OpenAI is being sued by its co-founder Elon Musk. Bloomberg and Axios have seen internal memos with initial reactions from OpenAI.
Jason Kwon, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, released an internal memo on the lawsuit saying that the company "categorically disagrees" with Musk's allegations. Kwon suggests that the lawsuit may be due to Musk's regret that he is no longer involved with the company.
Musk is basing the lawsuit on safety concerns regarding a commercialized AGI owned by Microsoft. He is suing for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices, among other things.
In his internal memo, Kwon rejects Musk's fear that GPT-4 is already an AGI or on the verge of becoming one.
"It is capable of solving small tasks in many jobs, but the ratio of work done by a human to the work done by GPT-4 in the economy remains staggeringly high," Kwon writes. "Importantly, an AGI will be a highly autonomous system capable enough to devise novel solutions to longstanding challenges — GPT-4 can't do that."
Kwon emphasized that OpenAI's mission remains to ensure that AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefits all of humanity.
"We've found that the strategy of creating frontier technology and making it broadly available by APIs and products best serves both parts of this mission, since we're able to attract the necessary capital, make the technology broadly usable, and also provide guardrails as required by society and conscience."
Furthermore, OpenAI is independent and competes directly with Microsoft, Kwon said. It is well known that the two companies do compete with each other in a number of areas, and that can cause friction. Microsoft owns 49 percent of OpenAI and has exclusive distribution rights for its AI models.
In a separate internal memo, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Elon Musk one of his heroes. However, he said he misses the person he once was, who competed with others by developing better technologies.
OpenAI declined to comment officially on the lawsuit or the two memos.
Kwon's memo also mentioned "inquiries from government agencies," presumably referring to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation launched after Altman was briefly ousted by the company's board last year. Kwon said the company was cooperating with the authorities and would provide the information requested.