Today the first witness was sworn in Musk vs. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat it appeared.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation suit, he turned on the charm and the jury acquitted him. Today he seemed adrift and unprepared. The only times he showed real animation was when he was bragging about what he did for OpenAI.
Direct examination is a way to tell a story through questions. It is important to make the narrative clear. In the lawsuit accusing Sam Altman of deviating from OpenAI’s mission, Musk spent an odd amount of time talking about himself, recounting his resume, and teasing various projects he’s done that have nothing to do with OpenAI.
“I came up with the idea, the name, and recruited the key people. I taught them everything I knew, gave them all the seed funding. And besides that, nothing.”
For example, he told jurors that he worked “80 to 100 hours a week,” which is why he got so much done. It’s unclear to me whether his prolific posting habits count as part of the work week. I hope the defense asks.
We eventually got to OpenAI, with Musk portraying himself as the driving force. He had been worried about artificial intelligence since his childhood, and finally felt that someone needed to stop Google from developing it. He testified that he became involved in AI safety because he had a conversation with Google’s Larry Page and asked, “What if AI wiped out all humans?” Page shrugged his shoulders, saying: For him, as long as AI doesn’t become extinct as well, things will be fine. “I said, ‘This is crazy,’ and he called me a speciesist for being pro-human.” And so, for Musk, OpenAI was born. especially To prevent Google from having too much power in the field of artificial intelligence. Trivial! Musk also said that after he hired Ilya Sutskever, then a research scientist at Google, at OpenAI, “Larry Page refused to ever talk to me again.”
What did Musk do at OpenAI? “I came up with the idea, the name, and recruited the key people. I taught them everything I knew, gave them all the seed funding. And besides that, nothing.” He paused to laugh, and one or two people laughed. But most of the courtroom was silent. I thought it sounded rude. “I could have started the project for profit, but I chose not to,” Musk said.
It’s hard to anticipate the argument you expect without making it yourself
I do wonder how much of this the jury follows. We’ve come across many ideas very quickly, including “artificial general intelligence,” a fantasy that many AI researchers are afraid of. Musk defined this as when a computer becomes “as smart as any human, and perhaps smarter than any other human.” (Large language models are not the same as intelligence, and AGI has been defined top-down for some time. But whatever! This case isn’t about that!)
At another point, Musk was asked to explain who former OpenAI board member Shevon Zillis is. “Shevon was my chief of staff, you know,” Musk said. One person at the show – who was supposedly aware of the fact that Zelis is the mother of a few of Musk’s children – burst into loud laughter. But the jury seemed puzzled.
During discussions about how best to obtain the massive amounts of funding the OpenAI computing company would need, there has already been discussion about creating a for-profit OpenAI arm with Musk. I think the strategy here was to make it clear that Musk’s intentions were very different from the profit being made. (That’s right! He didn’t get 55% equity in it, as one possible cap table suggested.) This all seemed pretty trivial, and we engaged in a discussion about what, in Musk’s mind, a reasonable equity split between founders and financiers would be; It’s hard to anticipate the argument you expect without making it yourself.
This is also a bit of a distraction from the main point of the experiment: Did OpenAI betray its mission statement and trick Musk into making a charitable donation? I agreed to a for-profit model but not that for-profit model Not a strong argument.
We will be back with more of Musk’s testimony and he will likely be questioned. If there was a clearer story from the defense, this trial would effectively be over except for the screaming. You’ve seen strong performances from Musk on the podium before. Today it seems he didn’t call. Maybe he’s angry about this trial because he knows he’s wasting his time.
