Musk v. Altman; Is the AI Job Apocalypse Overhyped?; DOJ Dismantles Voting Rights Unit

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0:33Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Figer, Director of Politics and Science. Today on the show, we're going to a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, to take a look at what has been going down in the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman trial. We're going to get into how the trial goes way beyond the rivalry between these two guys and could have major implications both for open AI, but also for the AI industry at large. Speaking of AI, we'll also discuss whether Meadows' recent layoffs are a turning point for AI taking over certain jobs.

1:09And we're going to touch on a story that has gone a little bit under the radar, but it matters now more than ever. The DOJ voting section has been gutted this past year. Dozens of lawyers have been ousted, and these lawyers were the ones in the government that were upholding the Voting Rights Act. Lots to get into.

1:33Okay, so let's kick things off with the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman trial. So the jury trial kicked off earlier this week, but the legal feud between these two guys dates back to 2024. Back then, Musk sued OpenAI, basically alleging two things. First, he said that the company had strayed from its founding mission to create AI that benefits all of humanity. And second, that he was misled by Sam Altman and OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, into contributing millions of dollars because he thought he was supporting a nonprofit. As you might have guessed, OpenAI's very weird structure is kind of central to this dispute.

2:10While its nonprofit arm controls the company, it created a for-profit arm to raise outside capital, and now it's trying to become a public benefit corporation. OpenAI has denied the allegations. They're saying that Musk just wants to hurt OpenAI because now he has a competitive AI lab, which is XAI. And in fact, the lawsuit was only filed after Musk started XAI, Although the feud has been going on basically since Elon Musk left OpenAI years and years ago. Now it's up to a jury and the judge who's overseeing the case to ultimately decide what happens next. This is something so aggressively not on my beat that I am watching.

2:45I don't know. The last time that I paid this like much attention to a trial that was not politically aligned was like maybe Anna Delvey. Like this is so interesting to me. We got her, you guys. We finally found the thing to make Leah care about AI. Amazing. We did it. This is so good, though. This is like so juicy. I love that this is going back to the beginning. I love that a really key part of this is Elon Musk being like, I made a charitable donation and it's not charity now and I'm pissed. I think, too, that one of the reasons it's not just that they're like big stakes, of course, they're big stakes, but these are also very messy companies, individuals like it is gossip.

3:22It is sort of there is so much swirling around OpenAI, XAI, SpaceX, Elon himself. It's just it is the whole thing is a great big mess. I think even Zoe just talking about even the structure of OpenAI is the most convoluted, twisty, turny kind of thing. So yeah, there is a lot to unpack, but most of all, just delightful to watch people be petty on the stand. Billionaire versus billionaire violence. Yeah. I mean, these two men absolutely hate each other and they have for quite a long time. But again, like just to get into the stakes a little bit, they're really high for OpenAI. The company could have to unwind its current structure.

3:59Greg Brockman and Sam Altman could have to leave. And obviously, they're pulling out all the stops. They have these hardcore legal teams. all of the executives are expected to testify. They've already been in court. And then to give you a little bit of background on just how ridiculous it has already been, like Elon Musk was promoting a New Yorker profile about Sam Altman that alleged he had kind of this history of being a bit deceptive, duplicitous. He was actually boosting that post on X ahead of the trial. Sam Altman was like hitting back. Another key moment that I thought was really funny was when one of the lawyers' microphones was like going in and out and the judge says, completely deadpan, yeah, we're funded by the federal government, which I felt like was a dig right to Elon Musk and Doge.

4:43This is it. This is what I'm here for. A little Doge dig. Here's Senior Writer Paresh DeVay, who was there yesterday when Musk took the stand. Hello, this is Paresh DeVay reporting from the federal courthouse in Oakland, California. Elon Musk took the stand in his lawsuit Again, Sam Altman and OpenAI, Elon mostly testified about his life history and his job history, how he moved to North America from South Africa. Then he talked about how he came about to founding OpenAI. And Elon told this story about how he was living with Larry Page, having long discussions about the future of AI. And Larry expressed that he didn't mind if AI destroyed humanity.

5:30Elon Musk thought that was a big concern. And so Elon had discussions with various people, including Sam Altman. And that's how he came to found OpenAI. And that's what led to OpenAI starting as a nonprofit. Musk and Altman entered this morning bypassing the front doors, coming into the building another way. and photographers have been trying to chase photos of them. Overall, a packed courtroom with about 100 or so people, including many attorneys from both sides, and an overflow room mostly full of media and other members of the public interested in following this trial. My favorite part, Parash didn't say this verbatim, but the lengths that Elon Musk went to to make Sam Altman seem like a little nobody in this opening monologue.

6:24Or so funny, he was like, he was a random investor I barely knew, basically implying that Elon made him who he is today. I thought that was silly. So much of this is all the spin that's going on around the trail has been fascinating to me too. So you mentioned that Elon boosted that story on Sam Altman, which is he also just controls the algorithm. He could also just like make it go into people's seeds. But we've had more than that, too. It got to the point where a judge had to tell them to knock off their posts because they've both been posting so much about each other that they've been admonished for their social media activity.

7:02Yeah. Yeah. Another thing that came up on day one of the trial, and this was something Maxwell Zeff wrote about for Wired, was that jury selection was a little bit difficult because people do have such strong priors about both of these men. They are nationally, internationally extremely famous, it's very difficult to find someone who doesn't have a preconceived idea about Elon Musk. And in fact, there were a couple people who were ultimately picked who did have preconceived ideas, but ultimately were able to say like, look, I can put this aside and like, do my civic duty. You're saying that in such like a kind way, almost Zoe, like preconceived notions.

7:35People were saying horrific stuff about Musk. They were like, this man is destroying the world. If you put me on this jury, I will do my very best to send him to jail. Like it was it was that kind of level of stuff. We're in the land of the like vintage Tesla bumper stickers. You cannot find a Tesla in Berkeley, California, in Oakland, California, that just does not have a bumper sticker on it that says, I bought this before Elon went crazy. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. But I also want to touch on where Microsoft is in all of this, because obviously they're named as defendants in the lawsuit.

8:08We're expecting Satya Nadella, the CEO, to testify, but they've been a little bit quiet. Brian, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on kind of what we're expecting from Microsoft, why they're kind of letting OpenAI duke this out while they, you know, also have a big financial stake in the outcome of this trial. Because of the mess. They don't want to be involved in the mess. I mean, they've got this giant... You don't see Satya Nadella posting on X about it? No, I feel like Microsoft has been, you know, Microsoft, obviously, very close relationship with OpenAI. Although, as of this week, they have a more open relationship where open AI can now use other people's clouds.

8:41Also very Berkeley. Very Berkeley. We call that poly. So, I think Microsoft just wants to be as far away from all of this as it possibly can. You know, the fact that Satya is going to have to testify is something they can't avoid. But I think this is just something, you know, Microsoft increasingly is placing its own bets in AI. It's increasingly sort of separating, not totally separating, but like their relationship is not quite so intertwined with OpenAI. And I think rightly so, right? I think it's clear, especially given, as we said, how much restructuring, how much turnaround, how much mess, again, I keep using that word that OpenAI has gone through.

9:18You maybe don't want to put all of your eggs in that basket. So I don't know. I think we're going to see Microsoft continuing to try to place as much distance as they can from this as possible while still retaining as much financial upside as they can. One thing that's not directly part of this trial, but I still think is really important to name, is just Elon Musk has this whole safety component to his argument. He thinks that OpenAI's founding mission was to create AI that would benefit all of humanity. He feels like they've gone back on that mission. They've put profits over people, that kind of thing.

9:50And he's making this argument that it's like growth at all costs. It's not prioritizing safety, beneficial AI, all of those things. At the same time, he is running an AI company, XAI, that puts very few guardrails on what people can do with those models. They famously have launched AI girlfriends that talk to people in kind of a romantic and sexual manner. People are able to jailbreak the models and do all sorts of things with them. It occasionally, like, goes off the rails and does kind of crazy things itself. And so I think while, again, this isn't being litigated per se, like there is a deep irony in Elon Musk making these arguments about OpenAI, which frankly has a lot of guardrails in place, although it possibly needs more depending on who you talk to.

10:31It's a chance to kneecap a major competitor, right? That seems to be it, especially everyone's racing to go public, Anthropik, SpaceX, which owns XAI, OpenAI. And so if one of those leaders in this race has to give up a bunch of money, lose its CEO and become a nonprofit all of a sudden, that makes SpaceX's prospects look a whole lot better. And I guess like my follow-up here is I'm sure that our reporters have been like talking to legal experts that can weigh in on this. Does he have a shot? I think he has a shot. I think that it's, you know, I think it really depends on who you talk to. I think personally I would be surprised to see Elon Musk be completely victorious in this case.

11:15But I think they're taking it seriously because it's not impossible. Like he's throwing everything he can at this. And while I do think OpenAI has a lot of evidence that Elon Musk knew along the way that they were restructuring, that they had to do that to raise outside capital because it is so horrifically expensive to build frontier AI models, you know, it's Elon Musk. So I don't think you can ever completely discount his legal fights, even when they seem spurious at the outset. Set aside like the legal merits, like who knows? We've got on the jury, we've got a psychiatrist, we've got a painter, we've got a former Lockheed Martin employee.

11:50And that's the beauty of the American justice system. But, you know, who knows what this group of people is going to decide this on or why? We'll find out soon. There's another story involving the AI industry going on this week. It's actually been going on for months, but we had an inflection point recently that makes it, I think, worth talking about now. Meta recently announced layoffs that are supposedly being made because of AI, potentially. At least that's what people say. The company plans to cut 10 % of its workforce, which is going to be about 8 ,000 employees. And it's also planning to close another 6 ,000 open roles.

12:21The same day Meta makes that announcement, Microsoft said it would offer voluntary buyouts to nearly 9 ,000 employees, which is the first time that Microsoft has made that kind of offer. The memo where Meta shared the news about its layoffs, it doesn't explicitly mention AI, but the company has obviously announced that it's nearly doubling its spending on the technology. It is a huge amount of sums going towards data centers, CapEx, infrastructure. And it's not just white-collar employees that are being affected. That gets a lot of the headlines, but there's a particular group of contractors that Wired's Joel Khalili talked to that's being hit by the layoffs as well.

12:55It's more than 700 workers based in Ireland. And what's interesting there is they're the ones who have been training Meta's AI models themselves or among the people, those are contractors who work to train these models. They're employed by a Dublin-based firm called Covalin, which handles various content moderation and labeling service jobs for meta. And their job is to check the material generated by meta AI models against the company's rules that bar dangerous and illegal stuff. It's tough work, right? It's tough both for what it is and also the realization that while you're doing it, you're basically training AI to take over your job, right?

13:28It is a job that is designed to be obsolete as soon as you do it well enough. This is such a good opportunity for us to have really our quarterly conversation is AI taking jobs. And like Zoe, I mean, I'm always so interested in your insight here. I'd love to hear you weigh in, not just on Meta and Microsoft, but generally what you're seeing up and down the board. Yeah, so it's really interesting. There was a study from Stanford that came out months ago that said AI, from what we can tell, is in fact taking jobs from younger workers. And that makes sense because you still need people managing the AI agents.

14:04But like if AI agents can do the work of kind of more junior employees, then perhaps you need less of them. At the same time, we know that the way that AI is being rolled out at a lot of companies is not actually creating the efficiencies that people have expected, at least not yet. But I think having talked to a lot of people in Silicon Valley lately, both people who are affected by the layoffs, managers who are going all in on this kind of new AI forward company structure, that there is actually, and I hope I don't get like completely taken down on the internet for this. I think that at least when we're talking about software companies, a lot of them are bloated in the AI era.

14:43I think that if you do AI correctly, you genuinely can have a single engineer who does a lot more than that person could previously do. And therefore, you might need fewer overall engineers unless you want to like as a company do a whole lot more things or roll out a bunch more products or whatever, which is also an option. And so I think we're going to see a lot of companies doing what Meta is doing. We already are. Amazon has taken similar steps, both because it looks good to investors. And I know that this is an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely do think it makes sense to restructure. If you can vibe code, say, Shopify on a weekend with two really, really good engineers, why does Shopify need hundreds and hundreds of them?

15:28I don't want those people to lose their jobs, but frankly, I don't know. I do believe that. I think that's absolutely right. I think a couple other things are happening too. One, yes, people are genuinely losing their jobs because it's more efficient to work with AI instead of coders and engineers, which is a shame, but as always said, it's just the reality of it. Two, which we talked about before, a lot of these companies way overhired in the COVID and post-COVID era. And so a lot of this is kind of correcting, bringing employment levels back down closer to where they were pre-COVID and using AI as kind of a blanket for that.

16:00But then three, I also think, you know, a lot of these companies like Meta, like the big hyperscalers have to spend so much money on data centers and other infrastructure. In some ways, it's a little bit less that we're going to have AI efficiency is going to make these jobs obsolete as we need to use that money to buy compute. Like instead of salaries, not a pretty standard of finance at all. But I think there's a certain like it's a tradeoff. Like these companies, it feels like they have infinite money sometimes, but they don't. And they have to make choices about where they spend and how they're going to allocate their resources.

16:35And right now, it's in chips and data centers, not people. For sure. And I think it's, you know, it is a bit confusing because I think there are a lot of people who are like, my company is rolling out AI tools. They suck. And I'm spending a lot of time like correcting the AI. Like in no world could this agent do what I am doing. And I think that that is also accurate. I think to do AI correctly, you need to be really thoughtful with how you roll it out. And frankly, you need really, really talented people who are managing the agents and figuring out how these tools can be deployed and how they can do the work that was previously done by many people.

17:08And so I think it's a rare company that is actually executing this new vision really, really well. And a lot of the layups we're seeing are not that. I guess from my end, it almost, it just sort of feels like we're also holding our breath. we're not going to really see what this looks like until there's, you know, immense studies about just software engineers just can't get a job anymore. Like that's just not what they should be studying in school. And that hasn't exactly happened yet. Am I wrong? No, no, I don't think. I mean, I don't think the job market is great, but I think what we're seeing happen is that people aren't moving from their jobs.

17:39If you talk to people at Apple, Apple famously doesn't do layoffs. So if you have a job at Apple, even if you, you know, ideally would like to like move on, You are hanging on for dear life right now because it's hard. It's hard to get hired. I'm very excited for our conversation in approximately three months from now where all of this is different, the same. I think it will be really interesting to see how this shakes out. But it's wild to think that not that long ago, being an engineer was like the top, top job. And like that's still true. Like a pre-IPO job at one of these like AI labs could, you know, give you generational wealth.

18:17But I think in short order, things have really changed. And particularly for people who are a little newer in their careers. I've talked to a bunch of engineers and asked them, like, would you tell your kids to go into this field right now? And a lot of them have been saying no, frankly. What do they want their kids to do? Major League Baseball player feels the most immune. Oh, and, you know, there's this great Vintner program in Berkeley. Get into some winemaking. Oh, my gosh. No, but it is things like that. They were like, I want them to do things like you can't easily replace with a computer.

18:47I want them to do a physical thing, be a therapist, go into construction. Those are the jobs that can't be easily automated. Although there are AI therapists, but I think they're not great. Although, unfortunately, haven't they been listening to Elon, though? Because the Optimus robot's going to do all of this for us by 2028. So I don't know where we can turn. Okay, I want to shift gears into a really, really good piece from Wired reporter David Gilbert about the Department of Justice. We've been working on this one for a pretty long time. And in the past year, the DOJ's voting section, which, as the name suggests, is the group that works to protect the right of Americans to vote, has been changing beyond recognition.

19:30I don't just mean entirely different missions or what have you, which is all true, but more than that, its staff has been virtually gutted. There were around 30 attorneys in the voting section on the day of Donald Trump's second inauguration. Three months later, all but two were gone. The departing lawyers have since been replaced by new hires with little federal court experience who've all spent years working against the very department they have now joined. These attorneys have appeared more than willing to comply with Trump's anti-voting directives and many of them have actually worked with Trump previously, defending him and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

20:08But to put this all into a bit of context, the voting section is a really, really key part of the DOJ's civil rights division. We don't talk about it a ton. And in some ways, that's kind of the point. The voting section has been described as the crown jewel of the division. And it was established following the Voting Rights Act to stop discrimination in voting. So if you haven't heard of it before, the goal is that theoretically it's doing its job and it's working. The lawyers who have worked there for years and years are all considered to be like the voting experts, the election experts in the country.

20:39So to have had them all virtually ousted in the last 15 months is pretty shocking. And to really understand how this dismantling took place, we have to go back to the 2020 election, where Trump really sought to weaponize the Justice Department, appointing special counsels to investigate election conspiracy theories. But it didn't really work because officials of the department pushed back. They threatened mass resignations. Skip ahead a couple of years, and Trump's efforts have been pretty successful. In February of last year, now former Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos to the staff that called for DOJ lawyers to be zealously advocating for the president.

21:17Staff called them the Bondi blasts and were like, this is spelling out the beginning of the end. It is a fun name. It's a terrible thing, but it's a good name. It's a good name. Yeah. Over the following months, this became even more clear. In April, the Senate confirmed the appointment of Harmeet Dillon as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division. Dillon has advocated for Trump and his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. And she's also, since being appointed, pushed out senior leadership, including people who were there from the 80s. You guys will enjoy this.

21:49When the resignation program across the government last year was rolled out, offered to tens of thousands of federal workers during Doge, former section lawyers tell Wired that they thought that Dylan didn't think that resignations were happening quickly enough. And as a result, Dylan sent letters to the senior managers in the section to transfer them to basically the Justice Department's complaint office, well outside of their areas. It was like a Bureau of Prison people writing to them with like complaints about their jobs. Like this was so clearly ousting. You know what blew my mind about this, though?

22:21I was like, wait, Harmeet Dillon. I've talked to her before when I was reading David's story. She represented James Damore. Yes. Oh. So give people a background on James Damore if they're fortunate enough not to have lived through that news cycle. This was, I think, a 2017 story, maybe even a little earlier than that, where a Google engineer put out a memo basically talking about the biological differences between men and women to the point of, like, why we don't see as many female engineers because this was in the midst of Google trying to, like, do a lot of diversity and inclusion initiatives.

22:58and it went completely viral. The CEO had to weigh in. Ultimately, James Damore was fired from Google for this memo and then went on to sue and has become kind of like, I think he lives in Berlin and he's like an internet personality now. But yeah, this was like, this was a, it was a big deal when it happened. No, it's huge. Like this is someone who's had their hands in so many different things, has worked with lawyers across the country, has represented all sorts of people, and like really importantly, has very much like thrown in with the administration. And the people that she has hired are a really interesting bunch.

23:34Like I mentioned, a lot of them have worked with Trump before, representing him in various attempts to overturn 2020. And without like sounding mean here, but this was like arguably one of my favorite parts of the entire story, another consequence of these changes and the replacement of the lawyers is this like litany of mistakes that have become entirely commonplace to the voting section, they actually had to institute a writing class for the division's new hires, which lawyers told David had never, ever happened before. And ultimately, though, like as like kind of like slapstick as this all is, the section has really become exclusively focused on forcing states to hand over unredacted versions of their voter rolls.