Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

perilunar

An entertaining and scathing writeup.

thisisauserid

Exquisite prose merely to call two billionaires insufferable.

vlucas

Sam didn't "win" the case in the sense that most people will think of when reading this headline. In the 20th paragraph of the linked article, finally getting to the actual reason: > On Monday, the jury took only two hours to reach its verdict. Musk’s complaint, the panel found, had indeed exceeded the statute of limitations Musk is appealing. This fight is far from over.

rsingel

The kicker on this story is glorious

Curosinono

E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan Sam B. stole money from everyone -> thief Sam A. did what? And Musk wanted to do the same thing. Both agreeded, that a non profit will not make enough money to push the frontier. He is only pissed that he didn't get control of openai and he is now pissed again because he apparently should have done the lawsuite a few years back. Despite him having unlimited money and probably very good laywers I'm not here to defend the richest of the richest, but E.H. and S.B. are complet different storries to OpenAI

xbar

A favorite quote: "The dubiousness of Altman’s character is [...] priced into his reputation."

pj_mukh

This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them. Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.

ryandrake

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wield the dick that is going to screw us all.

nivekney

"We"? Who "We"?

booleanbetrayal

I believe an upset to Altman and a re-characterization of OpenAI to a charitable stance would have left investors scrambling, and would likely have hastened an unwinding of the AI bubble to some degree. It feels like we'll be on this merry-go-round a good deal longer now.

alper

Will we become Musk's slave or Altman's slave?

thelastgallon

Dude has 800+ billion net worth. I think he'll be okay.

rgbrenner

musk sued long after the statute of limitations because what openai did was only objectionable to musk once he decided to become their competitor. and in this scenario, i’m supposed to root for musk who tried to use the court to harm a competitor who’s winning in the marketplace against xAI? no thanks. if you can’t compete in the marketplace, the court isn’t your backup plan. there’s nothing. positive about the weaponization of the courts.

nirui

The "benefits all of humanity" narrative was interesting. If Elon Musk remained the silly/goofy outsider character he was, then the narrative that he naively invested in OpenAI for the good of all mankind is somewhat believable. However, he really turned himself a serious shitball in the past few years and did some really harmful things intentionally. Maybe his trying to test the boundaries or something? But it does made his "kindness" somewhat hard to believe. Also, I can't see any outcome where the general labor (which most of us are) can benefit from AI development, given the context that the world is suffering from population decline and economic crisis, which could reduce overall opportunity and at the same time make living harder. After all, AI is different than other tech in that, the end gold for AI is to eliminate all "frictions". What is frictions? Well, say if you want to go to a place, the getting up and leave, the driving, the parking, the walking, that's all friction. In a frictionless world, you want to go to a place, and you already there, it's done right as you finishes your wishing. Here's the thing: as general labors, most services we provide is also to reduce friction, we exchange that for money to survive. That's how we got a share of the wealth of the world. So if there's less friction, then will translate to less opportunity, in that scene, "we all lost" too. BTW: in my (Chinese) education, we were told that when productivity is advanced enough, communism will become the final and only choice of humanity. The silly communists never realized that if productivity is really that advanced, then there's a chance that the life of most people could become some redundant waste to be eliminated.

tim333

>But, Really, We All Lost I'm not so sure. The danger with AI was that one bunch of capitalists got control, monopolised it / used trade secrets to control it, then it gets smarter than humans and said capitalists basically control the world and replace much human labour to grab all the money. Musk partly started OpenAI to guard against Google being in that situation and it has sort of worked in that it's led to a bunch of different companies all competing. The main ones being Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, those all being kind of OpenAI spin offs except for Google. The case illustrates the leaders can be arseholes so it's best to have competition to keep them under control.

mitchbob

https://archive.ph/LSWjV