Elon Musk testifies he started OpenAI to prevent ‘Terminator outcome’

Elon Musk and Sam and Altman appeared together in a federal courtroom for the first time Tuesday as they sparred over OpenAI’s decade-long development and what it means for the company’s future.

A trial in Musk’s lawsuit against Altman could lead to financial damages and, more importantly, management changes at OpenAI that could complicate its plans for an initial public offering as soon as this year.

As the first witness on the stand, Musk immediately sought to frame his case as more than just an OpenAI case. Siding with Altman “would give a license to plunder every charity in America” ​​and shake “the entire foundation of charitable giving,” Musk told a panel of nine jurors advising U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on how to rule.

Musk has been concerned about computers becoming smarter than people “since he was a young man in college,” his lawyer, Stephen Mollo, told the jury. Musk lobbied governments to pass regulations addressing the prospect of so-called artificial general intelligence, including meeting with then-President Barack Obama in 2015. “But the government did not step up,” Mollo said. “Elon felt like he had to do something.”

Around the same time, Musk met Altman, a then 30-year-old investor “whom he didn’t know very well,” Mollo said. They soon launched OpenAI together as a non-profit organization. Google’s unlimited progress in developing artificial intelligence worried OpenAI’s founders, and they wanted to create a competing laboratory with a greater focus on safety. “My point is [OpenAI] “I exist because Larry Page called me a pro-speciesist for being a pro-humanist,” Musk said, referring to the Google co-founder. “What would the opposite of Google be? An open source non-profit.”

While Musk believes AI can cure diseases and bring prosperity to humanity, he also told the court that he believes the technology could veer into catastrophic scenarios straight out of science fiction. “It could kill us all too…” finisher outcome. I think we want to be in a movie… like Star Trek“It’s not a James Cameron movie,” Musk said. (While Musk has long raised alarms about AI safety, his current company, xAI, has been criticized by researchers at other AI labs for its “reckless” safety culture.)

As OpenAI began to have some successes of its own, Musk and Altman agreed that creating a for-profit arm with consistent returns to investors was necessary to raise the extraordinary amounts of money needed to finance staffing and computing, according to Mollo. He compared it to a non-profit museum that receives some revenue from a for-profit store. “I wasn’t opposed to having a small for-profit business as long as the tail doesn’t wag the dog,” Musk said from the podium.

Musk felt that approach had gone too far when Microsoft, another defendant in the trial, agreed to invest $10 billion in 2023, and OpenAI increasingly transferred intellectual property and employees to the for-profit company. “The museum store sold Picasso’s paintings, so they were locked away where no one could see them,” Molo said.

OpenAI refuted

OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, told the jury that OpenAI never promised Musk that it would remain a nonprofit and publish all of its scripts. “The evidence here will show that what Musk says happened did not happen,” Savit said.

He added that Musk was aware of plans to raise corporate investments beyond $10 billion since 2018. Musk even raised concerns about Microsoft’s involvement in a 2020 tweet. But he did not file a lawsuit until he founded a competing company, xAI, in 2023.