{"id":357715,"date":"2026-05-24T03:04:49","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T08:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/could-anything-but-profit-steer-ai-the-openai-trial-offered-clues-but-no-verdict"},"modified":"2026-05-24T03:04:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T08:04:54","slug":"could-anything-but-profit-steer-ai-the-openai-trial-offered-clues-but-no-verdict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/could-anything-but-profit-steer-ai-the-openai-trial-offered-clues-but-no-verdict","title":{"rendered":"Might something however revenue steer AI? The OpenAI trial supplied clues however no verdict"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"prism-article-body\">\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao MvWXB TjIXL aGjvy ebVHC \">The <a class=\"zZygg UbGlr iFzkS qdXbA WCDhQ DbOXS tqUtK GpWVU iJYzE \" data-testid=\"prism-linkbase\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/elon-musk-openai-altman-ai-trial-c93da9d391ac03b88f987950197f28eb\">trial<\/a> pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI CEO <a class=\"zZygg UbGlr iFzkS qdXbA WCDhQ DbOXS tqUtK GpWVU iJYzE \" data-testid=\"prism-linkbase\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/altman-musk-openai-trial-7648a50c3981dcc464324d1835b77f93\">Sam Altman<\/a> made clear the two billionaires agreed on one thing: building artificial intelligence would require significant resources \u2014 and enormous amounts of money. <\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">It may seem obvious now, as an AI-obsessed stock market helps finance a global construction boom of chipmaking factories and energy-hogging data centers to keep chatbots running, but testimony and evidence showed how <a class=\"zZygg UbGlr iFzkS qdXbA WCDhQ DbOXS tqUtK GpWVU iJYzE \" data-testid=\"prism-linkbase\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/openai-musk-altman-trial-agi-4f8810743d6ef9a72f91f8721a3f4027\">people with outsized control<\/a> of the AI industry were privately debating its costs nearly a decade ago.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cEven raising several hundred million won\u2019t be enough,\u201d Musk said in a 2018 email to Altman and other OpenAI co-founders about what he increasingly saw as a futile attempt to compete with Google. \u201cThis needs billions per year immediately or forget it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">The soaring costs factored into the trajectory of OpenAI, which began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good and is now a capitalistic enterprise valued at $852 billion. As San Francisco-based OpenAI and other AI companies move toward historically large Wall Street debuts, the trial also raised questions about whether anything but commercial interests can steer AI\u2019s future.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">It is possible to build big things only with nonprofit money, but in the case of OpenAI&#8217;s early years, the uncertainty around AI also made it a risky investment, said Karan Girotra, a professor of operations, technology, and innovation at Cornell Tech. Now, he said, investment in AI is no longer speculative.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cNow it\u2019s traditional investment in something we know works,\u201d Girotra said. \u201cPeople want your car, you need to build the factory ahead of demand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">In his lawsuit, Musk <a class=\"zZygg UbGlr iFzkS qdXbA WCDhQ DbOXS tqUtK GpWVU iJYzE \" data-testid=\"prism-linkbase\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/musk-sam-altman-openai-trial-closing-arguments-3bda5ebbec28c23ac9e481a4edcad725\">accused OpenAI<\/a> of betraying its charitable mission for building AI, saying Altman and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman went behind his back and unjustly enriched themselves. OpenAI, in turn, has said Musk supported plans to form a for-profit company and filed his 2024 lawsuit to undercut the ChatGPT maker&#8217;s success as he built his own AI company, xAI.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">The federal jury in Oakland, California, never got to deliver a verdict on the merits of the case, determining Musk&#8217;s lawsuit <a class=\"zZygg UbGlr iFzkS qdXbA WCDhQ DbOXS tqUtK GpWVU iJYzE \" data-testid=\"prism-linkbase\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/musk-openai-trial-verdict-0b9b0bfaffe96f2c930341f52dfe4f8c\">missed a statutory deadline<\/a> and dismissing it Monday after a three-week trial.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">But the trial put on record details of internal battles that presaged today\u2019s societal and political debates over AI\u2019s impacts and costs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cIt\u2019s sort of hard to imagine at this point, given where AI has gotten,\u201d testified Kevin Scott, Microsoft&#8217;s chief technology officer, as he explained to jurors why his company opted to invest billions of dollars to help build OpenAI&#8217;s technology after founding donor Musk quit OpenAI&#8217;s board in 2018.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cIt was before ChatGPT,&#8221; Scott said. &#8220;It was before these remarkable things that are happening right now and so most of the people at Microsoft were very skeptical about whether or not all of these claims were going to materialize into reality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">Microsoft, a defendant in the lawsuit, at the time was also looking for a way to compete with Google in AI research. OpenAI told Microsoft what they needed was more data and more computing resources \u2014 and if they had that, their AI systems would grow far more powerful.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cThe things that they wanted and ultimately that we helped them do were very capital-intensive projects like building giant data centers, full of very expensive computers and networks,\u201d Scott said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">It remains in dispute how much profit was the prime motivator for the shift to OpenAI\u2019s capitalistic enterprise, which is not yet profitable but likely headed for an initial public offering as soon as later this year. <\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">What is clear, however, is how the costs involved constrained the company&#8217;s options. <\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">More than five years before OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the company had a breakthrough when it taught an AI system to beat professional players of Dota 2, a multiplayer video game featuring ogres, centaurs and other fantastical creatures.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cHonestly, the world reacted to it somewhat less than I thought they should have, but to us internally, it really felt like a moment where we had shown that our technology, using something called reinforcement learning, could take on an enormously complex task,&#8221; Altman testified.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">OpenAI&#8217;s livestreamed victory against a top Dota 2 player at a Seattle competition in 2017 made the tiny nonprofit a major contender against Google, which was then seen as the leader in AI research. It also led to some soul-searching about how OpenAI could compete when it was a nonprofit, largely dependent on Musk and other donors. <\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cHe was impressed,\u201d Altman said of Musk. \u201cAnd then immediately after the Dota win, Mr. Musk said he thought we really need to get more serious and figure out how to get way more capital.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">For another co-founder and OpenAI&#8217;s former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, the Dota victory was the beginning of discussion about whether OpenAI should create a for-profit company to more easily raise money. <\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cThe realization is that to make progress in AI, you need a big computer,&#8221; Sutskever told jurors. &#8220;And you need the big computer because the brain is a big computer. You have a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses in the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">What followed was a battle of wills \u2014 with Altman and Musk vying for leadership of OpenAI and Musk later trying to fold the AI laboratory into his car company Tesla. The other OpenAI leaders resisted, and Musk eventually quit. <\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">___<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC eTIW sUzSN \">AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this story. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/abcnews.com\/US\/wireStory\/profit-steer-ai-openai-trial-offered-clues-verdict-133262961\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made clear the two billionaires agreed on one thing: building artificial intelligence would require significant [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":357718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33383,71,434,10273,33382,33384,9486,428,20142,4971,2195],"class_list":["post-357715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-ai-laboratory","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-ceo","tag-chatgpt","tag-general-public","tag-karan-girotra","tag-manufacturing-facility","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-san-francisco","tag-tesla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357715"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357717,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357715\/revisions\/357717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etrafficlane.com\/60dollarmiracle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}