Winning in the court of opinion, and all that:
Musk, to be clear, has already succeeded. Regardless of what actually happened and what’s decided from here, he’s inflicted real pain. The trial has been an opportunity to make Altman and OpenAI’s founders look like greedy, sociopathic liars, which is a narrative that much of the public wants to believe.
And, it’s worth asking if things could have turned out any other way than a non-profit kind of contorting its way to becoming a for-profit:
So go back to 2017. Would the world be better off if OpenAI had remained a nonprofit and slowly withered on the vine while being outspent 100 to 1, as Google secured a monopoly in the most powerful technology of the 21st century? And in that scenario, how much longer does it take for us to get great AI products if Google has no competitive pressure to gets it act together?
🔗 Elon’s OpenAI Lawsuit Is Boring and Insulting, and It’s Already a Success