Elon Musk dropped his lawsuit Tuesday against OpenAI, maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, a day before a state judge in San Francisco was to consider whether it should be dismissed.
The lawsuit, filed in February, had accused the artificial intelligence start-up and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of violating OpenAI’s founding agreement by prioritizing commercial interests over the public interest.
A multibillion-dollar partnership OpenAI signed with Microsoft, Mr. Musk claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s promise to carefully develop artificial intelligence and make the technology available to the public.
Mr. Musk had argued that the charter said the organization should instead focus on building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity.
OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, had asked to be fired days after Mr. Musk filed the lawsuit. He could still refile the suit in California or another state.
Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and OpenAI declined to comment.
Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and several young AI researchers. He saw the research lab as a response to the artificial intelligence work being done at the time by Google. Mr Musk believed that Google and its co-founder, Larry Page, were not adequately concerned about the dangers artificial intelligence presented to humanity.
Mr Musk parted ways with OpenAI after a power struggle in 2018. The company later became a leader in AI technology, creating ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in human prose.
Mr Musk founded his own artificial intelligence company last year called xAI, while he has repeatedly argued that OpenAI was not focused enough on the risks of the technology.
He filed his lawsuit weeks after OpenAI board members unexpectedly fired Mr. Altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission to create artificial intelligence for the good of humanity. Mr. Altman was reinstated after five days of negotiations with the board and soon consolidated his control of the company, again vying for a seat on the board.
Late last month, OpenAI announced that it had begun work on a new AI model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives ChatGPT. The company said it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it sought to build the AGI
The company also said it is creating a new Safety and Security Committee to investigate how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies.
