the trial Pitting Elon Musk against the CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman He explained that the two billionaires agreed on one thing: building artificial intelligence will require significant resources and huge amounts of money.
It may seem obvious now that an AI-obsessed stock market is helping finance a global building boom of chip-making factories and data centers that consume energy to keep chatbots running, but testimony and evidence have shown how… People with great control Those in the AI industry have been discussing its costs privately for nearly a decade.
“Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough,” Musk said in a 2018 email to Altman and other OpenAI founders about what he saw as an increasingly futile attempt to compete with Google. “This needs billions a year immediately or forget it.”
Higher costs have factored into the path of OpenAI, which began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing artificial intelligence for the public good, and is now an $852 billion venture capital organization. As San Francisco-based OpenAI and other AI companies move toward a historic Wall Street debut, the experiment has also raised questions about whether anything other than commercial interests can guide the future of AI.
It’s possible to build big things with just nonprofit money, but in the case of OpenAI’s early years, the uncertainty surrounding AI also made it a risky investment, said Karan Girotra, a professor of operations, technology and innovation at Cornell Tech. He said that investing in artificial intelligence is now no longer just speculation.
“It’s now the traditional investment in something we know works,” Girotra said. “People want your car, you have to build the factory before ordering.”
In his lawsuit, Musk OpenAI charged By betraying its philanthropic mission to build artificial intelligence, saying Altman and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman went behind his back and unfairly enriched themselves. OpenAI, in turn, said Musk backed plans to start a for-profit company and filed a lawsuit in 2024 to undermine the ChatGPT maker’s success as he builds his own AI company, xAI.
A federal jury in Oakland, California, was unable to issue a ruling on the merits of the case and determine Musk’s lawsuit. Missed the legal deadline He dismissed it on Monday after a three-week trial.
But the trial detailed internal battles that were a harbinger of today’s societal and political debates about the impacts and costs of artificial intelligence.
“It’s kind of hard to imagine at this point, given where AI has come,” testified Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, as he explained to jurors why his company chose to invest billions of dollars to help build OpenAI’s technology after founding donor Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018.
“That was before ChatGPT,” Scott said. “This was before all these amazing things that are happening now, so most people at Microsoft were very skeptical about whether or not all these claims would come true.”
Microsoft, the defendant in the lawsuit, was also looking at the time for a way to compete with Google in artificial intelligence research. OpenAI told Microsoft that what they need is more data and more computing resources — and if they have that, their AI systems will grow much stronger.
“The things they wanted, which we eventually helped them do, were capital-intensive projects like building giant data centers full of expensive computers and networks,” Scott said.
There’s still disagreement about how much profit was the main driver of OpenAI’s venture capitalization, which is not yet profitable but is likely headed for an IPO later this year.
But what is clear is how the costs involved have limited the company’s options.
More than five years before OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the company made a breakthrough when it taught an AI system to beat professional players in Dota 2, a multiplayer video game featuring ogres, centaurs, and other fantasy creatures.
“Frankly, the world’s reaction to it was somewhat less than I thought it should be, but for us internally, it seemed like a moment where we showed that our technology, using what’s called reinforcement learning, could take on a very complex task,” Altman said.
OpenAI’s live-streamed victory over one of Dota 2’s top players in a Seattle tournament in 2017 made the small nonprofit a major contender against Google, which was then seen as a 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.
“He was impressed,” Altman said of Musk. “And right after Dota won, Mr. Musk said he thinks we really need to get more serious and figure out how to get more capital.”
For another co-founder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, Dota’s victory marked the beginning of a debate about whether OpenAI should create a for-profit company to raise money more easily.
“The realization is that to make progress in artificial intelligence, you need a big computer,” Sutskever told the jury. “And you need a big computer because the brain is a big computer. You have a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses in the brain.”
What followed was a battle of wills — with Altman and Musk vying for leadership of OpenAI and Musk later trying to integrate the AI lab into his own car company, Tesla. Other OpenAI leaders resisted, and Musk eventually resigned.
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AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this story.