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Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

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Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.

For criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.

Criminal law actually has very specific statutes of limitation as well, depending on the crime.

Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#213
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would he run Anthropic?

As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)

Hmm, my understanding is that Dario split over insufficient focus on safety at OpenAI (which, admittedly, could just be the PR-friendly reason) -- something that Elon is also clearly not big on.

Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https://xcancel.com/abc7newsbayarea/status/20546984193823543...

Almost certainly Dario would still have split from under Elon too, but also very likely that Elon would have immediately thrown a barrage of IP / NDA / trade secret / non-compete violation lawsuits to cripple Anthropic and keep it from reaching the frontier.

Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#215
post #19

> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations. Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.

No, it's a complete loss. Much like in engineering, the law considers technical details to be extraordinarily important.

Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#216
post #184

Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance: Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same law…

I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system but do they really need a jury and a trial to determine whether the claims are barred by the statute of limitations? Couldn't this be decided by a judge before trial?

Elon argued that even though the events in question took place sometime between 2017 and 2020 OpenAI intentionally hid the information from him until 2022-2023 which is why he wasn't able to file the lawsuit until 2024.

That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.

Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.

What Altman and Brockman did still seems highly unethical.

The tech industry largely does not care about ethics.

Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key word being public . People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.

> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition. Back when Musk proposed…

> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show

I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.

Any of the struggles old Twitter had are absolutely dwarfed by its current problems. They still lose money hand over fist, the noise floor is way higher than it used to be, and a solid majority of the best users have either left or simulpost their content on other platforms like Mastadon and Bluesky. The new blue check system is close to an outright disaster, the only saving grace being that you can filter out the worst of the trolls by installing an extension that filters out blue check users.

> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.

For SpaceX this is true, but for Tesla the competition has caught up and in some cases surpassed them. The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools. Elon's big bet on Full Self Driving has yet to pay off as the deadline for getting it to actually work as advertised continues to slip and it's not clear when if ever unsupervised Full Self Driving will be available, especially on vehicles with older hardware. People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021. Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape. Tesla had 3 or 4 years where they stood head and shoulders over the competition, but those days are gone.

Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own thoughts: If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point. His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019. Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into T…

Musk should have just made another company and then he’d have another 500 billion but he had that mistake and now it’s over. Then again we’ll see how well open ai does over the long term

I sometimes wonder, what does one need a second 500 billion that the first 500 billion is not enough for?

Re: Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

#220
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)

Hmm, my understanding is that Dario split over insufficient focus on safety at OpenAI (which, admittedly, could just be the PR-friendly reason) -- something that Elon is also clearly not big on. Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https:…

It's not my argument here that Musk is necessarily more aligned with Amodei.
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