After Elon Musk’s court loss, here comes a long hot summer with artificial intelligence
Elon Musk loses his bid to derail OpenAI. Few will feel sorry for him.
Unless you’re a corporate boss or a venture capitalist, maybe you should take a moment to feel sorry for yourself. A giant artificial intelligence descending upon the world is probably not your friend.
If you’re a clerk, programmer, administrator, writer, basic knowledge worker of any kind, you’ve already been warned that you might be replaced by artificial intelligence. Even if these fears prove overblown in the short term, the new technology could squeeze revenues.
The rapid collapse of Mr. Musk’s legal case on Monday will not slow the juggernaut. If anything, it will speed up. With emotions running high across the country, it could be a long hot AI summer.
AI critics dismissed the three-week trial in federal court in Oakland, California, as a power struggle between oligarchs that didn’t hold much interest for the masses. But it was also a rare glimpse into the seething maw of Silicon Valley, which is trying to transform and perhaps take over the world.
As the AI industry likes to remind us, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “The worst-case scenario,” Musk emphasized in his court testimony, is when AI “kills us all.”
Mr. Musk was undoubtedly trying to use Elon Musk in his pursuit of OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence company, and its CEO, Sam Altman. Mr Musk, 54, argued that OpenAI was trying to make as much money as possible from the start, in violation of its self-proclaimed mission as a charity that puts humanity first.
Was AI basically a bait and switch? It’s a question that was definitely worth asking. It would be nice to have a court ruling that would provide a definitive answer.
“The fundamental problem still persists,” said Oren Etzioni, a veteran AI researcher who was the founding executive director of the Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit organization. “Can a non-profit organization of any kind become for-profit willy-nilly?”
The nine men and women on the jury did not consider the merits of Mr. Musk’s argument, but ruled that the statute of limitations meant his lawsuit could not proceed.
“The AI trial of the century ends with a whimper,” wrote Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who is a prominent critic of AI companies. “And so there are some things we’ll never know.
Mr. Musk’s challenge to OpenAI has ended, at least for now, somewhat differently than recent lawsuits against social networks. Losses in Los Angeles and New Mexico in the past few months and the specter of more trials to come this year have put this part of the tech industry on the defensive.
Any showdown against AI will have to come in a different form another time.
Mr. Musk tried his best. If one of his goals was to humiliate Mr. Altman, 41, once a friend and now a foe, he succeeded somewhat in the court of public opinion. These revelations go to the heart of people’s biggest fears about AI: Can it be trusted? And can the people in charge be trusted?
In the end, no one at OpenAI looked particularly good in the trial version. Mr Musk accused Mr Altman of “treachery” and “fraud” and said OpenAI’s leaders had “unjustly enriched themselves” “to the tune of billions of dollars”.
“Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity,” the OpenAI Charter states. But if the company is acting in the best interests of the people, why does everyone who works there get so rich? Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, confirmed that his stake is now worth nearly $30 billion. Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder of OpenAI who has since left, said he had a stake of $7 billion.
(As for Mr. Altman, he has repeatedly said he has no direct stake in OpenAI. “I do it because I love it,” he told a Senate subcommittee in 2023. But during the trial, it was revealed that he had $2 billion worth of stakes in companies that do business directly with OpenAI. He said he was rebuffed from negotiating deals.)
And then there’s the issue of security—especially important with technology so potentially dangerous.
“Of course we would comply/aggressively support any regulations,” Mr. Altman told Mr. Musk in a 2015 email that became an exhibit in the test. But OpenAI, like almost every tech company, didn’t end up being a fan of regulation at all.
Ross Gerber, chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki, an asset management and investment firm in Santa Monica, Calif., that has invested in Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, said the lawsuit had not damaged Mr. Altman’s reputation or helped Mr. Musk improve his public image. “The good news is that people hate them both,” Mr. Gerber said.
“The public is already afraid of AI,” the investor added. “I don’t think they’ve diffused that in any way with this lawsuit.”
In the real world, this fear grows almost daily.
A lot of people seem to be rallying around the idea that they don’t want AI data centers in their community. Speakers who celebrate artificial intelligence and expect their audiences to do the same enjoy a rude reception. And the violence is starting to flare: Last month, a man traveled to San Francisco to throw a Molotov cocktail at Mr. Altman’s house. No one was injured, the man was arrested.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems. Both companies denied the claims.)
Artificial intelligence basically has the green light from Congress, the Trump administration, the courts and Wall Street. There is scattered opposition among state regulators and isolated lawmakers, but not much so far. All of this leaves the growing anger felt by those officials, administrators, writers, and other citizens with basically nowhere to go.
Wall Street expects smooth sailing from here. “OpenAI can shift its strategic monetization focus to the AI revolution taking place front and center given its strong market position in this space,” analyst Dan Ives wrote after the verdict.
OpenAI’s public offering, which may be somewhere close to $1 trillion, is expected as early as this year.
Mr. Musk didn’t win on Monday, but he still has his lawyers and his Ahab effort to sink the OpenAI whale. He he wrote at X: “I will appeal to the Ninth Circuit because setting a precedent for looting charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.”