Another part also says: "After Musk announced he was resigning from OpenAI in February 2018, Musk gave a departing speech at an all-hands meeting, Brockman testified. In front of about 40 OpenAI employees, Musk said that he was leaving because the only viable path that he saw forward was for OpenAI to merge with Tesla. However, the other leaders did not think so, Musk said, choosing a different path that Musk would never choose. According to Brockman, the speech was meant to lower morale at OpenAI, as workers understood that Musk was leaving to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI) at Tesla because he no longer had confidence in OpenAI."

Still his goals was to merge with Tesla... Ain't this also steal a charity?

I don't really want to advocate for Musk, but is it not possible that his goal was to merge with Tesla as an alternative to OpenAI becoming a seperate for-profit. If the option of staying a non-profit was going off the table I'd also probably want to advocate for merging with an existing for-profit I own that had aligned interests.

Yep. Both sides just look like assholes

I mean, the claim here is not that Musk is not an asshole. This is a court case where two assholes fight about who defrauded that other one more successfully. Whoever wins and whoever looses, we know both involved men have pretty non-existent morality.

And in the grand scheme of things, OpenAI being charity was always bullshit too.

> Whoever wins and whoever looses, we know both involved men don't have pretty non-existent morality.

I'm guessing that double negative is a mistake. Do you mean to strike the "don't" to make it "have pretty non-existent morality" or just "both involved men don't have morality"?

Thank you. I corrected it.

Ianal but openais defense seems to actually have spent some time in the hearings showing examples of Musk’s (perceived) hypocrisy (him not giving to charity because he views his companies as societally beneficial), which suggests to me that this stuff is legislatively relevant

he didn’t so they litigate what did happen

From what I heard at the time, Elon was running OpenAI as, to some degree an element of the Elon keritsu. Neurallink was upstairs from OpenAI, and OpenAI badges would open doors at Tesla and vice-versa. Elon will also move people from one of his companies to another if the need arises. I think some of the OpenAI execs were very upset when he moved Karpathy from OpenAI to Tesla to take over Autopilot.

Doing fractional Head of AI work for mid-market operators for the past year, I get the same question every discovery call: "what happens to my data and my workflow if [vendor] gets bought, sued, or pivots?"

The Brockman diary is the rare moment where the people running the vendor write the answer in their own words, in real time. What it actually shows is the people closest to the conversion knew the governance risk was real and contested. Not an argument for picking sides between Musk and Altman. An argument for the boring practitioner version: if your business depends on a model API, your contract and your switching cost are the only things that matter. The internal ethics of the vendor are not a hedge.

We default to Claude for client work right now with the explicit caveat that we'd swap to whichever model is best and cheapest in 18 months, and we structure the stack so they can. That's the lesson the diary should put on every CTO's whiteboard, regardless of who they think is the bad actor.

> This is pretty damning for OpenAI

I don't see how. Cases are decided by facts and law, not feelings -- except to the extent those feelings are probative of state of mind, which is relevant for some legal issues but not others. My understanding is that the crux of the case is on the extent to which a number of informal messages should be considered a binding contract.

Trying to go from a single admission like this to an overall legal conclusion is a lot like seeing a single line in a program and then concluding there's a bug -- without having ever seen the rest of the program. You might think "this line always crashes, " but actually it's never called (does not go to any matter at issue), or none of the terms mean what you think they mean, etc.

Though as far as I can tell the charity which Musk put about $30m into still exists and holds 26% of OpenAI's commercial arm valued at ~200bn. So rather than being stolen it's still there and with 7000x as much assets? Not sure how that plays out legally? It looks hard for Musk to win to me. IANAL.

IANAL, but as an analogy perhaps: Some of the investments made from FTX stolen assets got amazing gains (Anthropic being a notable investment). But it doesn’t undo the crime.

In FTX's case there obviously was a crime - stealing customer money. With OpenAI I don't really see it, hence I guess the lack of a criminal case. The 'stealing a charity' bit is more metaphorical - it wasn't actually stolen, just the control kind of moving from friends of Musk to friends of Altman which was inevitable when Musk quit.

I think Musk is alleging unjust enrichment of Altman and Brockman but given they only have a small percentage in the for profit they set up it's going to be hard to prove that's unjust in court I guess.

You could argue OpenAI had drifted from its mission to be open.

Ofcourse you can steal a charity! So long as it's not _his_ charity.