A bitter rift between two Silicon Valley billionaires could shape the future of the fast-growing artificial intelligence industry.
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, who has his own AI startup, is duking it out in court and in a public war of words with Sam Altman, leader of ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Musk, who is the world’s richest man and has the ear of President Donald Trump, has referred to the San Francisco-based OpenAI chief executive as “Scam Altman.” Meanwhile, Altman told Bloomberg that Musk is not “a happy person.” Musk and Altman, along with several others, co-founded OpenAI in 2015.
Underlying the personal feud is Musk’s legal challenge to OpenAI, which threatens to slow the company’s efforts at a time when the race for the lead in the AI space is heating up. Musk sued OpenAI last year for fraud, breach of contract and fiduciary duty over OpenAI’s efforts to change its corporate structure. He’s looking to the courts for an injunction to stop the company’s “unlawful” conduct and seeking compensation for damages and fees.
OpenAI has disputed many of the claims in Musk’s lawsuit.
“I wish he would just compete by building the better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff. … We’ll try to just put our head down and keep working,” Altman told Bloomberg. OK, back up. What’s going on with OpenAI?
OpenAI has an unusual business model.
It began as a nonprofit company and later launched a for-profit subsidiary to oversee its commercial operations. Its product ChatGPT has millions of users and is a household name, helping bring generative AI into the mainstream.
But with competition ratcheting up from Google, Amazon and others, OpenAI needed to raise significantly more money. To make that process easier, it embarked on a plan to explore changing the for-profit subsidiary to a public benefit corporation.That move irked early OpenAI investors like Musk, who said he invested more than $44 million from 2016 to 2020 in OpenAI under the belief it would remain a nonprofit serving humanity and not become beholden to shareholders concerned about profits. […]
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