Elon Musk announced on X.com, formerly Twitter, that artificial intelligence (AI) Grok of his young company xAI would soon be open source. Perfect timing for the billionaire, as he has just filed a complaint against the closed system of OpenAI, the publisher of ChatGPT.
The conflict between the two parties is not new. Elon Musk is one of the founders of OpenAI, alongside Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, however, slammed the door on the organization in 2018, because, according to him, he absolutely refused the idea of it becoming a lucrative entity. A few days ago, Musk finally decided to take action against the start-up, accusing its leaders of having betrayed the initial agreement on which it was founded: to build open AI for the good of humanity . He criticizes it, among other things, for being under the thumb of Microsoft.
OpenAI responds vehemently to Elon Musk
Since filing the complaint, the entrepreneur has not given up and continues to castigate OpenAI on social networks with the slogan “ OpenAI is a link » (OpenAI is a lie).
The company led by Sam Altman is fiercely defending itself against Elon Musk. She said she strongly disagreed with the accusations against her. According to her, the businessman decided to leave the company because things were not going his way. He would have even validated the idea of seeing it become a lucrative organization, and demanded to be its CEO with a majority share. Likewise, a merger with Tesla would have been considered.
In a document filed this Monday, March 11 in court to respond to Musk, OpenAI indicates that “ the founding agreement » mentioned by the latter does not exist. She believes that this is a fabrication to allow her to benefit from her immense success. “ The founding agreement is instead a fiction that Musk invented to unduly claim the fruits of a company that he first supported, then abandoned, and finally watched succeed without him », deplores the firm. OpenAI is now valued at more than $80 billion.
Grok will go open source… Perfect timing?
In this context, Elon Musk’s announcement of Grok’s opening seems anything but coincidental. Especially since in his legal action, he seeks an order forcing OpenAI to make its technologies and research in AI public. GPT-4 being the most advanced major language model, such an initiative would certainly benefit his own start-up, xAI…
“ Seeing the remarkable technological advancements made by OpenAI, Musk now wants this success for himself. He therefore brings this action accusing the defendants of breaching a contract that never existed and obligations that were never owed to Musk, demanding relief calculated to benefit a competitor of OpenAI », concludes the company.
Sources: X.com, CNBC
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