The Elon vs OpenAI Lawsuit and ads in ChatGPT | Diet TBPN

0:01Bunch of news today. Lots of people dropping stuff on Fridays. What's the meaning behind that? I don't know, but we'll take you through it. Lots of AI news, lots of open AI news, lots of open AI news, lots of people dropping stuff on Friday, lots of people dropping stuff on Friday, lots of people dropping stuff on Friday, lots of people. man for Sam, the steel man for Elon. I think you had the best take of the day so far, which is that this is the Super Bowl for Nick on X. Yeah, Nick on X. N.I.K. is having the best day of his life. Opening eyes number one hater for three years. He's having a great time.

0:41Let's kick it off with the Elon should lose side of the argument. I'm going to be steel manning Sam, steel manning Greg. They did nothing wrong. Elon's wrong. He needs to back down. Do you want your helmet? So, okay. Elon made a donation to a nonprofit organization. He got a tax write-off on that donation. And that nonprofit, OpenAI, the nonprofit, it's now one of the best funded nonprofits in history. And it's still focused on the original mission. OpenAI, the nonprofit, it still exists. It has just a tiny hundred plus billion dollar position in a for-profit company. they're going to be able to do nonprofit stuff forever, whatever they want to do.

1:24If they want to hire researchers, if they want to write white papers, if they want to train their own models, the OpenAI nonprofit can do that. Elon donated roughly$38 million alongside other donors who put in$90 million. There's some debate over how much Elon put in. I saw one report that was around$45. It's in the tens of millions of dollars. Their sort of optimistic belief is that the damages would be$38 million. If they lose. The original donation. If they lose. But I'm arguing right now that they're going to win. They're going to win. The jury is going to say not guilty. Elon, yeah, he was a big donor.

1:53He put up tens of millions of dollars, but play out the counterfactual. It's entirely reasonable to assume that things would have played out exactly the same, even if Elon was never in the picture, even if he never donated. Sure, I mean, the office would have had to be a little bit smaller. You're working with 90 million instead of 120 million. But we've seen folks raise 90 million Series Bs. we've seen folks raise$120 million series of C's, roughly the same company. You pay people a little bit less. You have a few less perks. The office snacks aren't as good. Maybe you skimp on the 45-pound plates.

2:27You just get the 10-pound plates. These things happen. So if Elon had never donated, maybe Sam would have just stepped up his donation. He put in 10. So it's not like if Elon didn't donate, he wouldn't have, like, OpenAI wouldn't exist, right? It's totally possible that everything would have been the same and that the Elon donations were not make or break for OpenAI. Elon should lose this case because everyone around the table came to the same realization at roughly the same time about the goal of creating AI responsibly. Basically, scaling laws ensured that AI progress would require vastly more capital than could ever be raised through donations.

3:06At a certain point, if you need$100 million for a nonprofit, you can do it if you're aligned with some of the world's richest people in tech, like Elon, Peter Thiel, the other folks that I mentioned. On the flip side, if you need$100 billion or you need$50 billion like OpenAI has already raised in the venture markets, that's just not going to happen in the nonprofit sector, except it could have. Because if Elon really believed in the nonprofit mission and really said nonprofit or bust, yes, I see the scaling laws. Yes, I agree we'll need an insane amount of capital to get to AGI. Well, guess who has an insane amount of capital?

3:41Elon. If he wanted to, he could have said, yes, I'm staying with the nonprofit strategy, and I'm going to put up the 50 billion. Every dollar that OpenAI has raised in the venture markets could have been a dollar donated by Elon Musk if he sold down all the positions. Now it's crazy. Never going to happen. It doesn't make any sense. Obviously, we're pro. I think the nonprofit transition makes a ton of sense in the context of raising that amount of money. I think that's a reality. And truthfully, I think that everyone around the table agreed about that. Even if you were going to keep funding the nonprofit, you're going up against Google.

4:13They have an economic flywheel that will provide the amount of capital required to advance AI, build massive. They're a hyperscaler. They're going to build massive data centers. They're not going to have a problem with this. Google was set up to make investments at this level. At$10 billion of CapEx, Google's not blinking. The shareholders are all thumbs up on that. Very different. Remember when Sam was texting Elon, I think this was in 2023, saying, like, it pains me to see you attack OpenAI publicly. I think we can both agree it's important that Google doesn't own AI. And that's been one of the only things that throughout this whole process they've stayed in agreement on.

4:52Yes, yes. So they want to create a counterbalance to Google specifically. Elon did actually have the money to continue supporting OpenAI as a nonprofit. It would have been crazy, but technically could have sold down positions. But Elon clearly agreed that OpenAI should build a for-profit, and that's why he wanted equity. He wanted to be CEO. He was interested in OpenAI joining Tesla. Tesla's a for-profit. He wasn't saying, we're going to bring OpenAI over to Tesla and the whole thing is going to be a non-profit. Clearly, Elon is no purist about non-profit AI research. He runs XAI. It's a direct competitor to OpenAI.

5:23He started it as a benefit corporation, which meant it had an obligation to deliver environmental and social benefits. But after the merger with X, that benefit corporation status was dropped entirely. This whole lawsuit is clearly just corporate lawfare. And the battle should be fought out in the financial markets, in the app store, on the open internet, not the courtroom. Let the best product win. Let the best AI model win. Let them build. Let them cook. This is what winning, like today, is what winning looks like for Elon. It doesn't really get me one step closer to Mars, right? It doesn't necessarily align.

5:58And so the win state right now is just being disruptive, right? Basically buying XAI time, putting OpenAI in a position where they are trying to go public, right? And they've got this massive high-profile trial going on. The helmet is really adding a lot to this conversation. I love it. Now, let's argue the flip side. Elon Musk will win the OpenAI lawsuit. And he should. and he should, he should win this. Judge Gonzalez Rogers already rejected OpenAI's motion to dismiss. Judge said, I think there's plenty of evidence that something happened here. OpenAI was trying to kill the case before the trial even started.

6:42They're trying to get rid of this thing, but it's clear that Elon is onto something here. Okay, just look at the emails. It's so obvious that the OpenAI squad was trying to fleece Elon and push him out without giving him a fair share. Elon said, guys, this is a direct quote from Elon email. Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. Otherwise, I'm out. I'm not donating anymore. If you're going to do the for-profit, just go start a normal company and wind this thing down. And that makes a ton of sense. It was an open invitation by him to just go build a traditional venture-backed company.

7:19And this is part of the trial. Part of the trial and this proceeding that I'm interested in is finding out why they didn't just do that. It's not like Sam and Greg couldn't have been like, cool, we worked on a nonprofit for a while. How do we set up a C-Corp? How do we set up a C-Corp? How do we set up a C-Corp? That's too complicated. Sam's like, oh, I own a couple points of Stripe. I think they have something called Atlas. You can just make a C-Corp. Maybe he forgot. A few clicks. Maybe there was a very, very specific reason. The nonprofit had developed some IP at that point that meant that starting over or having to rebuild a team or whatever factor meant that that was going to set them back years.

7:56That's a big deal. Elon gave them an invitation. Just go out and build a traditional venture-backed company. Maybe I'll invest. Maybe I'll be involved. Maybe I won't, but at least we'll have a clean slate to start from. But Sam told Elon that he remained, quote, enthusiastic about the nonprofit structure. That was enough to get Elon to donate more, but OpenAI wasn't all in on staying in nonprofit mode. They were on the cusp of restructuring OpenAI and taking the$10 billion investment from Microsoft. See, the reality of modern philanthropy, it's not fire and forget. Big donors like Elon, in this case, do have specific intentions and conditions attached to the gifts.

8:39It's not like he's just throwing 20 bucks in the Salvation Army donation box around Christmas. This is 30-something million. If you give that to a university and you want a building, they need to build that building. They probably need to build it to your specifications, even if you want your windows. They might even put your name on it. Yeah, they might even put your name on it. And you can dictate these things in a nonprofit donation. And you can ask that the donation is contingent on those results. You can pursue specific directions. He has every right to demand results. So a big part of this and why Elon is going to win, why he should win, is that you can't just have corporate structure remorse, OpenAI.

9:19You can't pull the plug on promises made. OpenAI's own certificates of incorporation talk about creating a company, quote, exclusively for charitable purposes with the technology being intended to benefit the public. Like, what's exclusively charitable about raising venture to build a subscription app with ads? That's not charity. Why are you doing that? Elon's right. Not only should Elon win this case against OpenAI, he will win this case. It's simple. Bunch of people, bunch of San Francisco elite tech guys, their fancy cars promised to build AI for humanity. They took$38 million from one of their co-founders based on that promise, then turned around and built a$500 billion for-profit empire with Microsoft.

10:04It's a straightforward bait-and-switch story that will play well to 12 regular jurors in Oakland. And so that's the case. I mean, this is going to be the big challenge, finding 12 regular people in Oakland. Extremely offline. How illegal is it to try to be on a jury? Extremely. Stop trying to get on the jury. Stop trying to get on the jury. Look, I said this. I'm going to vote. I'm going to vote in favor of whoever has the higher ARKGI score. Okay. I'm just pro AI progress. Yes, yes, yes. I don't care at all about who wins. I just want better models. You just want better AI. Yeah. Whoever will build, whoever's scaling faster.

10:38It does feel like it won't be existential. And it feels like it's more of a vibe war than maybe a true economic war. You could go back and argue that Elon should get pro rata equity at what was effectively like a pre-seed round that was done as a nonprofit. And that's 38 out of 120 that was raised in the nonprofit, something like that. So you give him 25. Something I'm curious about is, is there any precedent for a company going for a Blockbuster IPO while having this, like, lawsuit that is really going at the, like, foundation of the entity itself? Elon actually didn't directly donate to OpenAI.

11:14It was basically indirectly through a donor-advised fund through OpenAI's fiscal sponsor, YC. and so because it's not direct the idea of like the the the specific charitable purpose doesn't actually like it doesn't hold up oh and that it actually just defaults to like opening eyes yeah because you donate to one entity and then that entity would have to make that claim so their direct communication doesn't necessarily hold as much weight and then so there's like there's a bunch of pages about the history of like how you actually define these things so It seems like it's going to just come down to extremely esoteric legal definitions of trust.

11:56The last thing I would say there is part of opening eyes to fence is that through their actions, they've created one of the most well-capitalized foundations in history. And I think that they're going to continue to lean on that. Novo Nordisk has a foundation themselves focused on biomedical research. And it has the estimate is that they have$167 billion. Okay. So that's why we're using the term one of the best funded, because it's possible that the OpenAI nonprofit might not be the best funded in history. Although, if the stock continues to rip, they will probably become the best funded in history.

12:34There's a whole bunch of leaks and news in the timeline. There's so many documents that hit the timeline that it brought down all of X, and X actually crashed because so many people were logging on. The other interesting thing is that do we know where Sam Altman sits in terms of equity? It's been going back and forth? There isn't a number, but in one of the documents, I lost it. But it said he had indirect exposure via YC. Okay, okay. Yeah. Into the for-profit as well? Yes. Okay, so look through exposure there. But then in terms of like an actual grant, is there a number that's been thrown around?

13:04To my knowledge, nothing has been shared publicly other than the sort of idea of him getting around 7%. Okay, okay. Yeah. That still feels low for a co-founder of a mega-cap. No, but that was happening. That's like a lot of dilution happened by that point. I mean, yeah, if anything, these files make a lot of Elon's kind of antics more understandable. Like he's been the one saying that they're morally bankrupt. And here they just straight up say it would be pretty morally bankrupt to steal the nonprofit from him. Yeah. Like, I don't think anyone ever expected their language come out that was this specific about their moment to moment thinking during that point in time.

13:50You look at the run that Sam has gone on. Yeah. And you could imagine a situation where they're sitting at the table and saying this boardroom ain't big enough for the two of us. Yep. Right. Yep. And it really feels that big egos. Alex read through thousands of pages in Musk versus Altman. So you don't have to. We'll go through some of the summary here. Sutskiver voiced his worry over text with Maradi and others. Sutskiver, my trepidation around open source is that we're treating it as a sideshow, e.g. def not going far enough to really hurt stability. So they're not taking it seriously. And if open source takes off, everyone could standardize on that.

14:28Bergav says, bro, scooping harder than a Ben and Jerry's employee. Let's go. This is good. This is good, Alex. He's scooping harder than a Ben & Sherry's employee. We're going to use that for now on. This is fantastic. So Miramorati said, we're missing the opportunity to set standards with this massive growing group of developers. People are hungry to build things, and we should lean in and bring our tech to as many people as possible. Long-term maximize our chance of maintaining lead, reducing competition. OpenAI leaders were divided over early investor Reid Hoffman's decision to start a rival AI lab inflection.

15:05Altman, here's how I'd summarize my thoughts on this. Pros, he supported us in a moment when no one else would, and it was pretty existential. Okay, so we're learning more about the existentialness of certain donations when they came in during the OpenAI nonprofit era. I think OpenAI would have been pretty effed if he hadn't stepped up. Also, he was instrumental in getting the first Microsoft deal done and has genuinely been quite helpful with Microsoft-related stuff, and he's generally a good board member. Satya Nadella was worried about Microsoft's position in AI when he started looking at OpenAI.

15:35Yeah, so Stripe was, in 2017, Stripe was valued at$9.2 billion. Bunch of wee lads. From Satya Nadella's deposition, the question to Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, did you feel that your progress was moving more slowly than you had liked? And the answer, Satya Nadella says, I mean, always as a CEO of a company, I feel my job is to sort of be dissatisfied with the rate of progress at all times. And so yes would be the answer, which is both in the absolute sense, which is can we build products that are more capable in any particular domain, and also vis-a-vis competition. And so Satya Nadella was obviously motivated to invest, and now he has a huge stack of OpenAI shares.

16:18On Wednesday, August 24, 2022, with the Pacific Northwest summer showing all of its beauty, Bill Gates hosted a dinner at his home in Lake Washington. Satya suggested the gathering, which included Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott and a handful of top researchers. Food and drinks would be served, but the main entree was a hush-hush demo by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman. On a forthcoming release of ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4. an AI built on large language models. Bill had long encouraged researchers to develop a truly accomplished AI assistant, but had voiced his skepticism about this particular approach.

17:00That sounds like I'm listening to an audible. Thank you. Microsoft beat out Amazon when it initially started working with OpenAI. Elon Musk was opposed to working with Jeff Bezos and wrote the following in an early email to Sam Altman. He said, I think Jeff is a bit of a tool and Satya is not. So I slightly prefer Microsoft. but I hate the marketing department. Altman responded that Amazon had started, quote, really dicking us around. Yeah. Such a crazy line. So the upside on Microsoft's initial$1 billion investment in OpenAI was capped at$500 billion. Hopefully they hit that cap from a filing written by Musk's lawyers.

17:39In November 2018, after dinner with Sam Altman, Scott told Nadella that OpenAI's new corporate structure offered both, quote, a commercial vehicle for monetizing OpenAI AIP and investment returns capped at$500 billion. That's not bad. A 500X bagger is going to move the needle for Microsoft, for sure. Altman claimed the nonprofit would eventually benefit because though OpenAI has yet to make a single dollar in returns, if OpenAI ever does get to$500 billion in returns, the balance over that goes directly to the 501c3. That's exciting. Microsoft's board initially approved a capital investment of $2 billion, but ultimately decided to limit its initial investment to$1 billion in the hopes that a smaller investment would request OpenAI to commercialize.

18:23Satya. Hey, we got it. We can't give them too much. Let's put a little fire under them. Let's make sure that they're thinking about dollars. Dollars and cents. The second update to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI in 2021 included another$2 billion investment that wasn't reported and came with a lower upside. This is also a filing for Musk's lawyers. In March of 2021, Microsoft quietly invested another$2 billion in OpenAI. Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft publicly announced the investment, which was subject to a lower 6x return multiple. In place of its 2019 license to a single OpenAI model, Microsoft secured rights to commercialize any OpenAI model developed during the term of the agreement, except AGI.

19:03This could have saved OpenAI from Elon, and it's a diary with a lock on it. I think the diary framing is like woefully wrong. That's probably the worst part of this whole thing is because most of the thoughts that Greg's putting out are completely reasonable. Elon says they stole a charity, plain and simple. They're really on the, for all the jurors, they're really going to have to, I imagine you get, if it's Oakland, 12 people on the jury, I'd guess like four of them are driving Teslas. They're really going to have to go check all the cars, make sure they don't have the bought this before Elon went crazy bumper sticker on it.

19:42They're going to have to throw those candidates. Well, they should also throw out any jurors that show up in Koenigseggs. Because they're probably in the Koenigsegg owner meetup, and they're at Cars and Coffee. If I were grading this purely as an analyst, not as an open AI model, the documents are legitimately bad. I was asking Claude about this, and it was very funny because you can't not read into it like you're talking to someone at Anthropic. because it's taking shots at both of them being like, oh, well, like, you know, Elon has XAI, and that's a for-profit, so he's a hypocrite. And, like, maybe that's just objectively true and the model's just, you know, accurate, but it's funny just reading it in Claude's voice being like, Claude's sitting there being like, I don't like either of these companies.

20:30Joe says huge congrats to Goldman Sachs. I've been following them a long time. The whole team and culture is so impressive. I can't wait to see where they're going and what they do next. Yes, yes, yes. Goldman's really just getting started. There are some absolute dogs over there. We talked about it a bunch, but one of the most legendary things, going into the financial crisis, they know that real estate's going to sell off. They sell their corporate headquarters and lease it back for 10 years. They're not exposed to the financial risk of their building. Breaking with the United States. Canada has agreed to cut its 100 % tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products.

21:13China will reduce its total tariffs on canola seeds. A major... Okay. Yeah. Canola oil. They're getting seed oils. They're like, we got to have them. Okay, okay. Maybe this is part of a grander strategy. Oh, okay. He's like, yeah, we need to. This is our version of fentanyl. So he actually did. Carney said that Canada's partnership with China sets us, Canada, up well for the new world order. So this is the CEDLs are the first step. Yeah, that was a crazy quote. In other electric car news, Ford and BYD are in talks for car batteries. Let's give it up for some talks. U.S. car makers need, Ford, the U.S.

22:01car maker, needs more batteries for hybrid vehicles because it's shifting away from the full EVs. You know, they canceled the Ford Lightning, but they are going to do a lot of hybrids, and so they need a lot of batteries, and they're calling up BYD to help with it. The American car maker would buy batteries from the Chinese auto company for some of Ford's hybrid vehicle models, according to people familiar with the matter. The two companies are still discussing how the arrangement would work. One idea is that Ford would import batteries from BYD to Ford's factories outside of the U.S. Some of the people said talks continue.

22:34And it's possible a deal won't materialize. The tie-up, if completed, would pair Ford with the largest Chinese car company that has struck fear in much of the auto industry over its ability to produce affordable models that carry sophisticated technology. For Ford, it solves a problem. As the company pulls back from electric vehicles and ramps up its lineup of hybrids, it needs a battery supplier. And BYD is able to produce high-quality car batteries. We talk to lots of companies about many things. A Ford spokesman said, a BYD spokesman declined to comment. That's a good comment. President Trump's trade advisor, Peter Navarro, criticized the idea on X.

23:16He said, so Ford wants to simultaneously prop up a Chinese competitor's supply chain and make it more vulnerable to the same supply chain extortion? What could go wrong here? The day has finally come. Not to see ads in ChatGPT, but they're coming. They're coming. They're coming. We're talking about in the coming weeks, OpenAI plans to start testing ads in ChatGPT free and Go tiers. It's Go time. They said, we're sharing our principles early on how we'll approach ads guided by putting user trust and transparency first as we work to make AI accessible to everyone. They say, what matters most? Responses and chat GPT will not be influenced by ads.

23:59That is important. There's a firewall. There's a firewall. Editorial is over here. Ad sales is over here. They don't interface with each other at all. and so the models that generate the responses will not be aware of who's advertising on what this seems extremely easy to do technically extremely good for product reliability it's what the consumer wants they want you want to know when you go to google if you scroll down far enough you eventually get past the ads and you see the real results and you're going to want that in your llm even if there's an ad up at the top or in the middle as long as it's clearly labeled which they say they will be.

24:37So ads will always be separate and clearly labeled. Your conversations are private from advertisers. Yeah. So people have been so concerned, specifically Mark Cuban. We obviously had him on the show to talk about this last year, about this idea of like ads showing up in the results. And part of it, the reason I was never that concerned is like, if I just search best backpack for men, which is kind of a joke in itself. It's going to tell you Ridge. Well, Well, a man shouldn't wear a backpack in the first place. So sorry to any backpack super fans out there. Well, you're not a man yet. You're not 21.

25:13Oh, true. When I search best backpack for men, I can scroll down and find a Reddit result. It's the second result after Nordstrom. But they also serve me a bunch of ads. I don't assume that the best backpack for men is the first ad, right? It's not like when it's clearly labeled and separated. I just assume this is an ad for somebody that sells backpacks. People seem to be really riled up about this. I'm seeing a bunch of comments on the post. They're upset. I don't get it at all. The whole point is that ads have made it so that wonderful services on the Internet have been free for decades. They're generally aligned.