Elon Musk, CEO at (Tesla, SpaceX, X and co-founder of Open AI) has filed a lawsuit, Thursday 29th February 2024, against Open AI and its CEO, Sam Altman for breach of founding agreement.

In his complaint, Elon has faulted Open AI and CEO Altman for turning the once free-for-all company to a for-profit company in 2023 after establishing a corporate relationship with its biggest shareholder, Microsoft.

Recall that Open was founded in 2015 by a group of research engineers and scientist with funding from investors in the Technology scene, some which includes:

Elon Musk CEO at Tesla, SpaceX, X
Sam Altman, CEO at Open AI
Peter Thiel, Paypal Co-founder
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Co-founder

Following its earliest founding mission, Open AI was meant to benefit humanity. It runs an open-source model, thus making its technology freely available to the public. Open AI has produced different machine learning tools since 2015 and offered them for free. Very remarkable among them is the GPT (Generative pre-trained transformer) which is built to stimulate the human brain and give information based on pre-programmed data.

One of the most popular GPT series is ChatGPT. It was released in November 2022 and became the most popular free AI learning tool and was the ‘writers’ assistant’. It is an AI assistant that can read documents, answer questions based on the context and write contents in split seconds.

Unfortunately, the GPT-4 version is no longer open-source. This is against the proposed OpenAI corporate agreement, thus forming the bases of Elon’s lawsuit.. Infact, the Tech company reviewed their mission statement to reflect the new order.

While Elon Musk kicks against this paid model of the Open AI product, he raised concerns that GPT-4 is an entirely closed model as against the earliest open-source model. Moreso, the internal design and code of the GPT-4 has remained a secret. Elon claims that the code and internal details of GPT-4 are accessible only to OpenAI and Microsoft. He fears that Microsoft stands to make a fortune selling GPT-4 to the public.

Open AI has been a very helpful product in the technology space. One of its most popular tools, ChatGPT became widely used among students as a learning and fast reading tool as it could read and summarize bulk documents in seconds. ChatGPT equally became popular among content writers and researchers as a writing tool. This tool has been available to the public for free..

But with the new alliance between OpenAI and Microsoft, coupled with the review of its corporate mission, there are chances this GPT-4 version will no longer be free for all. The future of OpenAI and its business model will be determined in court following this lawsuit.

Has OpenAI done wrong? Do you think Elon Musk is pushing too hard? Let's discuss over the comment section.