[BitWiseVibe]

Wouldn't you have to prove damages in a lawsuit like this? What damages does Musk personally suffer if OpenAI has in fact broken their contract?

[KeplerBoy]

A non-profit took his money and decided to be for profit and compete with the AI efforts of his own companies?

[a_wild_dandan]

Yeah, OpenAI basically grafted a for-profit entity onto the non-profit to bypass their entire mission. They’re now extremely closed AI, and are valued at $80+ billion.

If I donated millions to them, I’d be furious.

[foofie]

You would have an argument if Elon Musk didn't attempted to take over OpenAI, and proceeded to abandon it after his attempts were rejected and he complained the organization was going nowhere.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...

I don't think Elon Musk has a case or holds the moral high ground. It sounds like he's just pissed he committed a colossal error of analysis and is now trying to rewrite history to hide his screwups.

[zoogeny]

I don't know how comparable it would be, but I imagine if I donated $44 million to a university under the agreement that they would use the money in a particular way (e.g. to build a specific building or to fund a specific program) and then the university used the money in some other way, I feel I ought to have some standing to sue them.

Of course, this all depends on the investment details specified in a contract and the relevant law, both of which I am not familiar with.

[mikeyouse]

Yeah - Had you donated the funds as "restricted funding" in the nonprofit parlance, they would have a legal requirement to use the funds as you had designated. It seems that Musk contributed general non-restricted funding so the nonprofit can more or less do what they want with the money.. Not saying there's no case here, but if he really wanted them to do something specific, there's a path for that to happen and that he didn't take that path is definitely going to hurt his case.

[MiscIdeaMaker99]

Was it a donation? Or was it an investment?

[Kranar]

The statement of claims is full of damages. It claims that Musk donated 44 million dollars on the basis of specific claims made by the plaintiffs as well as the leasing of office space and some other contributions Musk made.

[riku_iki]

it sounds like small amount in grand scheme of things..

[boole1854]

He doesn't have access to the GPT-4 source code and data because they decided to keep that proprietary.

[cynusx]

They will probably try to unearth that in the discovery phase

[AlwaysRock]

It's worth reading the actual filing. It's very readable.

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/mu...

[QuantumG]

It's literally the title.

[laristine]

You can sue for many reasons. For example, when a party breaks a contract, the other party can sue to compel the contract to be performed as agreed.

[otterley]

Specific performance is a last resort. In contract law, the bias is towards making the plaintiff whole, and frequently there are many ways to accomplish that (like paying money) instead of making the defendant specifically honor the terms of the original agreement.

[aCoreyJ]

Well Elon was forced to buy Twitter that way

[stubish]

How much money have competitors been spending to keep up, reproducing the technology that was supposed to be released to the public benefiting everyone. All of that could conceivably be claimed as damages. Money they should not have needed to spend.

Even all of the money spent to access ChatGPT. Because, if OpenAI had been releasing their tech to the public, the public would not have had to pay OpenAI to use it.

Or the value of OpenAI-for-profit itself could be considered damages in a class action. Because it gained that value because of technology withheld from the public, rather than releasing it and allowing the public to build the for-profit businesses around the tech.

Lots of avenues for Musk and others' lawyers to get their teeth into, especially if this initial law suit can demonstrate the fraud.

[tw600040]

that AGI, instead of benefitting the whole world, in which Musk is a part of, will end up only benefitting Microsoft, which he isn't a part of?

[WolfeReader]

This is no AGI. An AGI is supposed to be the cognitive equivalent of a human, right? The "AI" being pushed out to people these days can't even count.

[AlbertCory]

I don't think that qualifies as "standing", but IANAL.

[dmix]

"AGI"

[dragonwriter]

> Wouldn't you have to prove damages in a lawsuit like this?

Not really; the specific causes of action Musk is relying on do not turn on the existence if actual damages, and of the 10 remedies sought in the prayer for relief, only one of them includes actual damages (but some relief could be granted under it without actual damages.)

Otherwise, its seeking injuctive/equitable relief, declaratory judgement, and disgorgement of profits from unfair business practices, none of which turn on actual damages.

[delfinom]

Non-profit status is a government granted status and the government is we the people.

Abuse of non-profit status is damaging to all citizens.

[prepend]

The damages are clearly the valuation of the current organization vs the percent of original funding Musk provided.

The exact amount will be argued but it will likely be in the billions given OpenAI’s recent valuations.

[thepasswordis]

Could they just give him back the $60M or whatever?

That seems like nothing to them, or Elon.

[robbrown451]

Imagine if a regular for profit startup did that. It gets 60 million in initial funding, and later their valuation goes up to 100 billion. Of course they can't just give the 60 million back.

This is different and has a lot of complications that are basically things we've never seen before, but still, just giving the 60 million back doesn't make any sense at all. They would've never achieved what they've achieved without his 60 million.

[xcv123]

They scammed him out of tens of millions of dollars and a significant amount of his time and energy.

[TeeMassive]

I didn't read the suit, but they used (and abused?) Twitter's api to siphon data that was used to train an AI which that made them very very rich. That's just unjust enrichment. Elon's money paid for the website and using the API at that scale cost Twitter money while they got nothing out of it.