He claims that if the jury finds in favor of Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, and Microsoft, “it will become precedent and give precedent to looting every charity in America.”
Sam Altman did not return, but our first witness has been called: Elon Musk.
Elon is going to take the stand; stay tuned. The jury is reentering the courtroom after listening to arguments from OpenAI and Microsoft, then taking a short break.
According to Microsoft’s lawyer Russell Cohen, making his opening argument in Musk v. Altman, saying that each round of funding (including across the events of November 2023) provided more resources, which produced better research and better models that justified further investment.
Similar to Savitt, Cohen closed by saying that Musk only raised claims about the deal after ChatGPT and OpenAI became successful, and he launched xAI as a competitor.
Following the opening argument by Altman’s lawyer, Russell Cohen began Microsoft’s argument. According to Cohen, the dispute has little to do with Microsoft (which just relaxed its arrangement with OpenAI).
His version of events is that OpenAI came to Microsoft because it needed a massive investment to pursue its research, Microsoft wasn’t there when Musk was donating to the project, and no one, Musk or anyone else, claimed there were any conditions preventing Microsoft from investing.
As Savitt wrapped up his opening argument, he leaned on saying that Musk’s lawsuit came after the statute of limitations, and that he “sat on his claims for years.” The sour grapes only kicked in once it turned out that OpenAI was valuable.
Buying it on its own from Framework, the GPU costs $1,199.00 — a $500 jump from the 8GB variant, which costs $699.00. As part of a full laptop order, the gap between them is $500, too.
Nvidia announced the new GPU earlier today as a way to “maximize memory availability.”
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According to Altman’s lawyer, William Savitt. Continuing his opening argument, Savitt brought up an email from OpenAI scientist Ilya Sutskever around the time Musk’s quarterly donations ended.
It said, “The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI,” which apparently upset Musk to the point that he “literally” grabbed his stuff and stormed out.
According to Savitt, once Brockman and Ilya Sutskever built an AI model capable of besting Dota 2 players in 2017 and realized the importance of compute, they held dozens of meetings that included Musk, Jared Birchall (CEO of Neuralink and Musk’s longtime wealth manager), and Shivon Zilis (you know) about how to structure OpenAI for profit.
William Savitt, who is representing Sam Altman, continued his opening argument, saying that Musk only started to care about supposedly broken promises by Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman once he became a competitor. “The only person who claims to have heard those promises is Mr. Musk himself.”
