Musk vs. Altman: OpenAI mission trial enters 2nd week

After the notable testimony of Elon Musk, it is the turn of a co-founder of OpenAI to testify Monday at the trial in California that the richest man in the world brought against the creators of ChatGPT, in the hope of forcing his rivals to once again become a simple non-profit foundation.

Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI who has gone from being a protégé of Elon Musk to a sworn enemy in ten years, is not expected until the week of May 11 in the witness chair. The future of the young and powerful generative AI giant, now valued at more than $850 billion and in the running for an IPO, depends on this trial.

While waiting for his emblematic boss, it will therefore be his most faithful traveling companion, Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, who will undergo the fire of questions from Elon Musk's lawyers on Monday at the Oakland court, near San Francisco.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose group is accused of having illegally financed the commercial transformation of OpenAI, could also testify during the week.

From Tuesday to last Thursday, Elon Musk presented himself for three days as a selfless benefactor of the beginnings of OpenAI, to which he contributed with donations to the tune of $38 million from 2016 to 2020, before being betrayed.

The boss of SpaceX and Tesla assures that he wanted to counterbalance the domination of Google and place this technological revolution, likely to destroy humanity according to him, in better hands, freed from the pressure of profit.

“You can't steal from a charity,” insisted the richest man in the world, who considers the commercial shift made by OpenAI with the support of Microsoft illegal. Its commercial structure, already one of the most valuable companies on the planet, however, still remains subordinate to the original philanthropic foundation.

- Global competition -

Opposite him, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman attended almost the entirety of his hearing from the front row, without any statement in or outside the courtroom, surrounded by dozens of journalists since the first day.

Opposite, OpenAI's lawyer counterattacked the multibillionaire on his own lucrative ambitions. Elon Musk has just absorbed xAI, his own AI laboratory whose chatbot Grok is a rival to ChatGPT, into his space juggernaut SpaceX. Valued at around $1.250 billion, the latter is on its way to an unprecedented IPO.

The stakes are considerable: if judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will decide alone after the opinion of the jury, agrees with Elon Musk, OpenAI could see its entry into the stock market compromised. The cards in the fierce global competition on AI, in which Google and the Chinese tech champions are well placed, would be reshuffled.

In the lead, OpenAI now competes with Anthropic, and its Claude model. Their competition