{"id":269278,"date":"2024-11-21T10:22:32","date_gmt":"2024-11-21T15:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=269278"},"modified":"2025-01-30T16:33:59","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T21:33:59","slug":"elon-musk-makes-a-good-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/11\/21\/elon-musk-makes-a-good-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk makes a good point"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Before I go any further, let me be clear about what I mean by saying Elon Musk makes a good point \u2014 or rather, let me clear about what I *don’t* mean. I don’t mean that Elon Musk makes a good point when he says the economy will fail without Donald Trump, or that democracy is at risk unless we give Trump whatever he wants. I don’t mean that he makes a good point when he says that free speech is an absolute<\/a> virtue (unless someone uses the term “cis” on Twitter of course, which he defines as hate speech). And I don’t mean that he makes a good point when he says that we all need to have at least a dozen babies with as many different people as possible (he hasn’t actually said that, but it’s pretty obvious from his behavior<\/a> that he thinks this is the optimal thing to do).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, there aren’t a whole lot of areas where I think Musk *has* made a good point. But there is one, in my opinion, and it’s in the lawsuit he filed against OpenAI and co-founder and current CEO Sam Altman. The suit originally named OpenAI and Altman, as well as OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman \u2014 who left the company after the board tried to oust Altman, and then later returned after Altman emerged victorious from the board’s maneuvering (more on that below). The Musk lawsuit was withdrawn in July, but an amended version has been filed<\/a> that adds Shivon Zilis as a plaintiff \u2014 she is an employee at Musk-owned brain-implant company Neuralink and also the mother of three of his 12 children, including one named Techno Mechanicus (I am not making this up, although I wish I was). The claim also added Microsoft<\/a> as a defendant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zilis was added because she was formerly on the board of OpenAI and had some interactions with Altman that Musk clearly feels might help buttress his case. The reason for adding Microsoft as a defendant is that Musk claims the close relationship between the two has made it harder for OpenAI to form partnerships with other companies, including Musk’s own xAI. The claim argues that OpenAI is “actively trying to eliminate competitors” like xAI by “extracting promises from investors not to fund them<\/a>.\u201d In effect, it says, OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft has become a “de facto merger.” None of those things are the point that I’ve grudgingly referred to above as good, but they are definitely related to it. The preamble in the lawsuit describes its premise in this way<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus. You can find out more about me and this newsletter in\u00a0<\/em><\/em>this post.<\/em><\/a> This newsletter survives solely on your contributions, so please sign up for a paying subscription or visit my Patreon, which you can <\/em><\/em>find here<\/em><\/a>. I also publish a daily email newsletter of odd or interesting links called When The Going Gets Weird, <\/em><\/em>which is here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon \u2014 and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public. No amount of clever drafting nor surfeit of creative dealmaking can obscure what is happening here. OpenAI, Inc., co-founded by Musk as an independent charity committed to safety and transparency… is, at the direction of Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft, fast becoming a fully for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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For the benefit of humanity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“Market-paralyzing gorgon” might be a little over-the-top. Has OpenAI turned anyone to stone by having snakes for hair? If so, it isn’t mentioned in the claim (side note: everyone knows about Medusa, but she had two sisters who were also gorgons, Stheno and Euryale). In any case, Musk’s point is that when Sam Altman and his cofounders Brockman and Ilya Sutskever (who has since left to start his own company dedicated to AI saftety) came to Musk with the idea<\/a> for OpenAI in 2015, it was supposed to be exactly what its name implies: Open. In other words, it was supposed to be a public-oriented, nonprofit entity that would investigate artificial intelligence, large-langage models, etc. and build those tools with the prospect of potentially reaching AGI \u2014 artificial general intelligence, which is roughly defined as human-like reasoning<\/a> ability \u2014 while making its work public so that others could learn from it for the betterment of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sam Altman emails Elon Musk

May 25, 2015 pic.twitter.com\/L1F5bMkqkd<\/a><\/p>— Internal Tech Emails (@TechEmails) November 15, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>