Elon Musk dropped his lawsuit Tuesday against OpenAI, creator of the online chatbot ChatGPT, a day before a San Francisco state judge ruled whether it should be dismissed.
The lawsuit, filed in February, accused the artificial intelligence startup and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of violating OpenAI’s founding agreement by prioritizing commercial interests over the public good.
A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI signed with Microsoft, Musk’s lawsuit claims, represented an abandonment of the company’s promise to carefully develop AI and make the technology publicly available.
Musk argued that the founding charter said the organization should instead focus on building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do everything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity.
San Francisco-based OpenAI resigned days after Musk filed the lawsuit. He could still file the lawsuit again in California or another state.
OpenAI and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015, along with Altman, Brockman and several young AI researchers. He saw the research lab as a response to the AI work being done by Google at the time. Musk believed that Google and its co-founder, Larry Page, were not adequately concerned about the risks that AI posed to humanity.
Musk split from OpenAI after a power struggle in 2018. The company later became a leader in AI technology, creating ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in human-like prose.
Musk founded his own AI company last year called xAI, while repeatedly stating that OpenAI was not sufficiently focused on the dangers of the technology.
He filed his lawsuit weeks after OpenAI board members unexpectedly fired Altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission of building AI for the good of humanity. Altman was reinstated after five days of negotiations with the board and soon consolidated his control over the company, regaining a seat on the board.
Late last month, OpenAI announced that it had begun work on a new artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that powers ChatGPT. The company said it expects the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strives to build AGI
The company also said it was creating a new Safety and Security Committee to explore how it should address the risks posed by the new model and future technologies.
