Jury selection is to begin Monday in a high-profile legal battle between billionaire Elon Musk and artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, which he accuses of betraying its non-profit mission.
The clash in a courtroom across the bay from San Francisco pits the world’s richest man against a startup that Musk once backed and now competes against in the booming AI sector.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a formidable rival to the Grok chatbot made by Musk’s xAI lab.
While the lawsuit filed by Musk is part of a feud between him and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, it spotlights a debate whether AI should ultimately benefit the privileged few or society as a whole.
Court filings lay out how Altman tried to convince Musk to back OpenAI in 2015, acting as a co-founder for a non-profit lab whose technology “would belong to the world.”
Musk pumped some $38 million into the lab before he left.
OpenAI is now valued at $852 billion, with Microsoft among its backers, and is preparing to go public on the stock market.
The judge presiding over the trial is aiming for a jury to decide by late May whether OpenAI broke a promise to Musk in its drive to be a leader in AI or just smartly rode the technology to glory.
Musk argues in his lawsuit that he was deceived about OpenAI’s mission being altruistic.
The tycoon cites an email from Altman in 2017 claiming that he remained “enthusiastic about the non-profit structure” of their AI venture after Musk threatened to cut off funding for the lab.
Just a few months later, however, OpenAI established a commercial subsidiary in the face of needing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers to power its technology.
Over the course of the following two years, Microsoft pumped billions of dollars into OpenAI and the tech stalwart’s stake in the startup is now valued about $135 billion.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella is among those slated to testify at the trial.
Along with calling for OpenAI to be forced to revert to a pure nonprofit, Musk’s suit urges the ousting of Altman and OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman.
Musk is also seeking as much as $134 billion in damages and to have the court make OpenAI sever ties with Microsoft.
During pre-trial hearings, US Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers mused that Musk team seemed to be “pulling numbers out of the air” when it came to calculating damages.
