Muskas sustiprino kaltinimus „OpenAI“, „Microsoft“

 „Elonas Muskas eskalavo jo teisinę nesantaiką su OpenAI ir Microsoft, teigdamas, kad bendrovės susitarė, kad pašalintų konkurenciją, siekdamos dominuoti dirbtinio intelekto plėtroje.

 

 Ketvirtadienio vakarą San Francisko teisme pateiktame pakeistame ieškinyje Muskas pareiškė naujus antimonopolinius ieškinius OpenAI, ChatGPT kūrėjui, kurį jis padėjo įkurti, ir įtraukė į kaltinamuosius „Microsoft“ bei rizikos kapitalistą Reidą Hoffmaną.

 

 Muskas taip pat apkaltino „OpenAI“ generalinį direktorių Samą Altmaną „tik jam naudingus sandorius OpenAI sąskaita“ sandoriuose tarp OpenAI ir kitų kompanijų, kuriose dalyvauja Altmanas, ir pastūmėjus OpenAI „de facto susijungti“ su „Microsoft“ – tokią frazę ieškinys kartoja septynis kartus.

 

 Naujasis skundas yra naujausias iš daugybės teisinių priemonių, kurias Muskas šiais metais paskelbė prieš OpenAI. Ankstesniame skunde, pateiktame vasario mėnesį, teigiama, kad OpenAI ir Altmanas sulaužė dirbtinio intelekto įmonės steigimo sutartį, suteikdami pirmenybę pelnui, o ne naudai žmonijai. 

 

Tame 46 puslapių skunde Muskas tvirtino, kad glaudūs „OpenAI“ santykiai su technologijų milžine „Microsoft“ prieštarauja pradiniam bendrovės įsipareigojimui naudoti viešąjį atvirojo kodo dirbtinį intelektą (AI).

 

 Birželį be paaiškinimų atsiėmęs pradinį ieškinį, Muskas rugpjūtį jį atgaivino, pridėdamas naujų pretenzijų dėl nesąžiningos verslo praktikos ir kaltinimų, kad jis buvo manipuliuojamas, manydamas, kad dirbtinio intelekto įmonė, kurią jis padėjo įkurti, bus, ne pelno siekianti.

 

 Jis teigė, kad „OpenAI“ iš jo išviliojo daugiau, nei 44 milijonus dolerių, kuriuos, jo teigimu, paaukojo bendrovei 2016–2020 m. Čia  „OpenAI“ pasinaudojo „Musko gerai žinomu susirūpinimu dėl egzistencinės žalos“, kurią kelia pažangus dirbtinis bendrasis intelektas arba AGI, dažnai apibrėžiamas. kaip AI, kuri gerokai viršija žmogaus lygį.

 

 „Trečias Elono bandymas per mažiau, nei metus, perfrazuoti savo teiginius yra dar labiau nepagrįstas ir per daug toli siekiantis, nei ankstesni“, – penktadienį sakė „OpenAI“ atstovas.

 

 „Microsoft“, kuri pirmą kartą investavo į „OpenAI“ 2019 m., praėjusiais metais sustiprino partnerystę. Ji investavo 13 milijardų JAV dolerių mainais į tai, kas iš tikrųjų sudaro 49 %, OpenAI pelno siekiančios, grupės pajamų. Hoffmanas yra „Microsoft“ valdybos narys ir anksčiau buvo „OpenAI“ valdybos narys.

 

 Muskas praėjusiais metais įkūrė savo AI įmonę, pavadintą xAI. Bendrovė išleido AI pokalbių robotą ir stengiasi parengti daugiau AI modelių, statydama didžiulį naują duomenų centrą Tenesyje, kurį pavadino Colossus.

 

 Naujai pakeistame, ieškinyje Muskas kaltina Altmaną ir kitus kaltinamuosius meluojant donorams, rinkoms, reguliavimo institucijoms ir visuomenei.

 

 Jis taip pat kaltina „OpenAI“ ir „Microsoft“ antikonkurenciniu elgesiu, atgrasant investuotojus per naujausią 6,6 mlrd. dolerių finansavimo etapą investuoti į konkurentus, įskaitant xAI.

 

 „Microsoft ir OpenAI, matyt, nepatenkintos savo monopolija generatyvaus dirbtinio intelekto srityje, dabar aktyviai bando pašalinti konkurentus, tokius, kaip xAI, gaudamos investuotojų pažadus jų nefinansuoti“, – sakoma skunde.

 

 „Microsoft“ ir Hoffmanas neatsakė į prašymus komentuoti.

 

 Atsakydami į pradinį ieškinį kovo mėn., Altmanas ir „OpenAI“ vyriausiasis strategijos pareigūnas Jasonas Kwonas išsiuntė el. laiškus darbuotojams, sakydami, kad dėl įmonės sėkmės ji tapo ieškinių ir reguliavimo tyrimų taikiniu.

 

 „Manome, kad kaltinimai šiame ieškinyje gali kilti dėl Elono apgailestavimo, kad šiandien jis nebuvo susijęs su bendrove“, – rašė Kwonas atmintinėje, kurią tuo metu peržiūrėjo „The Wall Street Journal“.

 

 OpenAI valdo ne pelno valdyba, kuri kontroliuoja pelno siekiančią įmonę, tačiau ji pradėjo pertvarkymo į pelno bendrovę procesą.

 

 „News Corp“, „The Wall Street Journal“ ir „Dow Jones Newswires“ savininkas, bendradarbiauja su „OpenAI“ turinio licencijavimo srityje." [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Musk Steps Up Feud With OpenAI, Microsoft --- Billionaire accuses ChatGPT maker of anticompetitive behavior in new filing. Vipers, Gareth; Schechner, Sam.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Nov 2024: B.10. 

Musk Steps Up Feud With OpenAI, Microsoft

"Elon Musk escalated his legal feud with OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the companies colluded to eliminate competition in an attempt to dominate the development of artificial intelligence.

In an amended lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court late Thursday, Musk made fresh antitrust claims against OpenAI, the ChatGPT creator he helped found, and added Microsoft and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman as defendants.

Musk also accused OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman of "rampant self-dealing" between OpenAI and other companies in which Altman is involved, and of pushing OpenAI into "a de facto merger" with Microsoft -- a phrase the suit repeats seven times.

The new complaint is the latest in a series of legal salvos that Musk has launched against OpenAI this year. An earlier complaint, filed in February, alleges OpenAI and Altman broke the artificial-intelligence company's founding agreement by giving priority to profit over benefits to humanity. In that 46-page complaint, Musk claimed that OpenAI's close relationship with tech giant Microsoft goes against the company's original commitment to public, open-source AI.

After withdrawing that original suit without explanation in June, Musk revived it in August adding new claims of unfair business practices and allegations that he was manipulated into believing that the AI company he was helping launch would be a nonprofit.

He argued that OpenAI effectively defrauded him out of more than $44 million he says he donated to the company between 2016 and 2020 by preying on his "well-known concerns about the existential harms" posed by advanced artificial general intelligence, or AGI, often defined as AI that broadly exceeds human-level.

"Elon's third attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims is even more baseless and overreaching than the previous ones," an OpenAI spokesman said Friday.

Microsoft, which first invested in OpenAI in 2019, ramped up the partnership last year. It invested $13 billion in exchange for what is effectively a 49% stake in the earnings of OpenAI's for-profit arm. Hoffman serves as a member of Microsoft's board and was previously on the board of OpenAI.

Musk founded his own AI company called xAI last year. The company has released an AI chatbot and is pushing to train more AI models, building a massive new data center in Tennessee that it has dubbed Colossus.

In the newly amended suit, Musk accuses Altman and the other defendants of lying to donors, markets, regulators and the public.

He also accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by discouraging investors in its latest $6.6 billion funding round from investing in competitors, including xAI.

"Microsoft and OpenAI, apparently unsatisfied with their monopoly, or near so, in generative artificial intelligence are now actively trying to eliminate competitors, such as xAI, by extracting promises from investors not to fund them," the complaint says.

Microsoft and Hoffman didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

In response to the original suit in March, Altman and OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon sent emails to staff saying the company's success made it a target for lawsuits and regulatory inquiries.

"We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon's regrets about not being involved with the company today," Kwon wrote in a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal at the time.

OpenAI is governed by a nonprofit board, which controls the for-profit entity, but it has started the process of converting to a for-profit company.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI." [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Musk Steps Up Feud With OpenAI, Microsoft --- Billionaire accuses ChatGPT maker of anticompetitive behavior in new filing. Vipers, Gareth; Schechner, Sam.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Nov 2024: B.10. 

 

A Powerful AI Breakthrough Is About to Transform the World --- The technology driving ChatGPT is capable of so much more

"The AI revolution is about to spread way beyond chatbots.

From new plastic-eating bacteria and cancer cures to autonomous helper robots and self-driving cars, the generative-AI technology that gained prominence as the engine of ChatGPT is poised to change our lives in ways that make talking bots look like mere distractions.

While we tend to equate the current artificial-intelligence boom with computers that can write, talk, code and make pictures, most of those forms of expression are built on an underlying technology called a "transformer" that has far broader applications.

First announced in a 2017 paper from Google researchers, transformers are a kind of AI algorithm that lets computers understand the underlying structure of any heap of data -- be it words, driving data, or the amino acids in a protein -- so that it can generate its own similar output.

The transformer paved the way for OpenAI to launch ChatGPT two years ago, and a range of companies are now working on how to use the innovation in new ways, from Waymo and its robot taxis to a biology startup called EvolutionaryScale, whose AI systems are designing new protein molecules.

The applications of this breakthrough are so broad that in the seven years since the Google research was published, it has been cited in other scientific papers more than 140,000 times.

Modern AI has long been good at recognizing patterns in information. But previous approaches put serious limits on what more it could do. With language, for example, most AI systems could only process words one at a time, and evaluate them only in the sequence they were read, which limited their ability to understand what those words meant.

The Google researchers who wrote that seminal 2017 paper were focused on the process of translating languages. They realized that an AI system that could digest all the words in a piece of writing, and put more weight on the meanings of some words than others -- in other words, read in context -- could make much better translations.

For example, in the sentence "I arrived at the bank after crossing the river," a transformer-based AI that knows the sentence ends in "river" instead of "road" can translate "bank" as a stretch of land, not a place to put your money.

That level of contextual understanding enables transformer-based AI systems to not only recognize patterns, but predict what could plausibly come next -- and thus generate their own new information. And that ability can extend to data other than words.

"In a sense, the models are discovering the latent structure of the data," says Alexander Rives, chief scientist of EvolutionaryScale, which he co-founded last year after working on AI for Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook.

EvolutionaryScale is training its AI on the published sequences of every protein the company's researchers can get their hands on. Using that data, and with no assistance from human engineers, his AI is able to determine the relationship between a given sequence of molecular building blocks, and how the protein that it creates functions in the world.

Earlier research related to this topic, which was more focused on the structure of proteins rather than their function, is the reason that Google AI chief Demis Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The system he and his team developed, called AlphaFold, is also based on transformers.

Already, EvolutionaryScale has created one proof-of-concept molecule. It's a protein that functions like the one that makes some jellyfish light up, but its AI-invented sequence is radically different than anything nature has yet to invent.

The company's eventual goal is to enable all sorts of companies -- from pharmaceutical makers producing new drugs to synthetic chemistry companies working on new enzymes -- to come up with substances that would be impossible without their technology. That could include bacteria equipped with novel enzymes that could digest plastic, or new drugs tailored to individuals' particular cancers.

Meanwhile, Karol Hausman's goal is to create a universal AI that can power any robot. Hausman's San Francisco-based startup, Physical Intelligence, is less than a year old, and Hausman himself used to work at Google's AI wing, DeepMind. His company starts with a variant of the same large language model you use when you access ChatGPT. The newest of these language models also incorporate and can work with images. They are key to how Hausman's robots operate.

In a recent demonstration, a Physical Intelligence-powered pair of robot arms does what is, believe it or not, one of the hardest tasks in all of robotics: folding laundry. Clothes can take on any shape, and require surprising flexibility and dexterity to handle, so roboticists can't script the sequence of actions that will tell a robot exactly how to move its limbs to retrieve and fold laundry.

Physical Intelligence's system can remove clothes from a dryer and neatly fold them using a system that learned how to do this task on its own, with no input from humans other than a mountain of data for it to digest. That demonstration, and others like it, was impressive enough that earlier this month the company raised $400 million from investors including Jeff Bezos and OpenAI.

In October, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced they're pursuing a similar transformer-based strategy to create robot brains that can take in vast amounts of data from a variety of sources, and then operate flexibly in a wide range of environments. In one instance, they made several films of a regular robotic arm putting dog food into a bowl, then used the videos to train a separate AI-powered robot to do the same.

As in robotics, researchers and companies working on self-driving cars are figuring out how to use transformer-based "visual language models" that can take in and connect not just language but images too. California-based Nuro and London-based Wayve, as well as Waymo, owned by Google's parent company, are among the companies working with these models.

This is a departure from pre-transformer approaches to self-driving, which used a mix of human-written instructions and older types of AI to process sensor data to identify objects on the road. The new transformer-based models are essentially a shortcut to giving self-driving systems the kind of general knowledge about the world that was previously very difficult to grant them.

Powerful as they can be, these systems still have limits and unpredictability that mean they won't be able to completely automate people's jobs, says Dettmer.

The AI at the heart of EvolutionaryScale, for example, can suggest new molecules for humans to try in the lab, but humans still have to synthesize and test them. 

And transformer-based models are far from reliable enough to take over driving completely.

Physical Intelligence's system that taught itself to fold laundry would have to relearn that process in a way that's specific to your home before it can take over the job from you. That would require a huge amount of engineers' time, as well as money to train the model.

"I want to make sure I set expectations," says Hausman, the CEO. "As proud as we are of our accomplishment, we are still at the beginning."" [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Keywords: A Powerful AI Breakthrough Is About to Transform the World --- The technology driving ChatGPT is capable of so much more. Mims, Christopher.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Nov 2024: B.2.