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When do we take AI doomers seriously? <\/p>\n
That\u2019s a key subtext of Elon Musk\u2019s attempt to shut down OpenAI\u2019s for-profit AI business. His attorneys argue that the organization was set up as a charity focused on AI safety, and lost its way in pursuit of lucre. To prove that, they cite old emails and statements from the organization\u2019s founders about the need for a public-spirited counterweight to Google DeepMind.<\/p>\n
Today, they called the only expert witness to speak directly to AI technology: Stuart Russell, a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor who has studied AI for decades. His job was to offer background on AI, and establish that this technology is dangerous enough to worry about.<\/p>\n
Russell co-signed an open letter<\/a> in March 2023 calling for a six-month pause in AI research. In a sign of the contradictions here, Musk also signed the same letter, even as he was launching xAI, his own for-profit AI lab.<\/p>\n Russell told jurors and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers that there were a variety of risks associated with the development of AI, ranging from cybersecurity threats to problems with misalignment and the winner-take-all nature of developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Ultimately, he said that there was a tension between the pursuit of AGI and safety.<\/p>\n Russell\u2019s larger concerns about the existential threats of unconstrained AI didn\u2019t get aired in open court after objections from OpenAI\u2019s attorneys led the judge to limit Russell\u2019s testimony. But Russell has long been a critic of the arms-race dynamic created by frontier labs around the globe competing to reach AGI first, and called for governments to regulate the field more tightly.<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s attorneys spent their cross-examination establishing that Russell wasn\u2019t directly evaluating the organization\u2019s corporate structure or its specific safety policies.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> But this reporter (as well as the judge and the jurors) will be weighing how much value to put on the relationship between corporate greed and AI safety concerns. Virtually every one of the OpenAI founders have strenuously warned about the risks of AI, while also emphasizing the benefits, attempting to build AI as fast as possible \u2014 and hatching plans for AI-focused for-profit enterprises they would control.<\/p>\n From the outside, a clear issue here is the growing realization inside OpenAI after its founding that the organization simply needed more compute spend if it was to succeed. That money could only come from for-profit investors. The founding team\u2019s fear of AGI in the hands of a single organization pushed them to seek the capital that ultimately tore the team apart, creating the arms race we know today\u2014and bringing us to this lawsuit. <\/p>\n The same dynamic is already playing out at a national level: Senator Bernie Sanders\u2019 push for a law imposing a moratorium<\/a> on data center construction cites AI fears enunciated by Musk, Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton and others. Hoden Omar, who works at the trade organization the Center for Data Innovation, objected to Sanders citing their fears without their hopes, telling TechCrunch that \u201cit is unclear why the public should discount everything tech billionaires say except when their words can be recruited to fill gaps in a precarious argument.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, both sides of the case are asking the court to do just that: take part of Altman and Musk\u2019s arguments seriously, but discount the parts that are less useful for their legal argument.<\/p>\n Correction: The article was updated to correct name of a Stuart Russell, University of California, Berkeley computer science professor<\/em>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n