OpenAI lawsuit: Elon Musk, investor Vinod Khosla trade barbs on X

New Delhi, March 3 (IANS) Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla on Sunday got engaged in a public spat on X as the billionaire sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman over alleged breach of original contractual agreements around AI.

When Khosla accused the X owner of exhibiting “sour grapes” behaviour by suing OpenAI, the billionaire replied that the Indian-origin investor does not have any idea about the issue.

“With @elonmusk, feels like a bit of sour grapes in suing @OpenAI, not getting in early enough, not staying committed and now a rival effort,” Khosla posted on X.

“Like they say if you can't innovate, litigate and that's what we have here. Elon of old would be building with us to hit the same goal.”

Musk replied: “Vinod doesn’t know what he is talking about here.”

According to Khosla, Musk would have worked collaboratively with OpenAI towards reaching shared objectives around AI.

Musk was an original board member of OpenAI until 2018 while Khosla had invested around $50 million in OpenAI in 2019.

Khosla further attacked Musk, saying the billionaire “got in early and bailed early when it seems the going got tough and keeping the mission required real scale money to be able to have any benefit to society”.

The Musk lawsuit, filed in a court in San Francisco in the US, revolves around OpenAI’s latest natural language model titled GPT-4.

Musk alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft (which has poured billions of dollars into Sam Altman-run company) have “improperly licensed GPT-4” despite agreeing that artificial general intelligence (AGI) capabilities “would remain non-profit and dedicated to humanity”.

Khosla said that “these lawsuits are a massive distraction from the goals of getting to AGI and its benefits”.

“Yet, even with all these hurdles, especially given this week, Sam, Greg and team have pushed out better products faster than anyone in AI”.

“For all the baseless accusations being made about @OpenAI, we were the first venture check in and were never felt misled by Sam or the company,” he added.