The trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI over the accusation that the organization abandoned its founding mission in pursuit of profits is winding down, with both sides making their closing arguments on Thursday. It’s been a three-week endeavour that has featured lots of eye-opening testimony from the biggest names in the AI space. Witnesses provided a look into the machinations of these players that is usually reserved for books published years after the fact. We’ll have to wait for the jury to reach a conclusion on the arguments they heard over the course of the case to see who really wins, but the court of public opinion is certainly capable of coming to its own conclusions. In that regard, there are very few winners to come out of this trial—just a bunch of people who come off looking like some combination of petty, greedy, vindictive, and controlling. Since there are no real winners here, how about a power ranking of who lost the least?
Mira Murati Mira Murati didn’t physically take the stand during this trial, but she did come up pretty frequently over the course of the proceedings. OpenAI’s former CTO and the current CEO of Thinking Machines Lab featured prominently in the recounting of the drama surrounding Sam Altman’s very brief ouster at OpenAI, when the board voted to remove him. Among other things, she gave us an all-timer of a “you’re fired” text in which she told Altman that the board meeting was “directionally very bad” for him.
