Today's Edition
OAKLAND (REUTERS)
A US jury on Monday ruled against Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, finding the artificial intelligence company not liable to the world's richest person for having allegedly strayed from its original mission to benefit humanity.
In a unanimous verdict, the jury in Oakland, California, federal court said Musk brought his case too late. The jury deliberated less than two hours. The three-week trial had widely been seen as a critical moment for the future of OpenAI and artificial intelligence generally, both in how it should be used and who should benefit from it.
The verdict simplifies the path for OpenAI to proceed with a possible initial public offering that could value the business at $1 trillion.
Musk said he will apply, repeating his claim that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman viewed OpenAI as a means to great wealth.
In his lawsuit, Musk accused OpenAI, Altman and Brockman of manipulating him into giving $38 million, then going behind his back by attaching a for-profit business to its original nonprofit and accepting tens of billions of dollars from Microsoft and other investors.
Marc Toberoff, a lawyer for Musk, said the ruling could encourage other startups that begin as nonprofits but have greater ambitions to raise money, create for-profit entities to scale, and make their officers and directors rich.
“It's a brand new formula for Silicon Valley,” he told reporters.
OpenAI was founded byAltman, Musk, and several others in 2015. Musk left his board in 2018, and OpenAI set up a for-profit business the next year.
Musk has since founded his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, which is now part of his SpaceX rocket and satellite company.
OpenAI countered that it was Musk who saw dollar signs, and waited too long to claim OpenAI breached its founding agreement to build safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, said the verdict removed a significant overhang to a potential OpenAI IPO.
People use AI for myriad purposes such as education, facial recognition, financial advice, journalism, legal research, medical diagnoses, and harmful deepfakes.
Musk said OpenAI failed to prioritise AI's safety, and wrongly tried to enrich investors and insiders at the nonprofit's expense.
SpaceX is meanwhile preparing an IPO that could exceed OpenAI's in size.
