Elon suing OpenAI is pure hypocrisy and everyone's missing the point
Elon is suing OpenAI for "abandoning its mission to benefit humanity" and I'm honestly shocked more people aren't calling out how ridiculous this is.
This is the same guy who wanted majority control and tried to merge OpenAI with Tesla. When the board said no, he rage quit and took his funding with him. Now that they're actually successful and worth billions, suddenly he cares about the mission again?
The "non-profit turned evil corporation" narrative is convenient, but OpenAI was always going to need serious money. You can't train frontier models on good intentions. The compute costs alone are insane. They created a capped-profit structure specifically to balance the mission with reality.
And yeah, the Microsoft partnership changed things. But pretending Elon would've kept it pure is laughable. He's literally building his own competing AI at xAI while suing his former company. If that's not the definition of sour grapes, I don't know what is.
What really gets me is the timing. OpenAI releases GPT-4, becomes the fastest growing product ever, and suddenly Elon files suit claiming they breached their founding agreement. An agreement he walked away from years ago when he couldn't have full control.
The lawsuit won't go anywhere legally, but it's already winning in the court of public opinion. People love a "David vs Goliath gone wrong" story, even when David is a multi-billionaire with his own AI company.
Am I completely off base here, or is this lawsuit just Elon being Elon and trying to kneecap a competitor?