A combination photo shows CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, left, April 28, and Elon Musk, April 29, during the trial in Elon Musk's lawsuit over OpenAI for-profit conversion at a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif. Reuters-Yonhap
OAKLAND, Calif. — At the heart of the trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a moment when they found common cause on an ever more pressing question: how to protect humanity from the risks of artificial intelligence .
It turned sour, and the jury is charged with settling the ensuing legal dispute between the two Silicon Valley titans.
But the unresolved questions about the dangers of AI have been looming over the federal courthouse in Oakland, California, since the trial began last week. The technology itself is not on trial – the judge has warned lawyers not to get “sidetracked” by questions about its dangers – but witness testimony has touched on concerns around workforce disruptions and the prospect raised by Musk that superhuman AI might one day kill us all.
Musk, the world's richest person, filed the case accusing his fellow OpenAI co-founder of betraying promises to keep the company as a nonprofit. Altman , in turn, accuses Musk of trying to hobble the ChatGPT maker for the benefit of his own AI company.
One witness, AI pioneer Stuart Russell, said that the “winner take all” power struggle over AI's future is itself threatening humanity.
Musk's lawyers brought Russell to the stand as an expert witness, at the rate of $5,000 an hour. The University of California, Berkeley computer scientist listed a host of AI dangers, from racial and gender discrimination to jobs displacement, misinformation and emotional attachments that take some AI chatbot users down a spiral of psychosis.
“Whichever company develops AGI first would have a very big advantage” and an increasingly big lead over everyone else, Russell told the court, using the initials for artificial general intelligence , a term for advanced AI technology that surpasses humans at many tasks.
Judge's warning hasn't kept out talk of AI's dangers
The trial centers on the 2015 birth of OpenAI as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk.
Source: Korea Times News
