00:00A jury has been selected for the trial between the AI firm and Elon Musk,
00:04who claims that the company, OpenAI, abandoned its founding mission as a non-profit.
00:09Arguments begin today, but regardless of the outcome,
00:12Bloomberg Opinion reporter Dave Lee says it's a win for Musk.
00:16Dave, you're with us now.
00:17And in many ways, is it the distraction that ends up winning for ex-AI and Elon Musk here?
00:23Right, I think if you're Elon Musk, you're looking at OpenAI and thinking
00:26there's a competitor that reduces Musk's own chances of capturing more of the AI market.
00:32We know SpaceX is looking to go public very, very soon.
00:36And ex-AI, the AI company, is part of that.
00:39And what this case is doing, at the very, very least,
00:42is putting a cloud over OpenAI's own efforts to go public themselves.
00:47As this is overhanging them, there's a chance, if it really goes against OpenAI,
00:51that they'll have to unwind their for-profit business and go back to the non-profit structure
00:56that they originally set up in, which Elon Musk says he's seeking to create.
01:01OpenAI, of course, say, you know, Elon Musk is being disingenuous.
01:04He wants to be rich from AI as well.
01:06He was behind a for-profit restructuring for OpenAI.
01:09And that this is just a ploy to slow them down.
01:12Well, it's a ploy that is already working and could get more effective,
01:16depending on how the court ends up seeing it.
01:21Okay, the title of your column is OpenAI is Shedding Baggage.
01:26Now it needs a jury's help.
01:28Dave Lee, what baggage?
01:30Just be a bit more specific.
01:32Where do you begin?
01:33I mean, look, we've seen today this issue of having user and revenue growth issues.
01:39But one of the things that's been affecting OpenAI recently is this idea that it's doing too many things
01:45and some of this deal-making has tied it in knots.
01:48So, for example, on Monday we saw that OpenAI had renegotiated an already renegotiated deal with Microsoft
01:55over compute, over access to frontier models.
01:58That's a good bit of baggage to get out of the way because it brings some clarity to their deal
02:02with Microsoft,
02:03which has kind of gone sour over the last couple of years.
02:06Other baggage includes what the company was calling SideQuest.
02:09So we saw it close down Sora, the video app that was kind of popular but was really expensive to
02:14run,
02:15didn't really seem to have much in the way of generating enough revenue to make it worth it for OpenAI.
02:22These are all little things that Sam Altman, I think, in his sheer enthusiasm to try and do everything,
02:28are now, as the company prepares for an IPO, seen as distractions, seen as strains on the balance sheet.
02:34You know, this is a company that's going to show that even though it's going to be losing money for
02:38quite some time,
02:39up until at least 2030 is the projection.
02:42Right.
02:42They've got to be shown to be reining in some of those costs to at least be heading in the
02:46right direction.
02:47The biggest bit of baggage, or one of the largest bits of baggage, I should say, is this trial, though,
02:52which is why, as I said, they need a jury's help with some of this.
02:55Well, they've got the jury.
02:57They have opening statements.
02:58In fact, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were at the court yesterday, which was a surprise to some.
03:03We are expecting a lot of other previous and current OpenAI executives to take the stand, right?
03:08Yeah.
03:09I mean, OpenAI has been a soap opera in Silicon Valley.
03:12You had Sam Altman forced out briefly back after a weekend.
03:15You've had staff leaving, starting their own companies.
03:18Anthropic, of course, is one of those.
03:20Mira Morati has started her own company.
03:22She was formerly at OpenAI.
03:25Having some of this laid out on the stand is going to be wonderful for people like us.
03:30I feel it's going to be very uncomfortable for some of those really sort of at the center of this.
03:34There's a lot of egos here.
03:35There's a lot of, you know, bad blood, I think, between some of these former colleagues.
03:41But that's what happens, you know, when you're at the center of what, for the last couple of years,
03:45I think we can say is one of the most exciting and talked-about companies in the world.
03:49So plenty to enjoy.
03:50We've got a couple of weeks, a few weeks of it to enjoy starting today.
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