profit-oriented companies.
According to the lawsuit, Musk sees a particular turning point in the failed attempt by the OpenAI board of directors to remove Sam Altman as boss.
Microsoft, as a billion-dollar donor, used its influence so that Altman could return to the top.
The new board members do not have any in-depth expertise in artificial intelligence.
There was initially no response from OpenAI to the lawsuit.
Musk is known for extreme positions
Musk has long criticized OpenAI and Altman.
He himself re-entered the artificial intelligence market last year with the company X.AI, whose chatbot Grok competes with ChatGPT.
However, Musk also repeatedly warns about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
The entrepreneur shares many of the political positions of the American right, complains about alleged racism against white people and rails against the “woke brain virus” that is destroying humanity.
He is also currently suing researchers who documented a rise in hate speech on X, formerly Twitter.
Even beyond OpenAI, the belligerent Musk is currently at loggerheads with Microsoft.
Recently, people publicly criticized the fact that the Windows 11 operating system could only be installed with a Microsoft account.
However, he was then informed on his own platform X that the car manufacturer Tesla, which he runs, requires a user account to order a car.
tmk/dpa/AFP