Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X/Twitter and CEO of Tesla, has voluntarily dropped his breach of contract lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.
of Financial Times Reports The lawsuit, filed three months ago in a San Francisco court, accuses OpenAI of jeopardizing its original mission to benefit humanity by entering into a multi-billion dollar partnership with Microsoft. Musk argued that the $86 billion startup behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT was working on “proprietary technology to maximize the profits of literally the largest corporations in the world.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to reporters at the Allen & Company Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, USA, Wednesday, July 12, 2023. Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
But OpenAI dismissed Musk’s claims as “incoherent” and “frivolous.” The company published a blog post in March that included several emails from Musk from the company’s early days that seemed to show him acknowledging that the ChatGPT developer needed to raise significant capital to fund the computing resources needed to develop its AI models.
Musk’s relationship with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, has been tense for some time. Despite co-founding the company in 2015 and donating $44 million to the group, Musk had disagreements with Altman over the direction of the research and stepped down from OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018. A year later, OpenAI launched a for-profit arm and attracted a big investment from Microsoft.
Responding to the growing competition in the AI industry, Musk launched AI startup xAI last year, which has since raised $6 billion in venture capital and sovereign wealth funds to fund its development. Despite his involvement in the AI field, Musk has repeatedly warned about the potential dangers of the technology, in the past calling AI an “existential threat” to humanity.
The dismissal of the lawsuit comes as Musk criticized OpenAI’s new partnership with Apple. In a recent X/Twitter post, Musk said that if OpenAI’s technology is integrated into the iPhone, his company will ban Apple devices. He went further, saying that “visitors will have to leave their Apple devices at the door and the devices will be kept in a Faraday cage.”
Click here for details of Financial Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
