Had Musk v. Altman merely been a petulant matter of injured vanity, it might have played as a diverting farce. It was instead a travesty. The underlying issues\u2014of how A.I. ought to be governed, and by whom, and how\u2014are of great consequence. But in this trial, to root against Tweedledum was effectively to root for Tweedledee. It was a no-win situation.<\/p>\n
The butt pillow might have begun as a symbol of the trial\u2019s frivolity, but it was clear soon enough that it was also a powerful metaphor for the collective failures that got us here. It was difficult, sitting in the unyielding pews, not to feel personally implicated. These were the leaders our society had somehow been assigned. Mike Isaac, a veteran tech reporter for the Times, wasn\u2019t ashamed to admit that Brockman had inspired him to secure his own butt pillow. Isaac, a magnanimous man who looks like the actor Wilford Brimley styled as a member of the hardcore band Minor Threat, offered to share the cushion, but it struck me as somehow more appropriate to sit in the docks as a penitent. The courtroom filled up quickly in anticipation of Sam Altman, who was set to appear on the stand that day under oath. The OpenAI C.E.O. has long been known for his boyishness, but the past few years have coarsened his features and frosted his spiky hair with gray tips. He looked like a lesser vocalist for \u2019N Sync on a reunion tour. His presence in the courtroom had the mournful air of someone who no longer qualified as precocious.<\/p>\n
The basic question of the case, which is also the basic question of Altman\u2019s career, is whether the transmogrification of OpenAI from a safety-minded nonprofit into a ravenous corporate behemoth was cynical in intention or merely in outcome. Recently, my New Yorker colleague Andrew Marantz appeared on a podcast to discuss the alternative ways to model his behavior: the \u201calways-a-master-plan, 3-D-chess view\u201d and the \u201cimprovisatory-checkers-all-along view.\u201d There was a clever bit of trollery in Altman\u2019s decision to hire as lead counsel the lawyer William Savitt, who had earlier forced Musk to follow through on his impulse to buy Twitter<\/a>. Over hours of direct questioning, Savitt elicited from his brow-furrowed client a defense narrative that combined the most flattering elements of each version of the story. The part of the scheme that involved the creation of what he praised as \u201cone of the largest charities in the world\u201d\u2014the nonprofit parent, by virtue of its equity stake in the for-profit subsidiary, has assets valued at more than two hundred billion dollars\u2014was the result of what Altman repeatedly called \u201chard work\u201d or \u201cincredible work.\u201d But the part of the scheme that involved the creation of one of the largest and most powerful for-profit companies in the world was extemporaneous\u2014the by-product of having been \u201copen to creative structures.\u201d Altman said, \u201cSo this sounds a little silly to say now, but at the time, we almost didn\u2019t start this effort because we thought Google was so far ahead that it might be hopeless to compete.\u201d<\/p>\n The decision to stand up a profit-making entity was a matter of facts on the ground: the future of humanity required that OpenAI prevail in an existential battle against Google; this battle could not be fought without access to enormous pools of capital; it was impossible to court investors without the promise of returns. On these three points, everyone involved was in agreement: a dinky donor-funded charity would be taking an abacus to a data-center fight. It was acknowledged only in passing that the introduction of a fiduciary motive might create perverse incentives, and even then the worry was primarily about optics. As one of Musk\u2019s consiglieri wrote in an e-mail, \u201cI\u2019m a super fan of capitalism and making tons of money doing great things, but not sure if this correlates with the \u2018noble cause for humanity, not doing it to make money\u2019 narrative.\u201d What divided Musk and his lieutenants, on one side, from Altman, Brockman, and the OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, on the other, was the unresolved issue of which special man got to wear the pants. In September, 2017, Musk e-mailed Sutskever and Brockman to describe a scenario in which he \u201cwould unequivocally have initial control of the company.\u201d He insisted that he had no interest in retaining unilateral power over the destiny of the species. At some unspecified time, he continued, the authority vested in him, by him, would devolve upon an expanded board: \u201cThe rough target would be to get to a 12 person board (probably more like 16 if this board really ends up deciding the fate of the world).\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Had Musk v. 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