Elon Musk dealt blow in lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman | World | News
Elon Musk is the world’s richest man (Image: Getty)
A federal jury has tossed out Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. The nine-person jury unanimously found on Monday that Mr Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit and missed the deadline for the statute of limitations.
Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company that launched in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. Mr Musk accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of shifting the company into a moneymaking mode after he donated $38million in its first years.
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Elon Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI (Image: Getty)
The jury deliberated for two hours. The jury served in an advisory role, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted their verdict as the court’s own and dismissed Mr Musk’s claims.
The three-week trial in Oakland, California, shed light on the bitter falling-out between the two Silicon Valley titans and the beginnings of OpenAI, a company now valued at $852billion.
Mr Altman and OpenAI claimed there was never a promise to keep OpenAI a nonprofit forever. In fact, they claimed, Mr Musk knew this and filed his lawsuit because he couldn’t have unilateral control over the fast-growing AI developer.
Mr Musk was seeking damages to be paid to the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm as well as Mr Altman’s ouster from OpenAI’s board.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman. (Image: Getty)
“I think they’re going to try to make this lawsuit … very complicated, but it’s actually very simple. Mr Musk said during his first day on the stand. “Which is that it’s not OK to steal a charity,” he added. Mr Musk’s lawsuit claimed that, in addition to “breach of charitable trust,” Mr Altman and Mr Brockman unjustly enriched themselves from the windfall as the ChatGPT maker soared in valuation.
OpenAI has rejected Mr Musk’s allegations as an unfounded case. Mr Altman and Mr Musk both vied to be OpenAI’s CEO in its early years. In his testimony, Mr Altman said he had concerns about Mr Musk’s attempts to gain more control over OpenAI, which was aiming to safely build a better-than-human form of AI called artificial general intelligence.
“Part of the reason we started OpenAI is we didn’t think AGI could be under the control of any one person, no matter how good their intents are,” Mr Altman said.
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Near the end of his testimony, Mr Altman said that before things turned sour, he had thought very highly of Mr Musk.
“I felt like he had abandoned us, not come through on his promises, put the company in a very difficult place, jeopardized the mission, didn’t really care about the things I thought he cared about,” Mr Altman said.
“It’s been an extremely painful thing for me … to have someone that I respected so much not acknowledge that and continue to publicly attack us.”
On Monday, Sam Singer, a spokesman for OpenAI, said from outside the Oakland courthouse that the verdict was a “tremendous victory”.
Lawyer William Savitt, who represented OpenAI during the trial, said Mr Musk’s lawsuit “bears no relationship with reality”.
Also after the verdict, Steven Molo, the lead attorney for Mr Musk in the case, told the judge that he wanted to “preserve my client’s right to appeal.”
Outside the courtroom, another lawyer for Mr Musk, Marc Toberoff, said: “This war is not over, and I’d sum it up in one word, appeal.”
