AI: OpenAI & Elon Musk, lawsuit and counter-moves

...both personal and business for big stakes going forward

The feud between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk accelerated this week, as OpenAI responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit on the company’s governance structure and directions.

The origin story and history between the two companies goes back almost a decade, and one I’ve written about earlier. It’s a seminal chapter in these early days of the AI Tech Wave. And now it’s increasingly in the public eye, especially through lawsuits and public responses. And as recounted before, Microsoft and CEO Satya Nadella are also more than a bit player in this saga. Not to mention the Google founders and current CEO Sundar Pichai of course, both in the past and now future.

The WSJ has a detailed account titled “How the Bromance between Elon Musk and Sam Altman turned Toxic”, highlighting many of the blow-by-blow details, including to the current state of affairs between the two former friends and partners:

“Musk told Altman about his plans to start a competing artificial general intelligence company, xAI. Altman questioned whether adding another entrant into the AI race would ease Musk’s concerns. In the months after ChatGPT’s release, Musk began trying to poach OpenAI employees for xAI. He also threatened to sue Altman and OpenAI.”

“In November, Musk announced his own chatbot, Grok. He described it as a less “woke” competitor to ChatGPT. Musk gave the new chatbot access to Twitter’s trove of online data, as well as space in its San Francisco office. In recent weeks, xAI has begun preparing for a new fundraising round, a move likely to intensify its race against OpenAI.”

“After Musk filed his lawsuit, Altman wrote a memo to his staff: “The implication that benefiting humanity is somehow at odds with building a business is confusing,” he said. “I miss the old Elon.” 

In a public blog post this week, OpenAI laid out its counter arguments to Musk’s lawsuit, complete with email ‘receipts’:

“The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits. We are now sharing what we've learned about achieving our mission, and some facts about our relationship with Elon. We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”

It’s a story of great ambitions all around. Particularly in terms of what Elon Musk wants to do with AI across all his businesses, from X/Twitter to Tesla to xAI and more.

All of this makes for great media drama, and will likely contribute to future books, tv shows, and movies.

In the meantime, it’s clear that there is both a fair bit of personal drama between the two men, and of course a lot of business strategies on both sides. The stakes in the AI Tech Wave are getting exponentially big with the technologies. The ensuing dramas will be both personal and business. Stay tuned.

NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)