An anonymous reader writes: Before Elon Musk left OpenAI in a power struggle in 2018, he wanted to merge the nonprofit artificial intelligence lab with Tesla, his electric car company. Mr. Musk and other OpenAI co-founders met several times to discuss the merger. OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, was even offered a seat on Tesla’s board of directors, according to a court document. But folding OpenAI into Tesla would have eliminated the lab’s nonprofit status, and that, Mr. Altman said on the witness stand on Tuesday, was something he wanted to avoid. [...] “I believed that A.I. should not be under the control of any one person,” Mr. Altman said. [...] Mr. Altman testified about his feud with Mr. Musk. He said he had become worried that Mr. Musk, who provided the early investment money for OpenAI, wanted to take control of the lab. He described what he called a “particularly harrowing moment” when his OpenAI co-founders asked Mr. Musk what would happen to his control of a potential for-profit when he died. Mr. Altman said Mr. Musk had replied that the control would pass to his children. “I was not comfortable with that,” Mr. Altman said. When Mr. Musk lost a power struggle for control of the lab, he left, forcing Mr. Altman to find another big financial backer in Microsoft.
But Mr. Altman ran into trouble in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired him because, as several of its members have testified in the trial, it didn’t trust him. Steven Molo, Mr. Musk’s lead lawyer, homed in on Mr. Altman’s trustworthiness during an aggressive cross-examination. “Are you completely trustworthy?” Mr. Molo asked. “I believe so,” Mr. Altman answered. After questioning Mr. Altman’s trustworthiness for nearly 20 minutes, Mr. Molo turned to Mr. Altman’s relationship with Mr. Musk. Mr. Altman said that after he met Mr. Musk in the mid-2010s, Mr. Musk had occasionally expressed concern about the dangers of A.I. But Mr. Musk spent far more time saying he was worried that companies like Google would get ahead in A.I. development, Mr. Altman said. (Mr. Musk testified in the trial that he had wanted to create OpenAI to prevent Google from controlling the technology.) Mr. Altman, the lawyer intimated, took advantage of Mr. Musk’s concerns and was never sincere about his own A.I. fears. “Are you a person who just tells people things they want to hear whether those things are true or not?” Mr. Molo asked. The lawyer also questioned whether Mr. Atman, who became a billionaire through years of tech investments, was self-dealing through OpenAI. Mr. Molo showed a list of Mr. Altman’s personal investments across a number of companies that stand to benefit from their association with OpenAI. They included Helion Energy, a start-up that has deals with Microsoft and OpenAI, and Cerebras, a chip maker in business with OpenAI. Mr. Molo asked if Mr. Altman, who is on OpenAI’s board as well as its chief executive, would ever fire himself. “I have no plans to do that,” Mr. Altman said.
OpenAI’s odd journey from nonprofit lab to what it is today — a well-funded, for-profit company that is still connected to a nonprofit called the OpenAI Foundation with an endowment that could be worth more than $130 billion — provided grist for Mr. Molo’s questions about Mr. Altman’s motivations. He implied that Mr. Altman could have continued to build OpenAI as a pure nonprofit. But the only way to build such a valuable charity was to raise billions through a for-profit venture, Mr. Altman responded. Still, the giant sums being raised appeared to upset Mr. Musk. In late 2022, according to court documents, Mr. Musk sent a text to Mr. Altman complaining that Microsoft was preparing to invest $10 billion in OpenAI. “This is a bait and switch,” Mr. Musk said at the time. But Mr. Altman, under questioning from his own lawyers, said: “Every step of the way, I have done my best to maximize the value of the nonprofit. I would point out that there are not a lot of historical examples of a nonprofit at this scale.”
