Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their closing arguments this week, and now it’s up to the jury to decide whether OpenAI did anything wrong as it flipped. for a little more profit organization.
But Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I mentioned in the last episode TechCrunch’s Equity podcastbecame a big topic in the last days of the trial Whether or not OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is credible — for example, Musk’s attorney, Steve Molo, questioned whether Altman’s statements during his congressional testimony were true.
Kirsten pointed out that there is Musk made many confusing statementsAnd that trust isn’t just a problem for Altman.
“This is a key question for many tech journalists, politicians and increasingly consumers about all AI labs,” he said. “It really has to be trusted because we don’t have an understanding, necessarily — these are all private companies, there’s still a lot going on behind the scenes.”
Read on for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Ha: (End of Trial) led to this really provocative headline by one of our writers, Tim Fernholz, (which) simply says: “Who Trusts Sam Altman?” Anyone want to take a stab at answering this?
Kirsten Korosec: Yes, Anthony, I’ll throw it right back at you. Do you trust Sam Altman?
Anthony: It’s an interesting question because it feels like a kind of wild question to discuss in a journalistic context, but actually it’s the basis of the trial in many ways.
Sean O’Kane: This is not a yes.
Anthony: And it’s really the (core) basis for understanding a lot of what’s going on at OpenAI, especially this big executive power struggle they’re now calling The Blip.
Just like a lot of people who worked with Altman don’t trust him. And he admitted it a little bit because he’s going to talk about it he realizes that he avoids conflicttells people what they want to hear and tries to work on it.
I mean, it sounds plausible, and I understand that it might lead to misunderstandings in some cases. (But) I’m also a very conflict-averse person, and I’d like to think that if any of these cases were to go to court, people would be like, “Is Anthony Ha credible?” they will not ask.
Sean: Still not yes!
Kirsten: I think people would say you are reliable. I will say this question, while provocative, simply does not cover what this trial is about. I would zoom in and say that this is a key question for many tech journalists, politicians and increasingly consumers about all AI labs. It’s really about trust because we don’t have an understanding, necessarily – these are all private companies, there’s still a lot going on behind the scenes.
Maybe we can take a look when they all go IPO, but it’s basically about trust and abuse and do we trust the intent? And what I will throw back is that sometimes the intention is worthy, noble and still can be abused. It can still turn into a bit of a show. I think it’s more about who trusts Sam Altman – although that was very interesting in the test – but a bigger question that we can address to the entire industry.
Sean: Let me say: I don’t trust him. But you know I don’t trust most people, so I guess that’s just the point.
We’ll see where this goes. The trial ended today. I was very interested to hear how the jury decided on all this. I think a big motivator for this in the beginning was Elon Musk trying to smear his perceived rival and someone he felt was undermining him. I don’t know if we have enough information yet to say it’s completely done and if it has a chance to win. But I think all these people came out of here looking a little worse.
Anthony: To be specific, why this came up this week is that (Altman) was on the stand and he was basically upset about some of the statements he made in the past in his testimony (to Congress) and basically said he had no equity in OpenAI. And that’s not true because he had a stake through Y Combinator, which he used to run. And I tried to brush it off by saying, “I guess everyone understands what it means to be a passive investor in a VC fund.” I think (Elon Musk’s) lawyer said, somewhat fairly, “Really? Do you think the congressman who interviewed you knew that?”
Kirsten: Yeah, I mean he was playing the whole semantics game. What I found very interesting about (it) was the way Sam Altman answered questions compared to Elon Musk on the stand.
So Elon Musk, in many, many, many scenarios and in many cases, we can point out that he has put something on Twitter that is false or slightly false and set the record straight on the stand. So I would say that in Elon Musk’s world, there’s a history of not being truthful—lying, being outspoken or otherwise, but his attitude toward it was incredibly belligerent, and it was very different from Altman, who really took it (attitude), “I’m working on it,” and tried to be kind of friendly, and I don’t know if I’m going to work for him.
Because it really comes down to the basic facts, and I hope the jury is paying attention to that. But I thought it was really interesting – they were both liars, but how they dealt with it was very different.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
