Trial in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI entered its third day. Tesla CEO returned to the court to give his second testimony. During the trial, Musk said that he was “a fool” for putting money in OpenAI that started off as non-profit, but later created a for-profit arm. At issue was a 2020 deal with Microsoft that promised billions of dollars in investment and gave Microsoft exclusive rights to use OpenAI’s product. Elon Musk told OpenAI counsel William Savitt that he sent a text to CEO Sam Altman asking, “What the hell is going on?”. “I reacted quite negatively,” to the Microsoft investment, Musk said, adding “I texted Sam Altman and said ‘What the hell is going on?” or something to that effect.”Altman reassured him via text message that the product would remain open and available to all. “I agree this feels bad. We offered you equity when we established the cap profit, which you didn’t want at the time. We are still very happy to do any time you’d like,” Altman then responded to Musk’s text. “This does seem like the opposite of ‘open,'” Musk said in his testimony. The tech billionaire further said that the equity offer felt like a ‘bribe’ then.
Elon Musk during OpenAI trial : Do you really want Microsoft controlling AGI
Elon Musk said he felt Microsoft’s investments indicated it expected a potentially large return, and was concerned that Microsoft could come to control the development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a hard-to-define level of capability in which AI matches or exceeds humans.“With all due respect to Microsoft, do you really want Microsoft controlling artificial general intelligence?” Musk said.“Microsoft would only put $10 billion — which is a huge sum of money — into something if they feel like they will get a return,” Musk said during the testimony. “There’s no way Microsoft is just giving that as a donation or any kind of charitable way. That’s an amount of money that doesn’t make any sense.” Elon Musk further revealed that Microsoft’s partnership felt like a “bait and switch” and risked corporate control of AGI. The tech billionaire has sued the AI company for ‘stealing a charity’ and is seeking up to $140 billion in punitive damages from both OpenAI and Microsoft.
