Musk vs. OpenAI: "Not okay to steal a charity"

In the highly publicized legal dispute between Elon Musk and the leadership of OpenAI, the billionaire has reiterated his accusation that the AI company's actions would set a dangerous precedent. “It is not okay to steal a charity; that’s my view,” Bloomberg quotes one of Musk's statements from Tuesday's questioning. If OpenAI's departure from non-profit operations is approved, it will “become precedent to looting every charity in America,” he reportedly claimed further. Otherwise, the focus was mainly on Musk's version of OpenAI's founding story and AI concepts like AGI, or “Artificial General Intelligence.” He is scheduled to be questioned further on Wednesday.

OpenAI positioned against Google

According to the summaries, Musk spent most of his initial testimony talking about his journey to the US and his company foundations. When it came to OpenAI, he claimed to have been the driving force behind the AI lab's founding, in response to a conversation with Google founder Larry Page. When asked if AI could destroy humanity, Page had merely shrugged his shoulders, and for him, only the survival of AI mattered, The Verge quotes. That was crazy, Musk reportedly said, and “He called me a species-ist for being pro-human.” According to this version, OpenAI was therefore specifically founded to prevent Google from gaining too much power in AI development.

Musk reportedly had a decisive influence on the creation of OpenAI: “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people. Taught them everything I know and provided all the initial funding. Besides that, nothing.” He could have founded the lab with a profit motive but deliberately did not, The Verge further quotes him. Later, however, he admitted that there were indeed discussions about a profit motive even then, just under different conditions than those realized later. Musk thus seems to want to convince the court that he would have agreed to a transformation, just not the one that occurred after his departure.

In the proceedings (Case No. 4:24-cv-04722), the case concerns a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against his former business partners two years ago. The billionaire was on the board of OpenAI for three years but resigned before the AI company triggered the current AI hype with ChatGPT and later founded a for-profit subsidiary. He accuses those responsible of violating the founding agreement, which stipulated that OpenAI would develop a so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity and not for the profit maximization of individuals. AGI is defined as an AI system that can understand and perform any intellectual task like a human.

High-profile statements expected

The presiding judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, had also urged Musk and the opposing side, represented by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, president of the AI company, not to post too much on social media, Bloomberg reports. All three reportedly agreed to this. According to the news agency AP, not only are the two expected to testify, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is also reportedly scheduled to appear in court. Musk is expected to be questioned by the defense on Wednesday. Incidentally, he also claimed in court that he works 80 to 100 hours a week, takes no holidays, and owns neither holiday homes nor yachts.

(mho)