The first witness was sworn in today Musk vs Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised at how flat he looked.
This is not the first time I have seen Musk in court. During his defamation trial, he used charm and the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today he seemed disoriented and unprepared. The only time he showed the actual animation was when he was bragging about how much he had done for OpenAI.
Direct examination is a way of telling a story through questions; It is important to clarify the narrative. As for the lawsuit accusing Sam Altman of deviating from OpenAI’s mission, Musk spent an awkward amount of time talking about himself, recounting his biography and promoting various ventures he has made that have nothing to do with OpenAI.
“I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people. Taught them everything I knew, provided all the initial funding. Other than that, nothing.”
For example, he told jurors that he worked “between 80 and 100 hours a week”, which is how he worked so much. It’s not clear to me whether his prolific posting habits count as part of the work week. I hope the defense asks.
We finally reached OpenAI, where Musk portrayed himself as the driving force. He had been concerned about AI since childhood, and eventually realized that someone needed to stop Google from developing it. He testified that he became involved in AI security because he had a conversation with Google’s own Larry Page and asked, “What if AI wiped out all humans?” Page essentially shrugged – as far as he was concerned, as long as AI didn’t go extinct too, things were fine. “I said, ‘This is crazy,’ and they called me a speciesist for being pro-human.” This is how OpenAI was born for Musk especially To prevent Google from having too much power in AI. Petty! Musk also said that when he recruited Ilya Sutskever, then a research scientist at Google, to OpenAI, “Larry Page refused to ever talk to me again.”
What did Musk do in OpenAI? “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people. Taught them everything I knew, provided all the initial funding. Other than that, nothing.” He stopped to laugh and one or two people started laughing. But there was silence in most of the courtroom. I thought he looked irritable. “I could have started this for profit and I decided not to do that,” Musk said.
It’s hard to avoid the argument you’re expected to make without making it yourself
I wonder how much the jury is following it. We moved very quickly on a number of ideas, including “artificial general intelligence,” a hypothetical thing that many AI researchers are still afraid of. Musk defined it as when a computer becomes “as smart as any human, arguably smarter than any human.” (Large language models do not equate to intelligence, and AGI has been defined way down for quite some time. But whatever! This case is not about that!)
At another point, Musk was asked to reveal who former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis was. “Shivon, um, was my chief of staff and, uh, you know,” Musk said. A person in the gallery – presumably aware of the fact that Zilis is the mother of some of Musk’s children – laughed out loud. But the jury looked surprised.
During the discussion that would require large amounts of funding to figure out how best to achieve OpenAI, there was actually a discussion with Musk about a profitable branch of OpenAI. I think the strategy here was to make it clear that Musk’s intentions were very different from the profit intentions that came across. (It’s true! They didn’t get 55 percent equity in it, as a potential cap table suggested they should.) It all seemed pretty vague, and we got stuck into a discussion of what, in Musk’s opinion, would be a fair equity split between founders and funders; It’s hard to avoid the argument you’re expected to make without making it yourself.
This is also a kind of distraction from the core point of the trial: Did OpenAI betray its mission statement and fool Musk into making a charitable donation? I agreed with the profitable model but not that profitable model There is no strong argument.
We’ll be back with more testimony from Musk and possibly his cross-examination. If there is a clear story from the defense, this trial is effectively all but screaming. I have seen Musk’s strong performance on the stand before. His call did not come today. He may be angry at the lawsuit because he knows he is wasting his time.
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