OpenAI, an AI-based research and development organisation co-founded by Sam Altman, is now being threatened with a lawsuit. Anthony Trupia has filed a lawsuit against Altman and several other stakeholders of OpenAI, including Reid Hoffman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, Microsoft Corporation, Sequoia Capital, and Bedrock Capital Partners, to name a few.
Trupia claims that OpenAI has been running a fraudulent non-profit entity under the banner of “the benefit of all humanity”. He further accused OpenAI of using the same technology for personal gain and in doing so, violating federal law.
Anthony Trupia, who goes by the username “The Short Straw” on Twitter, has alleged that OpenAI is not benefitting the entire human race as the non-profit entity claims to, even though Altman has acknowledged the ethical implications of OpenAI’s models. Trupia has accused OpenAI of commingling resources of the non-profit institution with its for-profit arm, which is a violation of federal law.
The conversation around the lawsuit is now driving the conversation on the ethical practices of OpenAI. OpenAI has been earlier accused of trademarking ‘GPT’ for restricting anyone from naming products and also for a compatibility issue that resulted in a six-month suspension of giant AI experiments.
The lawsuit also highlights the point whether OpenAI is really building AI that is beneficial for all humanity, or just for its beneficiaries. It is certain that the intentions of the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, are highly questionable.
About OpenAI
OpenAI was established in 2015 with the mission of ‘promoting beneficial artificial general intelligence’ with research into artificial intelligence, deep learning, and natural language processing. It has received investments from tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and has 270 employees at present.
About Sam Altman
Sam Altman is the Co-Founder and CEO of OpenAI and was previously the President of Y Combinator. He has worked in building startups over the last fourteen years and is an influential figure when it comes to advocating for the ethical, responsible use of advanced AI. Altman is currently the Chairman of Y Combinator Research, OpenAI, and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research.
