Elon Musk is suing Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, among others, alleging they abandoned the company’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”

In a lawsuit filed Thursday with a San Francisco court, Musk’s lawyers said the tech billionaire was approached in 2015 by Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and agreed to form a nonprofit lab that would develop artificial general intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.”

A co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, Musk stepped down from the firm’s board in 2018, four years after saying that AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit filing said.

Musk’s lawyers said in the lawsuit that OpenAI’s focus on maximizing profits for Microsoft breaks that agreement.

“Under its new Board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the filing said.

OpenAI and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment.

Musk’s lawyers said the suit was submitted “to compel OpenAI to adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual Defendants and the largest technology company in the world.”

Microsoft, which is facing scrutiny from EU antitrust regulators over its reported $13 billion investment in OpenAI, recently announced a new partnership with French start-up Mistral AI.

The U.S. tech giant said on Monday that it was investing in the company, which is regarded as Europe’s answer to OpenAI, to help it unlock “new commercial opportunities” and expand to global markets.

The legal action pits two of the world’s most prominent tech leaders against each other at a time of extraordinary hype over the future of AI.

Since debuting in November 2022, OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm. The AI tool quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history and kick-started the launch of rival chatbots from companies such as Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft.

Both Musk and Altman have been making headlines. Musk, considered the world’s richest person, runs electrical vehicle maker Tesla, rocket and satellite maker SpaceX, and bought X for $44 billion in October 2022. He recently reported the advances of the brain chip technology implants produced by his startup Neuralink.

Altman has meanwhile had a rocky relationship with OpenAI. He was suddenly fired from the company in November of last year, in a move that sent shock waves across the tech industry. The American entrepreneur — one of the leading figures in the AI boom — returned to the firm a few days later.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on Tuesday that search powered by artificial intelligence is the biggest thing to happen to his company in the nine years he’s been at the helm.

“I have not seen something like this since I would say 2007-2008, when the cloud was just first coming out,” Nadella told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview.

Microsoft invited reporters to its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for an event that centered around new AI-powered updates to the company’s Bing search engine and Edge browser. Bing, which is a distant second to Google in search, will now allow users to chat in a way that provides more detailed answers to queries. 

The updates to Bing and Edge will launch on Tuesday on desktop in a limited preview, meaning users will get a finite number of queries to search during the initial period.

Nadella said search is a very profitable business, so these developments reflect a big opportunity for Microsoft.

“I’ve never ever felt this liberated in terms of opportunity in the days ahead,” he told CNBC.

Microsoft’s event Tuesday follows the company’s January announcement regarding a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. The deal marks the third phase of the partnership between the two companies, after Microsoft’s previous investments in 2019 and 2021.

ChatGPT automatically generates text based on written prompts in a fashion that’s much more advanced and creative than past chatbots. The web-based tool went viral after its debut in November. Tech executives and venture capitalists gushed about it on Twitter, even comparing it to Apple’s debut of the iPhone in 2007. 

On Monday, Google announced an AI chatbot technology called Bard that will begin rolling out in the coming weeks. Bard will compete directly with ChatGPT.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended Microsoft’s Tuesday event and confirmed that Microsoft incorporated some of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 language technologies into Bing to improve its capabilities.

“I feel like I’ve been waiting for this for 20 years so I’m very happy it’s here,” Altman said during the presentation.

Nadella was promoted to CEO in 2014 after running the company’s cloud business. He presided over Microsoft’s expensive and risky move from on-premises servers to cloud infrastructure. It turned out to be a massive boon for a company that largely missed the transition to mobile computing.

Microsoft Azure, the centerpiece of the company’s cloud unit, is second to Amazon Web Services and ahead of Google in the cloud infrastructure market.

“You can only be relevant in technology if you are good enough to see the waves of change and then to reorient your technology and innovation agenda and the business model agenda,” Nadella said. “We’ve gone through some very harsh ones. The last one we went through was obviously the mobile and cloud. We caught one, we missed one.”

—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report

WATCH: Google’s AI service vs. ChatGPT

The Nasdaq just wrapped up its fifth straight week of gains, jumping 3.3% over the last five days. It’s the longest weekly winning streak for the tech-laden index since a stretch that ended in Nov. 2021. Coming off its worst year since 2008, the Nasdaq is up 15% to start 2023.

The last time tech stocks enjoyed a rally this long, investors were gearing up for electric carmaker Rivian’s blockbuster IPO, the U.S. economy was closing out its strongest year for growth since 1984 and the Nasdaq was trading at a record.

This time around, there’s far less champagne popping. Cost cuts have replaced growth on Wall Street’s checklist, and tech executives are being celebrated for efficiency over innovation. The IPO market is dead. Layoffs are abundant.

Earnings reports were the story of the week, with results landing from many of the world’s most valuable tech companies. But the numbers, for the most part, weren’t good.

Apple missed estimates for the first time since 2016, Facebook parent Meta recorded a third straight quarter of declining revenue, Google‘s core advertising business shrank and Amazon closed out its weakest year for growth in its 25-year history as a public company.

While investors had mixed reactions to the individual reports, all four stocks closed the week with solid gains, as did Microsoft, which reported earnings the prior week and issued lackluster guidance in projecting revenue growth this quarter of only about 3%.

Meta was the top performer among the group this week, with the stock soaring 23%, its third-best week ever. In its earnings report on Wednesday, revenue came in slightly above estimates, even with sales down year over year, and the first-quarter forecast was roughly inline with expectations.

The key to the rally was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pronouncement in the earnings statement that 2023 would be the “Year of Efficiency” and his promise that “we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.”

“That was really the game-changer,” said Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors, in an interview on Friday with CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“The quarter itself was OK but it was the cost-cutting that they finally got religion on, and that’s why I think Meta really took off.”

Zuckerberg acknowledged that the times are changing. From the year of its IPO in 2012 through 2021, the company grew between 22% and 58% a year. But in 2022 revenue fell 1%, and analysts expect growth of only 5% in 2023, according to Refinitiv.

On the earnings call, Zuckerberg said he doesn’t expect declines to continue, “but I also don’t think it’s going to go back to the way it was before.” Meta announced in November the elimination of 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.

Link said the reason Meta’s stock got such a big bounce after earnings was because “expectations were so low and the valuation was so compelling.” The stock lost almost two-thirds of its value last year, far more than its mega-cap peers.

Apple, which slid 27% last year, gained 6.2% this week despite reporting its steepest drop in revenue in seven years. CEO Tim Cook said results were hurt by a strong dollar, production issues in China affecting the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, and the overall macroeconomic environment. 

“Apple is navigating what is of course a very difficult environment quite well overall,” Dan Flax, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, told “Squawk Box” on Friday. “As we move through the coming months and quarters, we’ll see a return to growth and the market will begin to discount that. We continue to like the name even in the face of these macro challenges.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded Jeff Bezos in mid-2021, took the unusual step of joining the earnings call with analysts on Thursday after his company issued a weaker-than-expected forecast for the first quarter. In January, Amazon began layoffs, which are expected to result in the loss of over 18,000 jobs.

“Given this last quarter was the end of my first full year in this role and given some of the unusual parts in the economy and our business, I thought this might be a good one to join,” Jassy said on the call.

Managing expenses has become a big theme for Amazon, which expanded rapidly during the pandemic and subsequently admitted that it hired too many people during that period.

“We’re working really hard to streamline our costs,” Jassy said.

Alphabet is also in downsizing mode. The company announced last month that it’s slashing 12,000 jobs. Its revenue miss for the fourth quarter included disappointing sales at YouTube from a pullback in ad spending and weakness in the cloud division as businesses tighten their belts.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s finance chief, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that the company is meaningfully slowing the pace of hiring in an effort to deliver long-term profitable growth.

Alphabet shares ended the week up 5.4% even after giving up some of its gains during Friday’s selloff. The stock is now up 19% for the year.

Should the Nasdaq continue its upward trend and notch a sixth week of gains, it would match the longest rally since a stretch that ended in January 2020, just before the Covid pandemic hit the U.S.

Investors will now turn to earnings reports from smaller companies. Some of the names they’ll hear from next week include Pinterest, Robinhood, Affirm and Cloudflare.

Another area in tech that flourished this week was the semiconductor space. Similar to the consumer tech companies, there wasn’t much by way of growth to excite Wall Street.

AMD on Tuesday beat on sales and profit but guided analysts to a 10% year-over-year decline in revenue for the current quarter. Intel, AMD’s primary competitor, reported a disastrous quarter last week and projected a 40% decline in sales in the March quarter.

Still, AMD jumped 14% for the week and Intel rose almost 8%. Texas Instruments and Nvidia also notched nice gains.

The semiconductor industry is dealing with a glut of extra parts at PC and server makers and falling prices for components like memory and central processors. But after a miserable year in 2022, the stocks are rebounding on signs that an easing of Federal Reserve rate increases and lightening inflation numbers will give the companies a boost later this year.

WATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with Truist’s Youssef Squali

A decade ago, Twitter’s future was looking bright. The company was benefiting from a flood of funding into the social-networking space, eventually leading to an IPO in 2013 that raised $1.8 billion.

Now the company is back in private hands. And they happen to be the hands of Elon Musk, the richest person in the world and one of the app’s most high-profile provocateurs.

It’s a massive moment. Twitter has become a key place for people to debate, joke and pontificate in their own circles of politics, sports, tech and finance. It’s also served as a platform that gives voice to the voiceless, helping protesters organize and express themselves in repressed regimes around the world.

In recent years, however, Twitter and social media rivals like Facebook have been at the center of controversy over the distribution of fake news and misinformation, sometimes leading to bullying and violence.

Investors had grown concerned about Twitter as a business. The company was generally unprofitable, struggled to keep pace with Google and Facebook, and often killed popular products with no real explanation.

What follows is a brief history of Twitter, which — despite its many flaws — is one of the most iconic companies to come out of Silicon Valley in the past 20 years.

2006

In March, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams created Twitter, which was originally a side project stemming from the podcasting tool Odeo. That month, Dorsey would send the first Tweet that read, “just setting up my twttr.”

2007

In July, Twitter received a $100,000 Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures. The app’s popularity started to explode after being heavily promoted by the tech community during the annual South by Southwest conference.

2008

Dorsey stepped down as CEO in October, and was replaced by Williams. According to the book “Hatching Twitter” by journalist Nick Bilton, Twitter’s board fired Dorsey over concerns about the executive’s management style and public boastings.

2009

Twitter’s popularity continued to soar, leading to a high-profile appearance from Williams on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show alongside celebrity Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher would also write about Williams and Stone as part of Time Magazine’s Time 100 issue. Twitter was now a mainstream phenomenon.

2010

Twitter reached space, with NASA Astronaut Timothy Creamer sending the first tweet live from outer orbit. Behind the scenes, however, management woes continued with Williams stepping down as CEO, replaced by operating chief Dick Costolo.

2011

Twitter became an essential social media tool used during the Arab Spring, the wave of antigovernmental protests throughout Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Protesters used the site to post reports and to organize. As the Pew Research Center noted, Twitter’s role in “disseminating breaking news” was not “not limited to the Arab uprisings – the death of Whitney Houston, for example, was announced on Twitter 55 minutes prior to the AP confirming the story.”

2012

Twitter’s reach expanded to 200 million active users. Barack Obama used the “platform to first declare victory publicly in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, with a Tweet that was viewed approximately 25 million times on our platform and widely distributed offline in print and broadcast media,” according to corporate filings.

2013

Twitter went public in November. The combined wealth of Williams, Dorsey, and Costolo hit roughly $4 billion.

“I think we’ve got a tremendous set of thoughts and strategies to increase the slope of the growth curve,” Costolo told CNBC at the time. “I would consider some of them tactics, some of them broader strategies, in service of doing what I referred to as bridge the gap between the massive awareness of Twitter and deep engagement of the platform.”

2014

Slowing user growth led to several stock drops and analyst downgrades. Twitter also deemed 2014 the year of the “selfie.”

2015

Compared to rivals like Google, Facebook, and even LinkedIn, Twitter was starting to look like the runt of the Internet litter. Twitter was still unprofitable as its ad business struggled mightily against its larger competitors. Dorsey would also return as CEO of the company, while still maintaining the top job at his other company, Square (now Block).

2016

Rumors began circulating that Twitter was looking to be acquired, with Salesforce as a potential suitor. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook were criticized for their role in letting prominent users like Donald Trump, who would win the U.S. presidential election that year, spread misleading information without consequence.

“Having the president-elect on our service using it as a direct line of communication allows everyone to see what is on his mind in the moment,” Dorsey said at the time. “We’re definitely entering a new world where everything is on the surface and we can all see that in real time and we can have conversations about it.”

2017

For a moment, Twitter appeared to be on the upswing. Its stock was finally trending upward as the company’s finances were improving. Meanwhile, Trump as president continued to use Twitter as his megaphone. According to Twitter’s own data, “Trump was the most-tweeted-about global leader in the world and in the United States” that year, CNBC reported.

2018

Dorsey and Facebook’s then-operating chief Sheryl Sandberg testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about alleged interference by Russia-linked actors in the 2016 election. Trump and fellow Republicans became increasingly vocal about alleged political bias by Twitter and other social media sites.

“In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform,” Dorsey said at the time.

2019

Analysts found correlations between President Trump’s voracious use of Twitter and various markets, including gold, underscoring the cultural power of Twitter. Trump met with Dorsey — a Twitter spokesperson said “Jack had a constructive meeting with the President of the United States today at the president’s invitation.”

“They discussed Twitter’s commitment to protecting the health of the public conversation ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections and efforts underway to respond to the opioid crisis,” the spokesperson said.

2020

As Covid-19 spread across the globe, the spread of misinformation dominated the online conversation. And Twitter continued to struggle to grow its business. The service was also hacked that year, and miscreants gained access to over a dozen high-profile accounts, including those controlled by Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, and Musk

2021

Twitter permanently banned Trump over inflammatory comments the president made during the U.S. Capitol riots in January that the company said could lead to “further incitement of violence.” Trump would allege that Twitter workers “coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me.” Later, Dorsey suddenly stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Parag Agrawal, the company’s chief technology officer.

2022

Musk took over Twitter after a protracted legal spat that would have culminated this week in a trial in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. The Tesla CEO agreed in April to pay $44 billion for Twitter, but then attempted to renege on the deal. He changed course and opted to proceed, walking into the company’s San Francisco office on Wednesday with what appeared to be a porcelain bathroom sink in his hands.

“Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he tweeted, with a video of his entrance.

Musk immediately began making changes, firing Agrawal, finance head Ned Segal, and head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde.

WATCH: Billionaire Elon Musk steps into Twitter HQ, sink in hand

JPMorgan Chase has hired a Singapore-based quantum-computing expert to be the bank’s global head for quantum communications and cryptography, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.

Charles Lim, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, will be focused on exploring next generation computing technology in secure communications, according to the memo from Marco Pistoia, who runs the bank’s global technology applied research group.

Lim is a “recognized worldwide leader” in the area of quantum-powered communications networks, according to Pistoia.

Hired from IBM in early 2020, Pistoia has built a team at JPMorgan focused on quantum computing and other nascent technologies. Unlike today’s computers, which store information as either zeros or ones, quantum computing hinges on quantum physics. Instead of being binary, qubits can simultaneously be a combination of both zero and one, as well as any value in between.

The futuristic technology, which involves keeping hardware at super-cold temperatures and is years away from commercial use, promises the ability to solve problems far beyond the reach of today’s traditional computers. Technology giants including Alphabet and IBM are racing toward building a reliable quantum computer, and financial firms including JPMorgan and Visa are exploring possible uses for it.

“New horizons are going to become possible, things we didn’t think would be possible before,” Pistoia said in a JPMorgan podcast interview.

In finance, machine-learning algorithms will improve to help fraud detection on transactions and other areas that involve “prohibitive complexity,” including portfolio optimization and options pricing, he said.

Drug development, materials science for batteries and other areas will be transformed by the dramatically advanced computing, he added.

But if and when the advanced computing technology becomes real, the encryption techniques that underpin the world’s communications and financial networks could immediately be rendered useless. That has spurred the study of next generation quantum-resistant communication networks, which is Lim’s area of expertise.

New forms of cryptography and secure messaging are needed ahead of quantum supremacy, or the point when quantum computers are able to perform calculations beyond the scope of traditional computers in any reasonable time frame, Pistoia said during the podcast.

That could happen by the end of the decade, he said.

The quantum advantage precedes that development and could happen as soon as two or three years from now, he said. At that point the new computers are more powerful and accurate than today’s versions but they are competitive.

“Even now that quantum computers are not yet that powerful, we don’t have so much time left,” Pistoia said in the podcast. That’s because bad actors are already preserving private communications to attempt to decrypt it later when the technology allows for it, he said.

Lim will “pursue both foundational and applied research in quantum information, focusing on innovative digital solutions that will enhance the security, efficiency, and robustness of financial and banking services,” Pistoia said in the memo.

Lim is a recipient of the National Research Foundation Fellowship in Singapore and won the National Young Scientist Award in 2019 for his work in quantum cryptography, said Pistoia.

Last year, Lim was asked to lead his country’s effort to create quantum-resistant digital solutions, and he has been involved in international efforts to standardize quantum-security techniques, Pistoia added.