I was closing the debate today musk vs altman test, and I almost feel bad writing about the incredible demolition derby I just witnessed. Musk’s lawyer Steven Molloy stuck to his words. At one point he called Greg Brockman – co-defendant – Greg Altman. He mistakenly claimed that Musk was not asking for money and this had to be corrected by the judge. He clarified that we’ve heard a lot of lies over the past few weeks, but offered little evidence for Musk’s actual legal claims.
OpenAI’s lawyer, Sarah Eddy, countered by arranging the mountain of evidence presented by the company in chronological order. He wasted no time in pretending that this test was particularly reliable. However, he added to Day’s enthusiasm about Musk: “Even the mothers of his children can’t support his story.” William Savitt, who led the defense after his presentation, demonstrated how often Musk “missed” some important details – and wondered how a sophisticated businessman could not understand or read the four-page term sheet sent to him by OpenAI.
I then wondered why we were all wasting our time here. So let’s discuss the gossip, which is the real issue of this lawsuit. How good was it? Here are my favorite nuggets.
Although this lawsuit was meant to punish Altman and has arguably already been served, I’d like to focus on my real conclusion here: Elon Musk sucks at AI.
Look, Musk said many times that OpenAI will not be successful. He repeatedly tried to bring it to its knees and steal its researchers and in one case — the case of Andrzej Karpathy, a founding team member Musk lured to Tesla — succeeded. But how is xAI doing? Well, it’s a black hole for money that SpaceX has acquired. This is a hemorrhage for researchers. xAI isn’t going to take over one of its giant data centers – there’s a deal with Anthropic instead. In an effort to match the programming-focused products offered by Anthropic and OpenAI, it may purchase Cursor. Enterprise users of xAI, whether it’s the US government or private companies, are empowered to use it. To the extent that its special CSAM machine Grok, aka MechaHitler, works, it clearly works because Musk has distilled other people’s models.
Zillis wrote in 2018 that Brockman and Sutskever thought Musk “didn’t really do his homework [on] AI/AGI and it is concerned about working with them.” I’m leaving this lawsuit thinking that all these liars deserve each other, but in fairness to Brockman and Sutskever, they were absolutely right about this. The question now is whether anyone looking to invest in the upcoming SpaceX IPO has noticed or cared.
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