Sam · TechCrunch AI
On the stand, Elon Musk can’t escape his own tweets
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Elon Musk came to a California federal court on Wednesday to argue that Sam Altman and his co-founders “stole a charity.” He left having admitted, under oath, that Tesla is not currently pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI)— directly contradicting a tweet he’d posted weeks earlier.
Key facts
- Musk was also asked about a post where he claimed to have invested $100 million in OpenAI, rather than the $38 million that changed hands
- Musk testified that he had discussed converting the company to a for-profit as early as 2016, and that in 2017, he had explored creating a for-profit arm of OpenAI where he would hold most the equity
- In Musk’s telling, when he co-founded the lab with Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others, he trusted them to build AI for humanity, but over time became suspicious of their motives, and finally concluded that they were “looting the nonprofit
- Another conversation focused on his efforts to hire OpenAI leaders when he left the board in 2018, including Andrej Karpathy, who departed OpenAI to lead self-driving work at Tesla
Summary
The lawsuit he filed challenging the structure of OpenAI alleges Altman and the other co-founders tricked him into backing a non-profit, then launched the frontier lab’s for-profit arm and let it come to dominate the organization. After an occasionally testy Musk testified for hours, it appears the case may come down to how much of a distinction jurors and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers make between investors in OpenAI having their potential profit capped or not.
OpenAI’s lawyer William Savitt sought to complicate that story during cross-examination, trying to show that Musk had supported a variety of efforts to transition OpenAI toward for-profit status so it could raise the funds necessary to compete with firms like Google, including incorporating the AI lab into Tesla.