Shutting down Musk vs. Altman lawsuit is completely worthless, judge rules Elon Musk took too long to sue OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over alleged breach of an agreement to run OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit and later pivoted to a business model. The court ruled that Musk’s claims of “breach of charitable trust” were valid, but were outside the three-year statute of limitations; Tesla and XAI’s Musk will appeal the decision, calling it a “calendar technicality.” My takeaway from that year’s so-called technology testing is that no one leading AI can be trusted to do the right thing. I will reach out to each of them.
Here are some things. During this trial, Elon Musk testified that his own artificial intelligence (AI) startup OpenAI distilled several other AI models, including OpenAI, to create Grok. Model distillation, simply put, is using one AI model to train another model. Of course Musk didn’t say this directly. When asked if xAI distilled OpenAI’s models, Musk tried to sidestep the question by saying that “generally all AI companies” do so. When pressed further on whether this meant yes, he replied “partially”. You know what that means.
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And I just want to ask, if it was that easy then where did all the billions of dollars of funding go? xAI has raised a total of $42 billion in funding to date, including a $20 billion Series E round this January. Keep in mind, Grok is not the only product of this kind of approach. But it is quite interesting for AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that they regularly complain about Chinese AI companies tainting their models. Nevertheless, Anthropic’s own blog post on the issue states that “distillation is a widely used and legitimate training method”. Does the word incest come to mind?
Internal emails and trial evidence revealed that Microsoft, under CEO Satya Nadella, had been debating the commercial value of OpenAI since 2018. This coincided with the time when OpenAI was publicly establishing itself as a non-profit organization. There’s a strong argument to be made that when OpenAI pivoted from an open approach to a closed-door commercial entity looking to maximize profits, Microsoft understood they would benefit, and indeed benefited.
Nadella’s own testimony during this trial views Altman’s sudden firing by OpenAI in 2023 as “amateur city”. One could argue that Microsoft needed to protect its multi-billion dollar investment in an AI company, at the time organizational peace and continuity was prioritized over a major step forward for transparency with governance.
“I don’t want to be IBM and OpenAI doesn’t want to be Microsoft.”
Those were the words Microsoft and Nadella were reminded of, and in legal terms, were used by Musk’s lawyers solely to counter a common narrative that Microsoft’s investment and partnership with OpenAI is some act of corporate philanthropy. Instead, there was a realization within Microsoft that AI would represent some kind of technological change in the coming years, and a fear that Microsoft would become an outdated technology company, a hardware and software giant with extensive cloud compute infrastructure, but nothing more.
Reference? In 1980, major hardware giant IBM partnered with a small software company, Microsoft, to use the latter’s DOS operating system for IBM’s new personal computers. At that time, IBM let Microsoft retain the rights to the software and also licensed it to other computer manufacturers. Ultimately, software became more valuable than hardware – Microsoft developed rapidly, IBM could not advance that far in the computing field.
Elon Musk, the man who started this legal drama, is not without his share of inconsistencies. Never mind being difficult in court and not giving yes or no answers to questions that specifically require yes or no answers. A key finding was that Joshua Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, testified that Musk’s race against Google led to a “blatantly unsafe and reckless” approach to achieving AGI, or artificial general intelligence (a topic of discussion in AI circles). In fact, it is believed that Musk’s Tesla AI failed at this twice.
Which leads me to my AI-bro obsession with Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind. He started DeepMind as an independent startup in 2010, sold it to Google four years later, and has since put together Google’s AI Lab, which has produced some of the biggest AI breakthroughs. Testimony from OpenAI co-founder and current president Greg Brockman said Musk was “very consistent and firm” with Hassabis. This, the test tells us, led to ongoing conversations with Altman, Brockman and OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis at that time. Musk and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy also suggested bringing OpenAI under Tesla’s radar for resources and sense of urgency.
Then there’s Mira Muratti, who played both sides of Sam Altman’s ouster. First, it is believed that he provided some chats to the board in order to remove Altman. Gossip emerging from this legal wrangle seems to suggest that he also shared with Altman details of what the board was doing. She has still not come clean on her role in that removal and reinstatement.
At a time when the economic future of AI is unclear, and may be accompanied by social and human disturbances, one thing becomes very clear – some of the names the world considers important to the world of AI are hypocritical, immature, cantankerous adults with lots of money and no one to keep an eye on them, and care little about any consequences of their actions. Are these really the people who should be leading anything, let alone a random march toward AI? No surprise, public sentiment about AI is at an all-time low.
Vishal Mathur is Technology Editor at HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live our lives, and vice versa. The views expressed are personal.