Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at the Atreju conference in Rome, Italy, on Saturday, December 16, 2023. The annual event, organized by Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, began in 1998 as a conference for right-wing youth and has evolved into a political kermesse, including… Including ministers and members of the opposition.
Alicia Pierdomenico | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI has challenged the foundational claim Tesla CEO Elon Musk filed in his lawsuit against the startup earlier this month.
As it seeks to commercialize its ChatGPT chatbot and underlying AI models, OpenAI faces a slew of legal battles, including Musk and copyright infringement issues from The New York Times and the authors. OpenAI responded to Musk's complaint last week by mocking it in a memo to employees and publishing emails about him dating back to its early days.
Musk, who claimed breach of contract at the startup he backed, pointed in his complaint earlier this month to a 2015 “founding agreement” with him and two other OpenAI co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Musk said that the three agreed that the new artificial intelligence laboratory would be a non-profit organization for the benefit of humanity, and that it would not maintain the privacy of information for commercial benefit.
He went on to say that by releasing the GPT-4 large language model last year without providing scientific details for public consumption, OpenAI broke that convention.
“There is no establishment agreement, or any agreement at all, with Musk, as the complaint itself states,” OpenAI said in a document filed with the California Supreme Court for the District of San Francisco. “The Foundation Agreement is instead a fantasy conjured by Musk to claim an unearned claim to the fruits of a project he initially supported, then abandoned, and then watched succeed without him.”
Musk cited OpenAI's 2015 certificate of incorporation with the Delaware Secretary of State, asserting that it “commemorates” the incorporation agreement. But OpenAI responded by saying Musk's complaint lacked an actual agreement.
The Microsoft-backed startup described Musk's claims as trivial. But she said in a blog post on Monday that she was asking the court to classify the case as complex and get a dedicated department for it, because it involves artificial intelligence and its allegations go back nearly 10 years.
In his complaint, Musk stated that in connection with OpenAI's 2017 plan to create a for-profit organization, he told Brockman, Altman, and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever to “either do something yourself or continue to use OpenAI as a company.” Nonprofit.”
OpenAI said in its filing dated March 6 that if the case were discovered, evidence would show that Musk was on board with gaining a profit structure.
Musk has his own artificial intelligence lab called X.AI, which has released a chatbot called Grok that is available through Posted by X on Monday.
OpenAI's ChatGPT had 100 million weekly users as of November.
“Given the remarkable technological advances that OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself,” OpenAI said in its filing. “So he brought this action charging the defendants with breaching a contract that never existed and to which Musk was never owed duties, seeking a relief calculated to favor a competitor to OpenAI.”
Watch: Sam Altman rejoins OpenAI's board of directors
