tech
Musk’s Failed OpenAI Lawsuit Underscores xAI’s Struggles
On Monday, an Oakland jury took under two hours to unanimously reach a verdict dismissing Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. Throughout the trial Musk had portrayed it as the good fight to prevent Altman from “stealing” OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit. Others, however, framed it as a more cynical effort. “It’s too late now to gin up something to harm a competitor,” said OpenAI’s lead lawyer, William Savitt, during his opening arguments.
TL;DR
- An Oakland jury dismissed Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, ruling it was filed past the statute of limitations.
- Musk's AI company, xAI, is reportedly falling behind competitors, with its chatbot Grok seeing a 60% drop in downloads and low paid subscription rates.
- xAI's credibility was questioned after Musk's testimony suggested the company may train its models on outputs from OpenAI.
- xAI is renting compute capacity at its Colossus 1 facility to Anthropic, indicating insufficient demand for its own models.
- SpaceX, which acquired xAI, is reportedly aiming for an IPO, potentially signaling a pivot for Musk from AI model development to providing computing power.