But the latest AI system it announced on Monday is now closed source, and only available to customers of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Microsoft has put $US16 million ($25 million) into Mistral, which isn’t much amid the $US500 million the start-up has raised so far (it’s valued at about $US2 billion), but significant enough to catch the attention of antitrust regulators.

If they’re worried that small investment could turn into something bigger, it’s because that’s what happened with OpenAI. Microsoft’s original $US1 billion investment in the company eventually turned into a $US13 billion 49 per cent stake in the firm. And OpenAI’s capitulation to a tech giant is at the heart of Musk’s complaint.

Musk founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 to distribute AI’s benefits to humanity in a way that was transparent, open and would help the world become “more abundant… every year”, according to Altman.

But over the years, OpenAI became more secretive, its corporate structure more convoluted (just look at the number of company names listed on the court filing below), and Microsoft became the clear recipient of that abundance. AI products were on track to become “the fastest growing $US10 billion business in our history,” Microsoft’s chief financial officer said last year.

Google’s AI division DeepMind took a similar road. It was founded 14 years ago to build powerful AI that would cure cancer and stop climate change, and for years its website said in bold letters that it built AI to “advance science and benefit humanity”. Then it sold itself to Google in 2015 and, in the heat of the recent generative AI arms race, changed its homepage to tout “transformative products” such as Gemini.

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Goals of curing disease and making everybody richer appear to have been overshadowed by a focus on enhancing the products of tech giants that could, ironically enough, put many people out of work.

Start-ups such as Mistral are pulled in this direction because building more capable AI systems requires enormous amounts of computing power, which only the world’s largest tech companies have steady access to. A spokeswoman for Mistral said its partnership would “not lead to compromises on openness”.

You could argue this is a rite of passage for start-ups. They set out to make the world a better place, then go public or get acquired and water down those ideals. But the stakes are higher with artificial intelligence systems that are being woven into all facets of life. (Just one example: British lawmakers are using generative AI to summarise feedback they receive from the public.)

Tools being widely used for critical decisions shouldn’t be controlled by an opaque oligopoly. It’d be disappointing if Mistral eventually shifted toward this status quo too.

If Musk’s lawsuit has any effect, it should be in forcing AI companies to be honest about their intentions as they evolve. His suit points out that Altman created a non-profit board at OpenAI that could fire him if he wasn’t trying to benefit humanity any more. They did.

Then Altman returned and removed some of the board members who fired him. That was a good move for OpenAI’s business but a betrayal of its supposedly benevolent goals. The emperor was wearing no clothes, and Musk was right to call him out.

Bloomberg

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