Musk v. Altman proved that AI is led by the wrong people

The tech trial of the year, Musk v. Altman , was ultimately a fight for control. Elon Musk argued that Sam Altman, with whom he helped found the now-massive company OpenAI, shouldn’t direct the future of AI.

Altman’s lawyers, in turn, poked at Musk’s own credibility. A jury came to a verdict on Monday after just two hours of deliberation, dismissing Musk’s claims due to the statute of limitations. In a strictly legal sense, three weeks of testimony added up to nothing. But the trial offered a more damning broader takeaway: Almost nobody in this saga seems worth trusting . Some of the most powerful people in tech seem temperamentally incapable of dealing with each other honestly. And if that’s true, it raises a bigger question: Why are they in control of a trillion-dollar industry that’s set to upend people’s lives? OpenAI was, in the testimony of both Musk and Altman, founded to stop powerful AI from being owned and advanced by the wrong people. Testimony and evidence showed its founding team fretting about who would control artificial general intelligence (AGI), a buzzword for AI that broadly equals or surpasses human knowledge and ability. They deeply feared Google DeepMind and its leader, Demis Hassabis. In 2015, Altman said he’d been mulling over whether anything could “stop humanity from developing AI” — and after concluding it was impossible, that he wanted “someone other than google to do it first.” Fellow cofounders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever so strongly opposed one-person control that they seemed willing to torpedo a lucrative deal that could — in their words — give Musk an “AI dictatorship.” In a part of the same email addressed to Altman, Brockman and Sutskever questioned his motivations, writing, “We haven’t been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process … Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals?” These concerns would be quickly borne out . Altman was “the blip,” a five-day period in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board removed Altman as CEO.

Key points

• Altman’s lawyers, in turn, poked at Musk’s own credibility.
• A jury came to a verdict on Monday after just two hours of deliberation, dismissing Musk’s claims due to the statute of limitations.
• In a strictly legal sense, three weeks of testimony added up to nothing.
• But the trial offered a more damning broader takeaway: Almost nobody in this saga seems worth trusting .
• Some of the most powerful people in tech seem temperamentally incapable of dealing with each other honestly.