Openai, Inc.: A Corporation for Research, Development, and Distribution of Artificial Intelligence Related to Musk’s Litigation

The lawsuit accuses the company’s president Greg Brockman of breaching his agreement with Musk by abandoning the founding principles over the years.

GPT-4 won notice because it can answer a wide range of questions, instead of being focused on specific tasks like playing chess. Musk’s lawsuit refers to assertions from Microsoft researchers, in a paper from March 2023, that “given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.” GPT-4 makes mistakes and it has limitations to it’s ability to correctly answer questions.

It is not that Musk is that person, and it is not that his lawyers decided that Musk was more lucrative than regular lawyers doing their job.

Let’s just take the very first cause of action of the lawsuit, for example. It is a claim for breaching of a contract that almost any first-year law student can evaluate, because step one is asking if there is a contract, and step two is figuring out what the contract says. To have a valid contract, you need an offer, acceptance, and an exchange of value, in an attempt to make simple concepts sound confusing and increase fees.

Even though courts do not like doing it, if contracts are written down, they can be shown to exist, what the terms are, and if they areEnforced.

In many places, the founding of Openai, Inc.’s founding Articles of Incorporation are cited, as well as numerous written communications between the two parties over a multi-year period.

The specific purpose of this corporation is to provide funding for research, development and distribution of technology related to artificial intelligence. The resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person.

Seeing a nonprofit: Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI is a lamentable violation of the For-profit Arm of the DeepMind lab

I asked a few lawyer friends if any of that looked like a contract, and most of them just made puzzled faces. This tracks with Musk’s increasingly fuzzy understanding of how contracts work; just yesterday a judge told lawyers for X that its breach of contract case against the Centers for Combating Digital Hate involved “one of the most vapid extensions of law I’ve ever heard.”

This entire complaint is more like a 1L exam question than a real lawsuit — to the extent that the second cause of action is something called “promissory estoppel,” a concept that sets the hearts of law professors aflame and which comes up in the real world approximately never. The important thing to know is that the richest person in the world is now trying to tell a court that he somehow detrimentally relied upon the promises of a nonprofit when he donated millions of dollars to it with no written contract. At the very least, this is hilarious.

It’s pretty much a sure thing that OpenAI will reply with a motion to dismiss for “failure to state a claim”, which is one of the 1L favorites.

Tension can be created by the for-profit arm of a nonprofit board. The at-times dueling sides were on display last year when Altman was abruptly ousted then brought back to the company.

According to the suit, Altman approached Musk in 2015 out of shared concerns over the risks of AI and specifically, the AI research lab owned by Google known as DeepMind.

The complaint argues that the company went astray by creating a for-profit subsidiary and giving Microsoft an exclusive license to some of its technology, as well as keeping secret the internal design of their latest version.

Musk has been involved in the backlash. Last year, he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that ChatGPT has a liberal bias, and he planned to provide an alternative.

A paid subscription to another Musk company is required to get early access to the prototype in the U.S.

On Openness in AI: Where the Llama 2 and GPT-4 come from: A Pedestrian’s Guide to How to Exploit Openness

AI systems exist across a spectrum of openness, ranging from fully open source to fully closed, depending on how much their inner workings are shared with researchers and members of the public. Those in favor of open source argue the approach allows greater transparency and potential for innovation. Arguments against include warnings that it makes powerful AI models potentially available to criminals or geopolitical adversaries. The Llama 2 model is free to download, modify, and deploy, while GPT-4 is not.

“I have the sense that most of us researchers on the ground think that large language models [like GPT-4] are a very significant tool for allowing humans to do much more but that they are limited in ways that make them far from stand-alone intelligences,” adds Michael Jordan, a professor at UC Berkeley and an influential figure in the field of machine learning.