Elon Musk withdrew his lawsuit Tuesday against OpenAI, the maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, a day before a state judge in San Francisco considered 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 contract by prioritizing commercial interests over the public good.
A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI signed with Microsoft, Musk’s lawsuit claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s commitment to carefully developing AI and making the technology publicly available.
Musk had argued that the founding contract said the organization should focus on building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity.
OpenAI, based in San Francisco, had requested the dismissal days after Musk filed the lawsuit. You 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 artificial intelligence work Google was doing at the time. Musk believed that Google and its co-founder, Larry Page, were not properly concerned about the risks that AI posed to humanity.
Musk parted ways with OpenAI after a power struggle in 2018. The company later became a leader in artificial intelligence technology and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in human prose.
Musk founded his own artificial intelligence company last year called xAI, while repeatedly claiming that OpenAI did not focus enough on the dangers of the technology.
He filed his lawsuit weeks after members of OpenAI’s board of directors unexpectedly fired Altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission of developing AI for the good of humanity. Altman was reinstated after five days of negotiations with the board of directors and soon consolidated his control over the company, regaining a seat on the board of directors.
Late last month, OpenAI announced that it had started working on a new AI model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that powers ChatGPT. The company said it expected 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 Committee to explore how it should handle risks posed by the new model and future technologies.
