Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their final arguments this week, and now it’s up to a jury to decide whether OpenAI did anything wrong as it has turned into a slightly more for-profit organization.
But as Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane and I noted in his last episode TechCrunch’s Equity podcasta big issue in the final days of the trial has been whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is credible — for example, Musk’s lawyer Steve Molo has questioned Altman about whether statements he made during congressional testimony were true.
Kirsten noted that Musk has made many misleading statements of his own, and that trust is not just an issue for Altman.
“This is a fundamental question [for] many tech journalists, policymakers and increasingly consumers for all AI labs,” he said. “It’s really about trust, because we don’t have the insight, necessarily — these are all private companies, there’s a lot more behind the scenes.”
Read on for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Ha: [The end of the trial] led to this really provocative title from one of our writers, Tim Fernholz, [that] it simply says, “Who trusts Sam Altman?” Anyone want to take a stab at answering this?
Kirsten Korosec: Yes, Antony, I will send it to you immediately. Do you trust Sam Altman?
Anthony: It’s an interesting question because it seems like something that’s kind of a wild question to discuss in a journalistic context, but actually that’s the heart of the trial, in many ways.
Sean O’Kane: This is not yes.
Anthony: And in fact it seems to be [at the] the core of understanding so much of what happened at OpenAI, especially this big executive power battle they’re now calling The Blip.
It just seems that a lot of people who have worked with Altman don’t trust him. And he’s acknowledged that a little bit, because he’s going to talk about the fact that he recognizes that he’s conflict-averse, tells people what they want to hear, and tries to work on that.
I mean, it sounds reasonable, and I can see how that could lead to misunderstandings in certain situations. [But] I’m also a confrontational person, and I’d like to think that if any of this stuff went to trial, people wouldn’t be asking, “Is Anthony Ha trustworthy?”
Sean: Still not a yes!
Kirsten: I think people would say you are trustworthy. I will say that this question, while provocative, does not simply encapsulate what this trial was. I would zoom out even further and say that this is a fundamental question [for] many tech journalists, policymakers, and increasingly consumers, about all AI labs. It really comes down to trust, because we don’t have the insight, necessarily — these are all private companies, there’s still a lot behind the veil.
Maybe when it’s all IPO we can take a look, but it’s basically a matter of trust and abuse, and do we believe the intent? And what I would say back is that sometimes the intention can be worthy, noble and still misused. It might still end up being a shit show. I think it’s more than who trusts Sam Altman — although that was very interesting in this trial — but more of that larger question that we can apply across the industry.
Sean: I’ll say it: I don’t trust him. But you know, I don’t trust most people, so I guess that’s just the bottom line.
We’ll see where this goes. The trial ends today. I was very curious to hear how the jury decides on all this. I think at the beginning of this, a big motivation for this was Elon Musk trying to throw mud, at a perceived opponent and someone that he feels looked down on. And I don’t know if we know enough yet to say that this is completely done and whether or not it has the potential to win. But I think all these people came out of it looking a little worse.
Anthony: And to be specific, because he is coming this week [Altman] he was on the stand basically grilling him about some statements he had made in the past, in testimony [Congress]basically saying he had no shares in OpenAI. And that’s not true because he had a stake through Y Combinator, which he used to run. And he tried to brush that off by saying, “I guess everyone understands what it means to be a passive investor in a VC fund.” And I think so [Elon Musk’s] The lawyer, somewhat fairly, said “Really? You think the MP being interviewed knew that?”
Kirsten: Yeah, I mean, he was playing the whole semantics game. What I thought was so interesting [this] is the style of how Sam Altman answered questions [compared to] Elon Musk in the booth.
So Elon Musk, in many, many, many scenarios and many cases, we can point to the fact that he posted something on Twitter that was a lie or a bit of a lie, and on the stand he set the record straight. So there’s a story of, I would say, no truth-falsehood, blatant or otherwise, in Elon Musk’s world, but the way he dealt with it was incredibly combative and very different from Altman who really got that. [attitude of]”I’m working on it,” and he tried to sound polite and I don’t know if it’s going to work for him.
Because it really comes down to the core facts, and hopefully that’s what the jury is paying attention to. But I thought that was really interesting – they were both untrue, but how they dealt with it was very different.
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