Image source, Getty Images
- author, Joao da Silva
- role, Business reporter
Elon Musk has suddenly asked a California court to dismiss his lawsuit against OpenAI and its president, Sam Altman, for abandoning the company's founding mission of developing artificial intelligence (AI) for the benefit of humanity.
The lawsuit filed by the billionaire's lawyers asks for the months-old lawsuit to be dropped, but gives no reason why.
This came just one day before the court was scheduled to hear the ChatGPT developers' motion to dismiss the case.
BBC News has contacted Musk's lawyers and OpenAI for comment.
The latest motion seeks to dismiss the lawsuit “without prejudice,” meaning Musk could reopen the lawsuit at a later date.
The Tesla CEO filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in late February, alleging that the company he helped found in 2015 has strayed from its altruistic goals and focused on making money.
OpenAI countered that Musk has previously supported the idea of a for-profit organisation and even hinted at a merger with his own electric car maker, Tesla.
The battle intensified earlier this week when Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to use OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot to power its Siri voice assistant and operating system.
Following the announcement, Musk posted several messages on his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), criticising the partnership.
One of the posts ended with, “Apple has no idea what actually happens when they hand over user data to OpenAI. They are misleading users.”
But investors likely welcomed the news, as Apple's market capitalization rose to a record high of more than $3 trillion.
Musk said he would launch his own AI company called xAI in July 2023, with the goal of “understanding reality.”
In November of that year, xAI released Grok, a “slightly humorous” chatbot to compete with chatbots like ChatGPT.
