The Wild Claim at the Heart of Elon Musk's OpenAI Lawsuit

Elon Musk started the week by posting testily on X about his struggles to set up a new laptop running Windows. He ended it by filing a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of recklessly developing human-level AI and handing it over to Microsoft. Musk's lawsuit is filed against OpenAI and two of its executives, CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman, both of whom worked with the rocket and car entrepreneur to found the company in 2015. A large part of the case pivots around a bold and questionable technical claim: That OpenAI has developed so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a term generally used to refer to machines that can comprehensively match or outsmart humans. The case claims that Altman and Brockman have breached the original "Founding Agreement" for OpenAI worked out with Musk, which it says pledged the company to develop AGI openly and "for the benefit of humanity. Musk's suit alleges that the for-profit arm of the company, established in 2019 after he parted ways with OpenAI, has instead created AGI without proper transparency and licensed it to Microsoft, which has invested billions into the company. It demands that OpenAI be forced to release its technology openly and that it be barred from using it to financially benefit Microsoft, Altman, or Brockman. "On information and belief, GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm," the lawsuit states, referring to the large language model that sits behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. It cites studies that found the system can get a passing grade on the Uniform Bar Exam and other standard tests as proof that it has surpassed some fundamental human abilities. "GPT-4 is not just capable of reasoning.