What’s With OpenAI This Time?

A new lawsuit was just filed by Elon Musk against OpenAI and company leadership several weeks after withdrawing an earlier suit. Filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, the lawsuit revived Musk’s earlier claims that OpenAI and two of his fellow cofounders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, breached its founding mission of developing open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology for the benefit of humanity. Musk says that the two wanted to cash in when OpenAI’s technology began to transform generative AI. That, however, is not the only big news going on over there.

But wait, there’s a lot more…

Three top executives walked out on the company. Cofounder John Schulman, cofounder and algorithm guru, just left for Anthropic; Greg Brockman, cofounder and president, will be taking an extended sabbatical. At the same time, Peter Deng, stolen from Meta in 2023, says he’s leaving too.

These slots will take time and a great deal of luck to fill effectively. Google and Meta are both making rapid headway competitively.

So, what is the real purpose behind the timing of Musk’s suit? He is said to want a judicial determination that OpenAI’s license to Microsoft to use its AI models is null and void and that OpenAI’s language models are outside the scope of the company’s partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI has a licensing partnership with Microsoft, and Microsoft invests billions into the company to use its large language models.

No one gave a reason for Musk’s dismissal of the earlier suit in June. Pass the popcorn—this one will play out in headlines for a while.