When can we take AI doomers severely?
That’s a key subtext of Elon Musk’s try to shut down OpenAI’s for-profit AI enterprise. His attorneys argue that the group was arrange as a charity centered on AI security, and misplaced its means in pursuit of lucre. To show that, they cite outdated emails and statements from the group’s founders concerning the want for a public-spirited counterweight to Google DeepMind.
At present, they known as their solely skilled witness: Stuart Russell, a College of California, Berkeley laptop science professor who has studied AI for many years. His job was to supply background on AI, and set up that this know-how is harmful sufficient to fret about.
Russell co-signed an open letter in March 2023 calling for a six-month pause in AI analysis. In an indication of the contradictions right here, Musk additionally signed the identical letter, at the same time as he was launching xAI, his personal for-profit AI lab.
Russell instructed jurors and Decide Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers that there have been quite a lot of dangers related to the event of AI, starting from cybersecurity threats to issues with misalignment and the winner-take-all nature of creating Synthetic Basic Intelligence (AGI). In the end, he stated that there was a pressure between the pursuit of AGI and security.
Russell’s bigger issues concerning the existential threats of unconstrained AI didn’t get aired in open court docket after objections from OpenAI’s attorneys led the decide to restrict Russell’s testimony. However Russell has lengthy been a critic of the arms-race dynamic created by frontier labs across the globe competing to succeed in AGI first, and known as for governments to control the sphere extra tightly.
OpenAI’s attorneys spent their cross-examination establishing that Russell wasn’t immediately evaluating the group’s company construction or its particular security insurance policies.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
However this reporter (in addition to the decide and the jurors) will probably be weighing how a lot worth to placed on the connection between company greed and AI security issues. Nearly each one of many OpenAI founders have strenuously warned concerning the dangers of AI, whereas additionally emphasizing the advantages, trying to construct AI as quick as attainable — and hatching plans for AI-focused for-profit enterprises they might management.
From the surface, a transparent challenge right here is the rising realization inside OpenAI after its founding that the group merely wanted extra compute spend if it was to succeed. That cash may solely come from for-profit buyers. The founding crew’s worry of AGI within the arms of a single group pushed them to hunt the capital that in the end tore the crew aside, creating the arms race we all know immediately—and bringing us to this lawsuit.
The identical dynamic is already taking part in out at a nationwide degree: Senator Bernie Sanders’ push for a legislation imposing a moratorium on knowledge middle building cites AI fears enunciated by Musk, Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton and others. Hoden Omar, who works on the commerce group the Middle for Information Innovation, objected to Sanders citing their fears with out their hopes, telling TechCrunch that “it’s unclear why the general public ought to low cost every thing tech billionaires say besides when their phrases might be recruited to fill gaps in a precarious argument.”
Now, either side of the case are asking the court docket to do exactly that: take a part of Altman and Musk’s arguments severely, however low cost the elements which are much less helpful for his or her authorized argument.
Once you buy by way of hyperlinks in our articles, we might earn a small fee. This doesn’t have an effect on our editorial independence.
