Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you from beneath a cherry blossom tree in Prospect Park in New York City. Spring has arrived!
Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court fight could have been a major moment for AI safety
Monday marked the start of a major trial pitting Sam Altman against his OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, who is suing the maker of ChatGPT for breach of contract.
Musk alleges that Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, broke the company’s founding agreement by restructuring and converting much of it to a for-profit enterprise. Altman and OpenAI counter that Musk, who left the firm in 2018 amid internal disputes and has since started his own rival AI business, xAI, is essentially a sore loser. Musk is seeking a range of remedies that include the removal of Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman and more than $134bn in damages, which Musk says would be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm. The company has denied Musk’s allegations.
The case, which pits the world’s richest man against the creator of the world’s most famous chatbot, in theory could pose consequential questions: what incentives should AI be oriented towards, benefiting humanity or making money? What does a responsible, maximally beneficial version of AI technology look like? What happened to OpenAI’s stated mission of benefiting humanity?
But the case is not posing that question. Instead, it’s a fight dominated by personal pettiness and specific bitterness, motivated by money and personal grievance.
Musk is no messenger for AI safety. His company’s chatbot Grok was the centerpiece of one of the most disturbing failures of generative AI to date: thousands of people used it to undress real women and underage girls via X, the social network Musk owns. xAI, the artificial intelligence arm of SpaceX as of February, has also been accused of negligently polluting its surrounding community with giant data centers. Why should we believe he would reorient OpenAI towards humanity’s collective benefit? He doesn’t lead xAI that way.
If Musk wins, he will kneecap a rival AI company. Without its for-profit arm, OpenAI will face difficulty attracting the level of investment it needs to compete in the AI race. If Altman and Brockman win, they can move forward with his for-profit enterprise as before. As Brockman wrote in his diary in 2017, which was made public during discovery: “It would be nice to be making the billions.” Perhaps his wish will be granted after the trial, and he will have pulled off a feat of corporate subterfuge that has made him and Altman billionaires. Neither that outcome nor Musk’s victory seems promising for an AI industry aligned less with monetary incentives and more with humanity’s collective betterment.
“Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty…
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