If it wasn’t already clear, Elon Musk and Sam Altman hate each other.
While the two men were once cofounders of OpenAI, they’re now locked in a vicious feud, playing out in all its theatrics in front of a judge and jury in a California courtroom. Musk is suing, alleging that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman tricked him into forming and funding the organization as a non-profit before they subsequently restructured it to have a for-profit entity. OpenAI says Musk was well aware of those plans and frames the lawsuit as an attempt to derail a competitor.
I know this story all too well. I’ve been reporting on OpenAI since 2019, embedding within its office for three days shortly after Musk stepped away and Altman formally took up the CEO position. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my years of following this company and the AI industry, it’s that this world breeds bitter rivalries.
It’s not a coincidence that nearly all of OpenAI’s original founders left the company under acrimonious conditions, nor that every tech billionaire has a largely identical AI company. The frenetic AI race is inseparable from the petty, clashing egos of the unfathomably rich, hellbent on dominating one another.
Indeed, if Musk were to win his bid, that could be devastating for OpenAI, especially as it prepares this year for a potential initial public offering. Musk seeks $150bn in damages from the company and one of its top investors, Microsoft. He also seeks to return OpenAI to a non-profit, to remove Altman and Brockman as leaders of the for-profit, and to boot Altman off the non-profit board.
Yet, to assume that the future of AI development will be determined by a personality contest misses the point. Yes, Brockman’s diary entries are revealing, as was former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati’s testimony about Altman pitting executives against each other, confirming my previous reporting.
But fixating on questions of whether Altman is untrustworthy, or whether Musk is even less so distracts from a far deeper problem. If OpenAI lost its footing as the AI industry frontrunner, another barely distinguishable competitor – Musk’s xAI or other – would simply replace it. That includes companies like Anthropic, who enjoy a better reputation yet engage in many similar behaviors compromising, like careful decision-making for speed, disregarding intellectual property, aggressively scaling their computing infrastructure to the detriment of communities.
Nothing about this trial or OpenAI’s financial structure will change the imperial drive of these companies to consolidate ever-more data and capital, terraform the earth, exhaust and displace labor, and embed themselves deep within the state to gain leverage over its apparatuses of violence. We would still exist in a world in which a tiny few have the profound power to cast it in their image and dictate how billions of people live.
As much as Silicon Valley would wish you to believe it, AI…
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