Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI’s models

from MIT Review

In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could destroy us all and sat through revelations that he had poached OpenAI employees for his own companies. He even confessed, to some audible gasps in the courtroom, that his own AI company, xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, uses OpenAI’s models to train its own. 

The federal courthouse in Oakland, California, was packed with armies of lawyers carrying boxes of exhibits, journalists typing away at their laptops, and a handful of concerned OpenAI employees. Outside, protesters lined the streets, carrying signs urging people to quit ChatGPT, boycott Tesla, or both. Musk looked calm and comfortable, slipping in the occasional quip in his distinct South African accent. But he also was full of remorse...

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How OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise

from the NYT

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, says that technological revolutions are driven by more than just technology. They are also driven, he argues, by new ways of paying for them.

“There is always a lot of focus on technological innovation. What really drives a lot of progress is when people also figure out how to innovate on the financial model,” he recently said at the site of a data center that OpenAI is building in Abilene, Texas.

Over the last several years, Mr. Altman’s company has found unusual and creative ways of paying for the computing power needed to fuel its ambitions.

Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services.

Industry experts and financial analysts have welcomed the start-up’s creativity. But these unorthodox arrangements have also fueled concerns that OpenAI is helping to inflate a potential financial bubble as it builds what is still a highly speculative technology...

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