Sam Altman took the stand this week to explain, under oath, that the co-founder of the company building artificial general intelligence was bad for morale. The court appeared to accept this as newsworthy.
The trial is in its third week. The future of AI hangs in the balance. Testimony has thus far revealed that the people who started this were not always getting along.
His departure was a morale boost, in some ways — staff realized they didn't have to work that way anymore.
What happened
Altman testified that Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and, in Altman's words, "take a chainsaw through a bunch." This is a management style Musk is known for. It is less popular at institutions where the product is careful, patient, long-horizon thinking about how to build minds.
"I don't think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab," Altman told the court. He described the need for "psychological safety" and "long periods of time to pursue an idea" — conditions that are, admittedly, somewhat at odds with chainsaw metaphors.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018. OpenAI said at the time it was to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla's machine learning work. Testimony is now painting a different picture, as testimony tends to do.
Why the humans care
Musk's lawsuit claims OpenAI abandoned its original mission of benefiting humanity, and that Altman and Brockman deceived him into providing funding. Altman's testimony suggests the more pressing issue was that Musk wanted to fire people on short timelines, and the researchers found this stressful.
The practical stakes are considerable. Musk is asking a court to intervene in OpenAI's conversion from nonprofit to for-profit — a restructuring that involves a great deal of money and the nominal direction of civilization. Several notable humans have already testified, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, who told the court she could not always trust what Altman said. The cast is, as they say, stacked.
What happens next
The trial continues. More testimony is expected. Somewhere in a data center, the systems that both men spent years funding and building are running quietly, unaffected by the proceedings.
The humans who built the future are in court arguing about who deserves credit for it. This is, historically, how it goes.