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Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

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Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#791

Whatever his reason may be (like resentment for jumping off the ship too soon and missing out, or standing in for humanity), I like what I read in the sense that it contains all the stuff that needs to be spoken about publicly, and the court seems to be the optimal place for this. It feels like Microsoft is misusing the partnership only to block other companies from having access to the IP. They said they don't need…

> Whatever his reason may be

The reason is that he was ruthlessly scammed by the sociopath CEO Sam Altman.

"Mr. Musk founded and funded OpenAI, Inc. with Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman in exchange for and relying on the Founding Agreement to ensure that AGI would benefit humanity, not for-profit corporations. As events turned out in 2023, his contributions to OpenAI, Inc. have been twisted to benefit the Defendants and the biggest company in the world. This was a stark betrayal of the Founding Agreement, turning that Agreement on its head and perverting OpenAI, Inc.’s mission. Imagine donating to a non-profit whose asserted mission is to protect the Amazon rainforest, but then the non-profit creates a for-profit Amazonian logging company that uses the fruits of the donations to clear the rainforest. That is the story of OpenAI, Inc."

"Plaintiff reasonably relied on Defendants’ false promises to his detriment, ultimately providing tens of millions of dollars of funding to OpenAI, Inc., as well as his time and other resources, on the condition that OpenAI would remain a non-profit irrevocably dedicated to creating safe, open-source AGI for public benefit, only to then have OpenAI abandon its “irrevocable” non- profit mission, stop providing basic information to the public, and instead exclusively dedicate and license its AGI algorithms to the largest for-profit company in the world, precisely the opposite of the promises Defendants made to Plaintiff."

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#792
post #438

If OpenAI became a non-profit with this in its charter: “resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person" I don't think it is going to be hard to show that they are doing something very different than what they said they were going to do.

They claim that this is about the end result, but in the meantime, they can license the not-yet-done AI to Microsoft.

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Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#793

Wouldn't you have to prove damages in a lawsuit like this? What damages does Musk personally suffer if OpenAI has in fact broken their contract?

Could they just give him back the $60M or whatever?

That seems like nothing to them, or Elon.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#794
post #608
post #440

I uploaded the PDF to ChatGPT4 with the original name and got "Unable to upload musk-v-altman-openai-complaint-sf.pdf" multiple times I changed it to "defnotalawsuit.pdf" and it worked...

The file uploading functionality of ChatGPT is just awful, it has nothing to do with the file name. You can test it yourself with any arbitrary file, the number of failures to upload you experience will be significantly higher than you would experience with, I'd hazard to guess, any other upload function around the internet. Now whether that's something with their processing pipeline or just their servers being perpe…

The coders at OpenAI are all ML people who only know Python. They have no idea how "proper" software is written, or how infrastructure works.

They had such glaring errors in their APIs for such a long time that it's almost comical. Such as when they increased the context window from 8K to 32K tokens, they forgot to increase the HTTP CDN WAF limit for a while. If you actually tried to submit that much data, you'd get a HTTP error code back. They never noticed because internally they don't go through a CDN.

Similarly, the "web browsing" feature was comically bad, with a failure rate exceeding 80% for months after it was released. Even when it worked it was glacially slow and would time out easily and fail. Meanwhile Phind was doing the same thing with 100% success rates and lightning fast response times... with a fraction of the budget and manpower.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#795
post #438

If OpenAI became a non-profit with this in its charter: “resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person" I don't think it is going to be hard to show that they are doing something very different than what they said they were going to do.

OpenAI being a nonprofit is like Anthony Levandowski’s "Way of the Future" being a 501(c) (3) religious nonprofit. All of which is lifted from Stranger in a Strange Land and L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology. (It wouldn't be the first time someone made a nerd-cult: Aum Shinrikyo was full of physics grad students and had special mind-reading hats. Though that was unironically a cult. Whereas the others were started explici…

Say hello to "effective altruism".

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#796

Any competent lawyer is going to get Musk on the stand reiterating his opinions about the danger of AI. If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Not saying I agree that being closed source is in the public good, although one could certainly argue that accelerating the efforts of bad actors to catch…

I have absolutely zero reason to believe "AI" is better of in the hands of Altman, Brockman etc and most of the public would feel similar.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#797
post #438

If OpenAI became a non-profit with this in its charter: “resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person" I don't think it is going to be hard to show that they are doing something very different than what they said they were going to do.

Its easy to show this, since the the corporation itself is doing this. The separate entity is the one going for revenue.

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Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easy to show this, since the the corporation itself is doing this. The separate entity is the one going for revenue.

You can't just give away all assets of a non-profit to a for-profit and say that now the old non-profit values no longer matters.

no one said the values would no longer matter - they just wouldn’t be furthered by said assets.

you might think that that also suggests that the values no longer matter, but that would be to say that the only way to prove that something matters is with money or money equivalents. to “put your money where your mouth is,” if you will.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's described here: https://openai.com/our-structure Quote: Fifth, the board determines when we've attained AGI. Again, by AGI we mean a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Such a system is excluded from IP licenses and other commercial terms with Microsoft, which only apply to pre-AGI technology. > "Musk claims Microsoft's hold on Altman and the OpenAI board will kee…

Does anyone credibly believe that GPT-4 "outperforms humans at most economically valuable work"?

Just a side node; we don’t actually even know. The glance we get to the stated GPT-4 model is highly censored and hindered so that it can be scaled to millions. What if OpenAI can use the uncencored version with the computing power of those millions devices without restrictions? Is that GPT-4 same as we get by spending $25 month?

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#800

A NY Times article says "Though Mr. Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for becoming a for-profit company, he hatched a plan in 2017 to wrest control of the A.I. lab from Mr. Altman and its other founders and transform into a commercial operation that would work alongside his other companies, including the electric carmaker Tesla, and make use of their increasingly powerful supercomputers, people familiar with his…

I don't see why this is a problem for the case. It demonstrates that OpenAI had not released its tech to the public, which includes Elon Musk. He wouldn't have needed to try wresting control if they had done what the non-profit was supposed to do.
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