WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Billionaire Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman alleging that the organization is developing AI for profitability instead of the company's foundational mission of utilizing it for the benefit of humankind.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, opens with Musk's warning statement that artificial general intelligence or AGI, a theoretical form of AI which can perform tasks at or above human level, poses 'a grave threat to humanity'.
'OpenAI Inc has been transformed into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,' the lawsuit alleges.
The Tesla CEO states his fears in the lawsuit that AGI could evade human control and endanger the whole planet. He added that such technology at the hands of for-profit companies poses a 'particularly acute and noxious danger to humanity'.
The lawsuit said that Altman supported Musk's concerns over AGI earlier, and in 2015 they together with Greg Brockman agreed to create a non-profit AI lab, known as OpenAI. They agreed that the lab would be 'for the benefit of humanity' and would be open source.
However, OpenAI partnered with Microsoft (MSFT) after Musk left the company in 2018. Now, Microsoft is considered as the biggest contributor of the ChatGPT maker with billions of investments.
Musk stated in the lawsuit that Altman and Brockman had betrayed the founding agreement by launching GPT-4, which is more powerful than ChatGPT, and keeping its design as a secret.
'This secrecy is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety,' the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit also claims that OpenAI is working on a new model known as Q*, which would be AGI-induced.
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