AI

Like, yes, sure, he doesn’t understand AI, but we have lots of nonprofits, which are governed by the same set of laws. Sure, yes, he’s getting $1,500 per hour from Musk and that is probably a pretty penny — likely more than my annual salary — but also... who cares. I was not overwhelmed by Schizer’s testimony but this cross isn’t doing anything to knock it down for me.

because the jury is engaged in a fact-finding mission. Anyway, of a hypothetical, he says: “You don’t want to be known as a liar.” Evidently Schizer is unfamiliar with the current president of the United States.

He’s a professor of law and economics at Columbia Law School. He specializes in nonprofits, nonprofit taxation, and management. We are going through an exhaustive list of his qualifications.

Yes. The main thing I am taking away from McCauley’s and Toner’s testimony is that the board got really bad advice from whatever lawyers they consulted on the firing Altman thing. I mean, I hope they consulted lawyers. I don’t think that’s come up in the testimony.

Increasingly I feel that the only thing happening here is Musk just trying to remind the world that Altman is untrustworthy. (Ironic!) McCauley’s testimony about the profit incentives is neither here nor there when it comes to the donations and whether any promises were made to Musk.

We are once again going over concerns about Sam Altman’s dishonesty. “Because of this pattern of lying, people in the company were copying that behavior, and there was a culture of lying and a culture of deceit,” she says.

Oh sure, Musk’s team objected and the question was withdrawn, but the OpenAI attorney said what I was thinking. Why is she here? She’s not a board member. She’s not an exec. She didn’t witness any decisions that bear on Musk’s donations. I guess the idea is that she’s testifying that OpenAI abandoned its mission? But we’ve established already that there were no known conditions on Musk’s donation yesterday, with Shivon Zilis.

Look, I’m not bought in on AGI at all, and the “AGI readiness” team getting disbanded in 2024 happened as it became clearer to everyone but the AI cultists that AGI wasn’t possible. (It was clear to some of us from the jump.) I have no idea how this is landing for the jury, but getting safe, beneficial AGI is silly if AI superintelligence isn’t possible.

She initially worked on the “applied” team, but then moved into a research team because it was “more interesting” to work on the “policy” and “AGI readiness” teams, and think about what to do in the case AGI happened. I also prefer daydreaming to actually working.

They also discussed Dario Amodei becoming CEO of OpenAI. “I thought it was an option worth considering among our set of difficult options,” Toner says.

Neither Altman or Brockman had been allowed to tell their side of the story, nor were their HR files pulled by the board. There was no input from Microsoft, or any other investors or customers. Toner smiles when she’s frustrated or annoyed, which she sometimes is by this line of questioning.

I am expecting a relatively sedate day today. We’re going to see more of former OpenAI board member Helen Toner’s deposition. Right now lawyers are discussing when the case will end; we expect closing arguments a week from today.

That’s what one actor said after a micro drama she starred in was promoted using AI clips of her in underwear. Multiple actors have had similar experiences, including ads featuring nude scenes and threesomes that they never shot. In the age of The Clippening, it doesn’t always matter if the content being clipped is real or not.

Following its acquisition by Elon’s other company, xAI is now being referred to as SpaceXAI. Presumably this is only the start of the brand synergy to come.

In its Q1 2026 investor letter, it advised analysts not to expect any contribution from Perplexity in its revenue guidance. The latter was supposed to have powered Snap’s AI search, but alas. The letter also hinted at more Specs news in June, because “intelligent eyewear” is still very much on the company’s agenda.

It was primarily because Altman was not entirely candid with the board about his interests in an OpenAI startup fund. There was also some drama about Toner’s paper, which Altman told Sutskever that another board member suggested Toner resign from the board. That board member said she’d never said it. Further, Mira Murati and Sutskever also mentioned problems. And, of course, the lack of disclosure of ChatGPT...

She says the starting point was Sutskever reaching out to have a conversation where he expressed serious concerns about Altman. It was a “pattern of behavior” that included issues with “honesty and candor” that led to the firing, not any one action. Toner has already laid out some of this in a 2024 podcast, and it’s similar to Murati’s testimony.

She wasn’t surprised she hadn’t been told, though, because “I was used to the board not being very informed about things.” She says that “caused me to believe that [Altman] was not motivated to help the board perform the oversight role.”

That means there’s no clear-cut way to test for safety. People are just throwing things together to see what happens. She refers to OpenAI’s safety board’s methods as becoming “somewhat less slapdash” over time.

In Wednesday’s annoucement of its compute partnership with Anthropic, the company formerly known as xAI referred to itself as “SpaceXAI.” It was the first time I had seen that name, and while I don’t think it’s a good one, it made some sense following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.

This should be about an hour. YGR has told the jury that if she sees them falling asleep, she’s going stop the video and have them stand and stretch.

Every time a MSFT lawyer gets up to question a witness in Musk v. Altman, it’s “And Microsoft wasn’t there?” with an occasional addition of “And Satya Nadella wasn’t there either?” This gets funnier every time it happens.

She is asked about texting Musk about the Microsoft deal with OpenAI — that the structure was not maximum profit and Microsoft was not in control. She looks at the evidence, and says she sees it there but... “it’s not in my neurons, it’s not in my brain, but I see it.” Okay.

OpenAI says it partnered with AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA on a protocol called Multipath Reliable Connection, or MRC, which “improves GPU networking performance and resilience in large training clusters.” The full spec is available through the Open Compute Project.

That’s according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Similar numbers of both Republicans and Democrats also cite data centers, which are quickly becoming a bipartisan issue, as a major reason for higher costs.

Zilis said she now recalled certain messages that she had said she didn’t recall in her deposition, saying that at this point she’d reviewed documents numerous times. Eddy said, “Your long-lost memories have since been recovered.”

Three were Tesla AI. One was OpenAI as a B-corp subsidiary of Tesla. One was Altman as anchor for TeslaAI. But my favorite? “Find a way to get Demis. Seriously…. Demis really does fanboy hard and I don’t think he’s immoral… just amoral. If he hung around E perhaps it would force him to think about humanity more.” Hassabis is really haunting these guys.

The AI startup says “dreaming” will allow Claude to review previous sessions to “find patterns and help agents self-improve.” This feature, which is rolling out in research preview, is supposed to help AI agents identify frequent mistakes, spot tasks they might converge on, and understand a team’s preferences.

as part of his push to increase Tesla’s AI presence. “Those who want to work on large scale AI research don’t currently think of Tesla, and Elon wants to change that by announcing his intention to create a world-class AI lab,” Zilis wrote in 2017.

We are seeing more details about Zilis advocating for Musk’s plan to wrap OpenAI into Tesla. “Tesla solves the funding issue immediately… Tesla at least has option to bury,” reads one email from Zilis. “They haven’t internalized the advantages to burying this in Tesla for stealth advantage,” reads another.

They didn’t want Musk — or anyone — to have control over OpenAI. “You and I can argue that’s stupid all we want but they are holding firm on it,” Zilis says in an email to Jared Birchall in September 2017.

Anthropic is doubling five-hour rate limits for many Claude Code users, removing Claude Code’s peak hours limit reduction, and significantly increasing API rate limits for Claude Opus models, starting today.