Elizabeth Lopatto
Bret Taylor has been asked to slow down twice.
He has not managed to do this at all. He is speaking rapidly, in a monotone.
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Elizabeth Lopatto
“OpenAI is decidedly not profitable,” Taylor said.
“We’re decidedly not cash-flow-positive today.” The company has not generated any profits to date.
Elizabeth Lopatto
There’s “a lot of tension” between LLMs and what Taylor calls “content companies”...
Because LLMs keep stealing people’s work, lol. Anyway he was talking about the OpenAI deal with Reddit, which was done to avoid litigation.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Plantiff rests. OpenAI calls its first witness, Bret Taylor of OpenAI Foundation.
He is in a gray suit and gray tie. I am expecting more pleated khaki pants testimony. He was also the chair of Twitter’s board when it was acquired by Musk.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Ilya Sutskever says he was uncomfortable with Musk’s large ownership demand.
Also, Musk gave no guarantee his proposed control of the board would diminish over time. “I found it to be aggressive because I knew that Mr Musk had many other obligations in many other companies that the was running that were much larger than OpenAI,” he said. He also didn’t like the proposal that Tesla take over OpenAI. “It would be on some level, it would be like, it would kill a dream,” he said. “When one starts a company, one has dreams for a company to flourish and do different things, and in general being absorbed into another company means to give up that dream.”
Jay Peters
Threads has a new logo and wordmark.
The logo isn’t too different from the previous version, but I think it looks nice. Threads’ head of design has a… thread… with a little more about the changes.
Image: Meta
Elizabeth Lopatto
Sutskever’s testimony is kind of a snooze so far.
We are now at “the blip” again. The board chose “not consistently candid” carefully, he says. Sutskever said he prepared a document of incidents with Altman, with some other people at OpenAI. Altman has a pattern of lying and pitting executives against each other, “this leads to tremendous loss of productivity,” trust, and difficulty creating safe AGI.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Satya Nadella is excused.
Our next witness is Ilya Sutskever. This promises to be more interesting, I think.
Elizabeth Lopatto
A lot of people contact Satya Nadella about their boards, apparently!
He says he provides suggestions a lot. And they’re just suggestions, including in the case of OpenAI. While Microsoft put forward 14 names, none of those names were added to the new OpenAI board except Sue Desmond-Hellman. CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who was added later.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Microsoft’s lawyer is now back with Nadella.
He’s explaining that firing a CEO is “a fairly big things” and when he didn’t get any details on why Altman was fired, he felt that OpenAI’s board was “sort of amateur city as far as I was concerned.”
The data mining company with extensive defense contracts is making merch to signal which side you’re on.
Mia Sato
Elizabeth Lopatto
We are discovering that Satya Nadella knows very little about the OpenAI nonprofit.
We also discover that Nadella has no idea if Altman and Musk talked about Musk’s mean Microsoft/OpenAI tweets. As a side note, we are referring exclusively to “Twitter” and “tweets” even for posts after the X rebrand.
Jay Peters
iRacing now works on the Vision Pro.
It supports foveated streaming, which will show you the sharpest image right in front of your eyes, according to an iRacing blog post.
If you’re more of a flight sim person, there’s also now a public beta of X-Plane with support for the Vision Pro, too.
iRacing for Apple Vision Pro Now Available
[iRacing.com]