AI Briefing: Elon Musk and Sam Altman battle over OpenAI’s mission

OpenAI and other companies in the generative AI space continue to develop and debut innovations at a rapid pace. But all that AI fervor is also generating another bevy of legal battles.

The creator of ChatGPT was hit with several new lawsuits alleging copyright infringement and other concerns, with others accusing the company of putting profit over purpose. Last week, OpenAI was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed jointly by The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet, which alleges the company violated copyright laws by using their content to train AI models. A day later, OpenAI and Altman were named in a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, who alleges Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman violated the contract they made with Musk when the three co-founded the nonprofit nearly a decade ago. According to the complaint, OpenAI has abandoned its nonprofit mission by pursuing business deals that might betray researching AI for the public good. 

“Mr. Musk has long recognized that [artificial general intelligence] poses a grave threat to humanity —perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today,” according to the complaint. “His concerns mirrored those raised before him by luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy. Our entire economy is based around the fact that humans work together and come up with the best solutions to a hard task. If a machine can solve nearly any task better than we can, that machine becomes more economically useful than we are.”

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