Elon Musk threatens tells Microsoft it is “lawsuit time”, here’s why – Times of India

From his statements and tweets, it has been quite clear that Microsoft surging ahead in the AI race hasn’t gone down well with him. More so, since he — Elon Musk — was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Now, Musk has threatened Microsoft with a lawsuit after a report emerged that the Satya Nadella-led company have stopped advertising on Twitter.
In a tweet, Musk said, “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.” They, of course, being Microsoft and he accused the company of using Twitter data to train its AI models. Musk was replying to a tweet that claimed Microsoft “drops Twitter from its advertising platform as they refuse to pay Twitter’s API fees.”

Large Language Models — the likes of ChatGPT — always need data to train them. Often this data is used from platforms like Twitter and Reddit and is quite important because it learns from them. Musk, in the past, had also raised this matter but it is only now that he has threatened to sue Microsoft.
The Twitter CEO has also said in the past that he wasn’t happy how OpenAI had turned out and that wasn’t his intention when he co-founded the company. In February 2023, when ChatGPT had created quite a rage and Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment. “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” said Musk in a tweet.
Do keep in mind that as of now Musk has just issued a threat, something he had done with Apple as well. In fact, he had threatened a “war” against Apple but the issue was resolved. Whether that’s the case with Microsoft as well remains to be seen.