Tesla’s Elon Musk says he was ‘deceived’, suing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, again
- Musk is once again suing OpenAI, this time claiming he was ‘deceived’ into confounding the firm
Elon Musk is having another go at suing OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
In the new lawsuit filed on Monday, Musk’s lawyers argued that the OpenAI executives “deceived” Musk into confounding the company by playing on his concerns about the existential risks AI poses in what they describe as a “textbook tale of altruism versus greed.”
Musk’s lawyers also claimed that the billionaire was “assiduously manipulated” by Altman and Brockman into confounding OpenAI, a non-profit that would focus on building AI safely with an open approach for the benefit of humanity. But the lawyers claimed it was “all hot-air philanthropy – the hook for Altman’s long con.”
“After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital, and recruited top AI scientists for OpenAI, Inc., Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices. The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” Musk’s lawyers argued.
The lawsuit also stated that Musk was told OpenAI would hire leading scientists to compete with Google’s DeepMind in a race to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, the lawyers argue that the company created a for-profit entity once it approached creating AGI.
Altman, Musk, and Brockman founded OpenAI in December 2015 as a non-profit research lab. Musk departed in 2018, but his lawyers said in the first lawsuit that he “continued to make contributions to OpenAI” until mid-September 2020.
