Elon Musk v OpenAI, court filing, accessed April 30, 2024, is part of HackerNoon’s legal PDF series. You can jump to any part of this filing here. This part is 10 of 29.
G. Defendants break their promise in 2023
112. In its early years, research and development at OpenAI, Inc. was conducted openly, and the public had free access to designs, models, and code.
113. For example, when researchers at OpenAI, Inc. discovered in June 2018 that an algorithm called “Transformers” could perform natural language tasks without explicit training, entire communities, from open source to grassroots groups to commercial ventures, sprang up to improve and extend OpenAI, Inc.’s models—the intended benefit of open-source publication of the nonprofit’s research.
114. In 2019, OpenAI, Inc. released the complete, open version of a second-generation Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (“GPT”), GPT-2, with the stated hope that it would be “useful to developers of future high-performance models.” The company also published a detailed report describing the new model and acknowledging some of the many benefits of publicly releasing such models.
115. In 2020, OpenAI, Inc. announced a third version of its model, GPT3, and republished a research paper detailing the full implementation so that others can build on it.
116. OpenAI, Inc.’s initial findings, while technologically interesting, had little commercial value and were publicly disclosed by Altman. However, when the threshold of artificial intelligence was reached, which the Defendants were required to develop for the benefit of humanity and not for profit under the Founding Agreement, Altman made a U-turn and began locking the technology down for personal use.
117. For example, on March 14, 2023, OpenAI, Inc. released its most advanced model to date, GPT-4, which many, including Microsoft, hailed as “a form of general intelligence.” Microsoft scientists stated that, given its advanced capabilities, GPT-4 “could reasonably be considered an early (but still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.” However, the defendants did not release the report or code, preventing the public from building on the nonprofit’s AI advances, as Musk had promised.
118. Reuters reported that OpenAI is also developing a secret algorithm called Q* and that several OpenAI employees have written a letter warning about its potential power. It seems that Q* may be an even clearer and more impressive example of AGI developed by OpenAI.
119. According to the information and knowledge available, Altman induced the nonprofit to license its technology exclusively to Microsoft, the world’s largest for-profit corporation (6), contrary to the written commitments of Altman and the nonprofit – for example, in the OpenAI, Inc. certificate of incorporation: ‘No part of the net income or assets of this corporation shall ever be used for the benefit of … any private individual’; and in the bylaws: ‘We commit ourselves to … avoiding enabling applications of AI or AGI that … result in an undue concentration of power’.
120. The Microsoft license covers all of OpenAI, Inc.’s “pre-AGI” technologies (7) and tasks the Board with determining when “AGI” has been achieved. To date, the Board has made no such determination, so Microsoft has full access to OpenAI’s suite of technologies. With full access to the nonprofit’s research and staff, many of whom, to the best of their knowledge, now work for the for-profit company OpenAI or Microsoft, it is a no-brainer to develop a “complete” AGI system based on the nonprofit’s research and technology.
121. Defendants have kept GPT-4 and subsequent models, including, without limitation, GPT-4T and GPT-4o (released in May 2024), completely secret. To the best of our knowledge and belief, the internal details of GPT-4, GPT-4T and GPT-4o are known only to OpenAI and its partner Microsoft. The reason for the secrecy is obvious: Defendants and Microsoft could make a fortune selling this technology to the public, which would not be possible if the nonprofit made its research and technology available for free, as Altman repeatedly promised Musk.
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(6) In August 2024, Microsoft’s value is estimated at $3.11 trillion.
(7) OpenAI’s website defines AGI as “a highly autonomous system that surpasses human performance at the most economically valuable work” and states that such technology “is excluded from IP licenses and other commercial terms with Microsoft that apply only to technologies developed before the launch of AGI”.
