The personal pettiness of the Elon Musk v OpenAI trial

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you from beneath a cherry blossom tree in Prospect Park in New York City. Spring has arrived! Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court fight could have been a major moment for AI safety Monday marked the start of a major trial pitting Sam Altman against his OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, who is suing the maker of ChatGPT for breach of contract. Musk alleges that Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, broke the company’s founding agreement by restructuring and converting much of it to a for-profit enterprise. Altman and OpenAI counter that Musk, who left the firm in 2018 amid internal disputes and has since started his own rival AI business, xAI, is essentially a sore loser. Musk is seeking a range of remedies that include the removal of Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman and more than $134bn in damages, which Musk says would be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm. The company has denied Musk’s allegations. The case, which pits the world’s richest man against the creator of the world’s most famous chatbot, in theory could pose consequential questions: what incentives should AI be oriented towards, benefiting humanity or making money? What does a responsible, maximally beneficial version of AI technology look like? What happened to OpenAI’s stated mission of benefiting humanity? But the case is not posing that question. …