The world’s richest man, the AI king, and a courtroom showdown

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For two men whose companies promise to remake civilisation, the opening day was strangely pedestrian. The microphones in a federal courtroom in downtown Oakland kept cutting out. A presentation slide vanished from the screens. “We can’t hear you,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said, before drily observing that the federal judiciary would happily accept additional taxpayer funds.

Sitting under the fluorescent lights this week were Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI. Their tech empires are worth, between them, more than $US3 trillion ($4.2 trillion). Yet here they were, fidgeting through technical hitches a few metres apart, separated by years of broken friendship, as the most consequential trial of the AI age finally got under way.

Musk v Altman is, on its face, a contract dispute over a now decade-old start-up. In substance, it is a referendum on the architecture of the modern AI industry – its mission, its money, and the small constellation of men who insist they alone can shepherd humanity through the most powerful technology ever built.

It will most likely hold implications for AI going forward, and for Australia and other countries where the technology is tearing through workplaces and society more broadly.

Corporate litigation lawyer Andrew Staltman predicted the spectacle would be “crazy and nasty”, “the landing of the Hindenburg on the deck of the Titanic”. So far, that’s proven to be accurate.

The $US150 billion question is whether Musk can convince a nine-person jury – and ultimately Gonzalez Rogers – that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman defrauded him by morphing the 2015 non-profit research lab into what he calls a “wealth machine” now valued at $US852 billion, with IPO ambitions of up to $US1 trillion. Musk wants last October’s for-profit conversion unwound. He wants Altman and Brockman gone.

“It is not OK to steal a charity,” Musk, in a black suit and matching tie, told the jury on Tuesday. If OpenAI prevailed, he warned, the case would set a precedent for “looting every charity in America”.

“I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a start-up. I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding to create what would become an $800 billion company.”Elon Musk

OpenAI’s lead counsel William Savitt told the........

© Brisbane Times