Billionaire Elon Musk Enters Courtroom Showdown With OpenAI
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.