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Elon Musk filed a lawsuit last week against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman,

alleging the companies deal with Microsoft compromised the startup's original mission.

Musk is seeking disgorgement, additional unspecified damages and specific performance.

The lawsuit is quite interesting for a number of reasons, most of which relate to the unusual

corporate structure of OpenAI, which was founded as a tax-exempt non-profit,

later establishing a holding company that allowed it to take money from investors in a capped-profit subsidiary.

The investors in the capped-profit subsidiary are not entitled to board seats as they would

be in a normal corporation and the profits return to investors are capped at 100 times the

amount investors initially put in, which many would view as a decent return on investment, but it is still a cap to return.

Investors in the for-profit subsidiary were amusingly warned when investing.

It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global LLC in the spirit of a donation with the understanding that it may be difficult

to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.

This is quite unusual.

In essence, this is a breach of contract lawsuit, but surprisingly no actual contract appears to exist, which can

make things complicated. The fact that the lawsuit was filed in California is also surprising

as it names eight Delaware registered corporate entities as defendants, and so you would expect

a suit to be filed in Delaware.

The fact that it's not probably relates to Musk's anger with the Delaware court system.

Musk's lawsuit asks the court for judicial determination that OpenAI's GPT4 software constitutes artificial general intelligence or AGI.

There is of course no legal definition for artificial general intelligence which might make this difficult.

The suit requests trial by jury which means that a jury would be expected to decide on this topic

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