Elizabeth Lopatto

I disagree! I think that’s Ilya Sutskever, frankly. Those two did the least amount of beefing on the cross-exam, it’s true. But I am against the Sutskever erasure here — not least because he impressed a number of us in the peanut gallery. I’m sorry I keep bickering with Molo in these updates but a lot of what he’s saying is profoundly arguable. Sir, I was here the whole time!

Molo agrees that OpenAI needed money for compute. He is annoyed that a “brainstorming session” is being cast as evidence that Musk wanted to abandon OpenAI’s non-profit mission.

Of OpenAI’s founding as a charity, Molo says, “If he wanted to found a for profit business there was nobody in California or the planet who would be better suited and know how to do it than Elon Musk.” xAI, Musk’s struggling AI business that was acquired by SpaceX and is facing an awful lot of lawsuits about its habit of making deepfake porn, suggests otherwise. Anthropic, for instance, does not seem to be having these problems.

Molo asks the jury to imagine they are on a hike and come across a wooden bridge over a gorge, with a river 100 feet below. It looks a little scary but “a woman standing by the entry to the bridge says, ‘Don’t worry the bridge is built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth,’” Molo says. “Would you walk across that bridge? I don’t think many people would.”

Look, this case is full of liars. It just is! The biggest problem for his side is the contemporaneous written evidence.

“Are you completely trustworthy?” was the first question, and Altman’s answer is “I believe so.” So here’s the thing. I am largely trustworthy unless you leave your french fries unattended near me. What’s the best way to answer that question under oath? “If you are a truthful person, wouldn’t you say, ‘I am absolutely trustworthy?’” Molo asks. Well, I’m truthful. That’s how you know I might eat your french fries. Come on, man.

“17 times during his testimony I had to ask him to answer the question,” Molo says. Dude, you don’t want this. If they’re considering conduct, they’re considering your client’s conduct, which was remarkably bad.

“He’s sorry he could not be here,” Molo says. He’s thumping on how important jury service is, which is never a good sign in a closing statement.

I will spare you. This should go on for 20-30 minutes, she tells us.

First there was a dongle. Then there was an attempt to move it. YGR took the opportunity to chew out Musk’s team for not consulting OpenAI about the monitor. There appeared to be no way for OpenAI to access the monitor and so it has been carried out. I am sitting next to the reporter from Wired and we are trying not to die of laughter.