Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

Summary

Had Musk v. Altman merely been a petulant matter of injured vanity, it might have played as a diverting farce. It was instead a travesty. The underlying issues—of how A.I. ought to be governed, and by whom, and how—are of great consequence. But in this trial, to root against Tweedledum was effectively to root for Tweedledee. It was a no-win situation.The butt pillow might have begun as a symbol of the trial’s frivolity, but it was clear soon enough that it was also a powerful metaphor for the collective failures that got us here. It was difficult, sitting in the unyielding pews, not to feel personally implicated. These were the leaders our society had somehow been assigned. Mike Isaac, a veteran tech reporter for the Times, wasn’t ashamed to admit that Brockman had inspired him to secure his own butt pillow. Isaac, a magnanimous man who looks like the actor Wilford Brimley styled as a member of the hardcore band Minor Threat, offered to share the cushion, but it struck me as somehow more appropriate to sit in the docks as a penitent. The courtroom filled up quickly in anticipation of Sam Altman, who was set to appear on the stand that day under oath. The OpenAI C.E.O. has long been known for his boyishness, but the past few years have coarsened his features and frosted his spiky hair with gray tips. He looked like a lesser vocalist for ’N Sync on a reunion tour. His presence in the courtroom had the mournful air of someone who no longer qualified as precocious.The basic question of the case, which is also the basic question of Altman’s career, is whether the transmogrification of OpenAI from a safety-minded nonprofit into a ravenous corporate behemoth was cynical in intention or merely in outcome. Recently, my New Yorker colleague Andrew Marantz appeared on a podcast to discuss the alternative ways to model his behavior: the “always-a-master-plan, 3-D-chess view” and the “improvisatory-checkers-all-along view.” There was a clever bit of trollery in Altman’s decision...