Continued Musk under questioning, saying “ I chose not to. I chose to create something that would be a charity, and I could have absolutely created -- just like I created my other company -- and I would have owned a huge portion of the company.”
Elon Musk is going over emails from the evidence, saying that “everyone was in complete agreement” that fundamentally, OpenAI would be a charity.
The day after opening up its relationship with Microsoft and Azure, OpenAI announced an expanded deal with Amazon that brings its latest AI models, Codex, and other tools to AWS.
Ben Thompson interviewed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman and said it seems clear that “OpenAI’s focus is going to be on AWS,” particularly with an eye toward the new Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents setup.
Elon is going to take the stand; stay tuned. The jury is re-entering the courtroom after listening to arguments from OpenAI and Microsoft, then taking a short break.
According to Microsoft’s lawyer Russell Cohen, making his opening argument in Musk v. Altman, saying that each round of funding (including across the events of November 2023) provided more resources, which produced better research and better models that justified further investment.
Similar to Savitt, Cohen closed by saying that Musk only raised claims about the deal after ChatGPT and OpenAI became successful, and he launched xAI as a competitor.
Following the opening argument by Altman’s lawyer, Russell Cohen began Microsoft’s argument. According to Cohen, the dispute has little to do with Microsoft (which just relaxed its arrangement with OpenAI).
His version of events is that OpenAI came to Microsoft because it needed a massive investment to pursue its research, Microsoft wasn’t there when Musk was donating to the project, and no one, Musk or anyone else, claimed there were any conditions preventing Microsoft from investing.
As Savitt wrapped up his opening argument, he leaned on saying that Musk’s lawsuit came after the statute of limitations, and “sat on his claims for years.” The sour grapes only kicked in once it turned out that OpenAI was valuable.
According to Altman’s lawyer, William Savitt. Continuing his opening argument, Savitt brought up an email from OpenAI scientist Ilya Sutskever around the time Musk’s quarterly donations ended.
It said, “The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI,” which apparently upset Musk to the point that he “literally” grabbed his stuff and stormed out.
According to Savitt, once Brockman and Ilya Sutskever built an AI model capable of besting DOTA 2 players in 2017 and realized the importance of compute, they held dozens of meetings that included Musk, Jared Birchall (CEO of Neuralink and Musk’s long-time wealth manager), and Shivon Zilis (you know), about how to structure OpenAI for-profit.
William Savitt, who is representing Sam Altman, continued his opening argument, saying that Musk only started to care about supposedly broken promises by Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman once he became a competitor. “The only person who claims to have heard those promises is Mr. Musk himself.”