Elon Musk has moved to withdraw his lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the business abandoned its primary objective of building artificial intelligence for humanity’s benefit.
Musk’s decision to withdraw the complaint, which was filed in a California state court in February (case number CGC24612746), comes just one day before a scheduled hearing where the judge would have considered OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the case.
It also comes one day after Musk threatened to ban Apple devices from his firms if the company integrated OpenAI’s technology into the iPhone and Mac “at the OS level,” among other odd threats.
OpenAI argued that Mr Musk had previously supported the notion of a for-profit structure, even proposing a combination with his electric vehicle company Tesla.
The feud heated up earlier this week when Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to improve its Siri voice assistant and operating systems using OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
Following the news, Mr Musk took to his social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, to criticize the partnership.
One of the posts concluded with the phrase “Apple has no idea what’s going on once they hand over your data to OpenAI.” “They are selling you down the river.”
Musk had used much of the 35-page complaint (plus attached exhibits) he filed in March to remind the world of his role in the formation of a company that has since become one of the world’s hottest startups (OpenAI ranked first on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2023), thanks in large part to the viral spread of ChatGPT.
“It’s certainly a good advertisement for the benefit of Elon Musk,” Kevin O’Brien, a partner at Ford O’Brien Landy LLP and former assistant US attorney, told CNBC at the time. “I’m not sure about the legal part though.”
Musk formed his own AI startup, xAI, last year, and it developed the Grok AI chatbot, which is included with an X Premium subscription. The business has since received $6 billion from investors to fund the expensive chips required to power its AI system. Last week, CNBC reported on documents indicating that Musk diverted thousands of Nvidia H100 AI chips intended for Tesla and had them delivered to X.