Speaker 1: Aw Zone Media. Hello On, Welcome to this week's Better
Speaker 1: Offline Monologue. I'm your host ed ZiT Trump, and I
Speaker 1: know some of you are going to say, Ed, didn't
Speaker 1: you say we'd get a second part? Didn't you say
Speaker 1: we get a second part? Ed? Where's the second part?
Speaker 1: It's coming tomorrow. You get a monologue as well. Good Lord.
Speaker 1: The complaints from some of you just kidding. You're all
Speaker 1: very nice. Now, because I deeply hate myself, I decided
Speaker 1: to sit down and read case four to two four
Speaker 1: CV zero four seven two to two ygr from the
Speaker 1: United States District Court of West the Northern District to California. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about, of course, is Elon Musk's lawsuit
Speaker 1: against Open a I, filed in August. November of last year,
Speaker 1: there was an amended complaint. Nevertheless, Elon Musk is alleging
Speaker 1: multiple kinds of fraud, as well as violations of the
Speaker 1: Sherman Act and to monopoly law from the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: which most notably was the same law that might lead
Speaker 1: to the breakup of Google's ad taken search businesses. Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: he's suing, and he loves to sue, but in Layman terms.
Speaker 1: Musk alleges that Sam Wortman tricked him into funding open
Speaker 1: ai as a charity when he actually wanted it to
Speaker 1: be more like a for profit entity, a classical start
Speaker 1: up model. Musk also alleges a conspiracy by open ai
Speaker 1: to stop people who invested in open ai from investing
Speaker 1: in other generative AI companies, specifically Musk zons Ai as
Speaker 1: long as others like Anthropic. This sounds like some Musky
Speaker 1: and bullshit, but this is actually true. It was reported
Speaker 1: by The Information and other outlets. The lawsuit itself is contrived,
Speaker 1: including annoying things like Musk's lawyers referring to open AI's
Speaker 1: tax exempt nonprofit as a for profit market paralyzing Gorgan
Speaker 1: Just you don't need to write like this. He fucking
Speaker 1: loses anyway. It is pretty interesting, though, and it explores
Speaker 1: the deeply weird beginnings of open ai itself. To explain
Speaker 1: Joe and was originally founded in twenty fifteen by Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: Sam Mortman and a selection of other engineers specifically as
Speaker 1: a non profit making open source artificial intelligence, and it
Speaker 1: was meant to be a research house. Now another thing
Speaker 1: is it was specifically made as a reaction to Google's
Speaker 1: acquisition of artificial intelligence firm deep Mind. The plan, according
Speaker 1: to emails shared as part of the lawsuit, was to
Speaker 1: beat Google to the punch by making artificial general intelligence,
Speaker 1: you know, the entirely fictional concept of a conscious autonomous computer,
Speaker 1: and then they go and open source it in what
Speaker 1: Sam Moortman called an AI Manhattan project. Just I could
Speaker 1: go into the history there, but is that really what
Speaker 1: you want to compare this anyway? Anyway? Aortmand would go
Speaker 1: on to tell Elon Musk that the mission would be
Speaker 1: to create the first general AI AGI and use it
Speaker 1: for an individual empowerment i e. The distributed version of
Speaker 1: the future that seems the safest. More generally, safety should
Speaker 1: be a first class requirement. And that is a quote,
Speaker 1: by the way, with the technol owned by the foundation
Speaker 1: referring to open AI and use for the gift of
Speaker 1: the world. Just a lot of bollocks really, Anyway. Things
Speaker 1: began to get tense in September twenty sixteen when Sam
Speaker 1: Wortman arranged a deal with Microsoft to buy sixty million
Speaker 1: dollars of Compute for Well for ten million dollars in
Speaker 1: exchange for evangelizing Microsoft as zero as their preferred cloud provider,
Speaker 1: along with some sort of vague consultancy services over Microsoft's models.
Speaker 1: Musk would respond to the terms by saying, fine with me.
Speaker 1: If they don't use the active messaging would be worth
Speaker 1: way more than fifty million. Nots seemed like a Microsoft's
Speaker 1: marketing bitch. Two months later, Microsoft were put out a
Speaker 1: blog post saying that open ai was choosing as zero
Speaker 1: as their primary cloud platform and that open ai would
Speaker 1: become an early adopter of as zure En series virtual machines,
Speaker 1: some of Microsoft's early GPU compute instances. It's been going
Speaker 1: quite a while. A year later, in an exhibit from
Speaker 1: the trial from September twenty to twenty seventeen, things would
Speaker 1: get a little more fraid with Iliasuitskava, a gifted engineer
Speaker 1: recruited by Musk in AI's earliest days, sending an email
Speaker 1: to both Musk and Aortman sharing concerns about the future.
Speaker 1: Aortman worried about how much money would cost the fund.
Speaker 1: Open Ai had been considering finding a way to make
Speaker 1: it a wouldn't you guess it? For profit entity, but
Speaker 1: Sitzkev had other problems and was far more worried about
Speaker 1: Altman and Musk. In the email, Suitzkeave of raised concerns
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk wanted unilateral absolute control over the AGI,
Speaker 1: and that while Musk had claimed otherwise in negotiating how
Speaker 1: to keep open Ai going, it was very clear that
Speaker 1: and I quote absolute control was extremely important to him.
Speaker 1: As an example, Suitzkeaver added that Musk had said that
Speaker 1: he needed to be CEO of the new company so
Speaker 1: that everyone would know that he was the one in charge,
Speaker 1: even though he also stated that he hated being CEO
Speaker 1: and would much rather not be CEO. Suitzkeva added the
Speaker 1: Musk's concerns that there would be an AGI dictatorship run
Speaker 1: by Demis Hassabis, CEO of Deep Mind, but that in
Speaker 1: the current structure that Musk was suggest he would become
Speaker 1: a dictator if he chose to all very good stuff.
Speaker 1: Siitzkav bizarrely then immediately moved on to say something very
Speaker 1: very similar to Sam Altman, saying that and I quote
Speaker 1: he didn't understand why the CEO title was so important,
Speaker 1: and that Sam Altman's reasons had changed, and that it
Speaker 1: was really hard to understand what was driving them Siitzkev
Speaker 1: also added a question and I quote, is AGI truly
Speaker 1: your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals?
Speaker 1: How has your thought process changed over time? Ortmand would
Speaker 1: reassure Musk, both personally and through others, that he remained
Speaker 1: focused on open AI's nonprofit mission. In January twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: Orton would suggest a ridiculous idea selling cryptocurrency to fund
Speaker 1: open Ai, which Musk would warn would simply result in
Speaker 1: a massive loss of a credibility for open Ai everyone
Speaker 1: associated with the ico, referring of course, to an initial
Speaker 1: coin offering, a flimsy idea that just means just buy
Speaker 1: a bunch of tokens before the thing goes live, basically
Speaker 1: how crypto works. I guess it was a whole boom.
Speaker 1: I'm not doing a fucking podcast about it. Let's move on.
Speaker 1: Musk would step down from open ai in February twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: and a month later, Sam Wonan would propose a fixed
Speaker 1: maximum term equity race, essentially selling stock in open ai
Speaker 1: but an associated entity. Yet it was still a nonprofit
Speaker 1: at the time, and that had a maximum amount you
Speaker 1: could make on buying it. It's just very confusing and
Speaker 1: What it basically means is it means that they would
Speaker 1: create an entity on the side that you could raise
Speaker 1: money for that would also own all the bits. I'll
Speaker 1: get to that in a second. Nevertheless, this is all
Speaker 1: extremely dodgy and weird. Around a year later, in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: Sam Wonman would eventually create the legally precarious for profit
Speaker 1: arm of open Ai what I was just talking about,
Speaker 1: and it was called open AILP and immediately, according to
Speaker 1: Elon Musk's lawsuit, transferred most of the company's assets and stuff.
Speaker 1: The same year, open Ai would strike an exclusive partnership
Speaker 1: with Microsoft to provide the compute for their models. As
Speaker 1: part of the deal, open Ai would give Microsoft full
Speaker 1: license to use their pre AGI intellectual property and research,
Speaker 1: which is to say, literally everything they've ever made, and
Speaker 1: this would in turn make well, this is the funny,
Speaker 1: weird part. This is the really crazy. This is the
Speaker 1: part that really gets me. They would own everything. Microsoft
Speaker 1: would own everything until they hit AGI. Now, AGI at
Speaker 1: this point has been defined by open Ai and Microsoft
Speaker 1: as when they hit one hundred billion dollars in profit.
Speaker 1: Every time I read about and talk about this stuff,
Speaker 1: I just think, who is the idiot? Here, is it
Speaker 1: Satching the Dellar, Is it Sam Altman or they both
Speaker 1: just the kind of mediocre rich guy who just bounces
Speaker 1: their skulls together and they say who has the shittiest idea?
Speaker 1: Who will be the dumbest boy today. Nevertheless, Microsoft owns
Speaker 1: everything open Ai makes until they invent Agi, by which
Speaker 1: I mean they make one hundred billion dollars in profit.
Speaker 1: It's all so goddamn stupid. It's also stupid. Now at
Speaker 1: some point I want to do an entire episode on
Speaker 1: this lawsuit because it's got so many exhibits and so
Speaker 1: many warring incentives. Elon Musk's Xai competes directly with open
Speaker 1: ai to make large language models that no one really
Speaker 1: needs and that cost more to run than they will
Speaker 1: ever make. And this lawsuit, as with others, features broad
Speaker 1: demands for discovering depositions of people at LinkedIn co founder
Speaker 1: and former open ai board member Read Hoffman, and attempts
Speaker 1: to name both Microsoft and Hoffman himself as co defendants.
Speaker 1: Since filing the lawsuit, and the Elon Musk led consortium
Speaker 1: of Bias has offered ninety seven point four billion dollars
Speaker 1: for the assets of open AI's charity, an often that
Speaker 1: would require multiple different government agencies to approve, which open
Speaker 1: Aies board has now declined either way. While Musk is
Speaker 1: regularly full of ship, he's right about one thing. Sam
Speaker 1: Woman clearly had no intention of ever keeping open ai
Speaker 1: as nonprofit, nor was he ever dedicated to doing so,
Speaker 1: or really anything of them make in himself CEO and
Speaker 1: getting a billion dollars. Since twenty nineteen, open ai has
Speaker 1: raised over twenty billion dollars in funding, and it's reportedly
Speaker 1: raising as much as forty billion dollars in the next round,
Speaker 1: led by fucking Masayoshi son of soft Bank. It's so good.
Speaker 1: I love it. And they're likely doing this because the
Speaker 1: company burned five billion dollars in twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 1: it is said to as much as double that in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, according to estimates. Musk lawsuit is likely
Speaker 1: an attempt to interfere with this funding or to destabilize
Speaker 1: open Ai. It's week its point, it's flimsy status as
Speaker 1: a nonprofit that will require a great deal of legal
Speaker 1: effort to unwind if it's even possible at all, And
Speaker 1: I must be clear it may not be possible. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's any precedent of anyone ever taking a
Speaker 1: nonprofit of this size, of this weirdness connected to like
Speaker 1: twenty different for profit entities, and turning it into a
Speaker 1: for profit. It just doesn't make sense. But I will
Speaker 1: tell you something that might make you happy or might
Speaker 1: just make your laugh, which is open AI only has
Speaker 1: a a year and a half to do so, a
Speaker 1: year and a half to turn from a nonprofit into
Speaker 1: a for profit because a year and a half all
Speaker 1: that equity they raised, but it's not equity, it's some
Speaker 1: weird for profit sharing. Nevertheless, all the money they've raised
Speaker 1: in the last round, the six point something billion dollar one, yeah,
Speaker 1: it all turns into debt. Oh well, I'm sure they'll
Speaker 1: work it out. They sure haven't yet