CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Mirrors of Greed: Elon Musk, OpenAI and the Tech Brat Battle

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

They are a disagreeable bunch, with disagreeable ideas to match.  The querulous brats behind the drive for technological servility and plugged in stupidity were always going to scrap over which dystopian vision they most prefer.  Elon Musk thought he was onto something hounding OpenAI and its current CEO Sam Altman for supposedly betraying one of those visions.  In his $150 billion legal action, Musk alleged that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman deceived him into investing in the company in its initial stages when salad green altruism was modish and humanity mattered.  The litigation was a prong in a broader strategy to unseat Altman from OpenAI, sabotage the company’s $852 billion restructuring into a public benefit corporation and direct $134 billion to OpenAI’s non-profit foundation.

The deception centred on maintaining OpenAI as a non-profit entity and pursuing artificial intelligence (AI) ventures in ways beneficial to humanity. (When the tech brats have a stab at humour, they go in hard.)  According to Musk, OpenAI had effectively stolen a charity.  (Between 2015 and 2017, he had personally put $44 million into OpenAI, funds, he argues, that were essentially misappropriated when the company sloughed its non-profit skin.)  In an introductory overview of the company from December 2015, the company badges itself a “non-profit artificial intelligence research company” with the object of advancing “digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.  Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.”

How things change.  On May 18, a mere two hours was needed for a nine-jury member in Oakland, California to unanimously find against Musk, basing their decision on that most technical of grounds: the statute of limitations.  This left two civil claims – breach of charitable trust and unjust........

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