Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of rando Twitch guys who sometimes become CEOs for five minutes. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay is here. Hey buddy, what's up?
We're doing AI chaos again. This is just this is this is what we do here on the Vergecast. We talk about how people don't like AI and then we talk about AI. This is this is what we're here for. If you look at our like audience stats, like the website stats, which we don't talk about a lot, everybody just wants to read about AI guys being uh extremely dramatic.
And boy, do we have a lot. There's a cornucopia of AI guys being dramatic in the world right now.
Alex Heath had a good tweet. He's he's covering the trial and he goes, "The entire AI industry is basically just how seven guys feel about each other."
Uh and by extension, like the entire United States economy. It's just how seven guys feel about each other. Um, we got a lot to talk about. There's a there's a new uh Fitbit product that I think you and I both have a bunch of thoughts and questions about. Uh, OpenAI is maybe making a ChatGPT phone. We got a bunch of stuff to talk about, but we got to start with the trial, right? Elon Musk versus OpenAI continues. This is week two of the trial. Uh, I sort of expected it to be less bananas in week two after Elon Musk left the stand. I was wrong.
Very wrong. It has only increased in amount of bananas, a bushel if you will, full of bananas.
Can I just say this like one thing that's been on my mind throughout this entire trial and maybe it's because you know I I have like ex-lawyer in me and married to a lawyer and we think about the lawyer stuff. To make AI good, you have to tell it everything, right? Like it needs access to all of your email. You got to write down everything you want. You got to write these long system prompts. All this stuff, all the context that it needs. We're now watching the fruits of that in discovery in a lawsuit.
Oh, that's such a good theory. Do you know what I mean? Like, Greg Brockman, why did you keep a journal? Uh, and his journal is extraordinarily damning. He's like, I shouldn't steal this charity. Like, what are you doing, man? Um, I'm not saying that drove this set of characters to keep the notes and send the texts that they sent. I'm very grateful that they did because some of them are frankly hilarious and honestly a huge part of this Vergecast is just going to be me and David reading other people's texts to each other and it's going to be amazing. Um, but we're entering an era where every executive is talking to Claude all day long on their way to work or dumping context into AI systems. And boy is the next generation of lawsuits going to be amazing. Like just straightforwardly amazing. And I I'll tell you one, there's a reason I brought up Becky. Her law firm just sent around a reminder that when the clients take the legal advice and go ask ChatGPT about it, it loses its privilege.
And like courts in New York have like ruled on this that if you if your lawyer sends you something that's like here's what I think we should do in this case, that is protected by attorney-client privilege. And then if you the client go to ChatGPT and say hey what do you think about this thing my lawyer said you lose the privilege.
Right, it's the equivalent of telling someone else. You've now told someone else.
And that like on both sides lawyers like I can discover that now also I have to tell my client like the next generation of discovery in all these cases is going to be bananas because everyone is telling their computers everything all the time and you can just see in this case like every everyone is so online that everything is in the computer like yeah.
Zoolander style like it's in the computer.
That is a really good theory and it actually makes me think like one of the funniest characters as we're going to get to in all of this is Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoft who throughout this whole saga everyone is desperately trying to get to leave a paper trail and he just refuses. He's like yes he's a he's the public company CEO the longest tenured most experienced you know multi-billion dollar public company CEO. Microsoft is the economy. Like he can't screw up.
This man can only be reached on a phone through cutouts.
Yes. And he's they keep being like I keep I'm trying to loop him in. I'm trying to get him in. I'm asking him questions. I'm texting him. I'm reaching out and and then and then every once in a while it's like long pause and it's like just got off the phone with Satya and it's like you I get it Satya. But I know that Nadella just like the rest of them in his interviews he's like I talk to Copilot every day about my next meeting about this stuff. I love talking to it on a commute. And it's like, oh, that get ready, buddy.
Yeah. I mean, it is funny like it's it's useful to remember that all of the events that are being discussed in this trial are from somewhere between 2 and 12 years ago and that a lot has changed even even since the most recent stuff in this case. A lot has changed in a lot of people's relationships. So, like you're right that the stuff that is happening right now discovery is going to be just outrageous.
Yeah. You're wearing one of those Limitless bracelets that records all of your meetings so you can be a cool startup founder. Guess what happens? Your next deal goes sideways.
Like the audio of all or the transcripts of all your conversations will now it's great. I'm excited as a reporter. I'm excited. I also refuse to use computers at work even more than ever.
Yeah, it's totally fair. So, we we should just walk through some of the stuff going on in this trial, but I feel like the stuff that's been the most interesting to me personally has kind of split in two ways. There's either the stuff we've learned about the early days of OpenAI and particularly the circumstances under which Elon Musk ends up leaving. Uh we learned a lot about that this week, particularly from Greg Brockman, who is one of the co-founders and is now the president of OpenAI. Um and then there's also the what happened during what everybody refers to as the blip, the the brief period of time where Sam Altman was not the CEO. Let's should we start with the early days because there's there's a lot of interesting stuff that comes up. Um bunch of stuff that I didn't know that maybe I just missed in the course of all of this stuff including things like at the very beginning OpenAI was going to be part of Y Combinator uh that where where Sam was running Y Combinator this big VC firm for a long time and like I think more and more it's becoming clear that a lot of the internal consternation at OpenAI over the years has been all of the stuff that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman did around OpenAI and in the ways in which they were semi-sketchily actually enriching themselves all while claiming to have no interest in a nonprofit and just trying to save the world. And if you're Elon Musk, it seems like a really good idea to try to prove as much of that as you possibly can, right? Is that is that a fair description of what's going on?
I think that's a fair characterization of what's going on. You will recall that Sam left his position as CEO of Y Combinator in totally mysterious and extremely sketchy circumstances.
Yes. And it is probably because he was double-dealing all over the place and no one has ever really ever come out and said it. But a lot of people have basically been like if you connect all these dots that I keep leaving everywhere, you will you will deduce that Sam Altman did a bunch of weird double-dealing stuff and is no longer the CEO of Y Combinator. And I think we're starting to see that in this case as well, which by the way is totally in character with the Sam Altman that is like routinely profiled by everybody, including Ronan Farrow. There's a lot of weird double-dealing, talking out of both sides of your mouth, trying to make everyone happy, getting very rich along the way.
Yeah. And this ends up being really important in the firing of Sam Altman, but also appears to have existed since the very beginning, right? That they're they're running this nonprofit. They're starting this thing. They're trying to save the world. And Sam Altman like famously didn't take equity in this company. Has spent a lot of time talking about how he didn't take equity in his company. And then you you start to poke at it and it's like, well, he has equity in that company that is now doing a deal with OpenAI and he has equity in that company which is doing a deal with OpenAI. And like you just there I think Elon Musk's lawyers have a real vested interest in building a pattern of Sam Altman being unreliable and trying to make himself rich while building a nonprofit on Elon Musk's money. But there are parts of that case that appear to be very straightforwardly compelling from Musk's side of things.
There are parts of that case that appear to be very straightforwardly compelling. And I I'm going to issue the disclaimer like criticism of one character in this lawsuit is not praise for the other character. And both sides get to put on their case. And so when OpenAI's lawyers are putting on their case, Elon looks maximally bad. And when Elon's lawyers are putting his case, Sam Altman looks maximally bad. And that's the way trial coverage goes. And I say this every time because everyone gets very confused about how we feel when we're just talking about the cases the lawyers are putting on. But the out that I have for Sam and Greg in just in this process, yes, the evidence against him is compelling that they they basically did a bunch of shady stuff. They are not sly by any stretch of the imagination. They're just out in the open being like, "So, we're going to do some like circular financing stuff and like, you know, Greg is like leaving himself journal notes. It's like, man, I shouldn't I shouldn't steal a charity, you know?" Like, they know what they're they are operating out in the open. And they're sending Elon these like extremely long notes that all start with this like staggering amount of praise because everyone's basically afraid of Elon, it seems. And they they have to be really nice to him to get to one decision. And they keep laying everything out.
There there's at no point are they being shady about it, right?
Except that the thing that they're doing seems kind of shady.
Do you know what I mean? Like Yeah.
They're like, "We're going to do a shady thing." And Elon's like, "I don't know." And then that proceeds until they get it done. Well, ironically, it's not shady when they're all on the same team, right? And then it's then it just becomes, you know, we all we there's so much money in this that we're all going to get rich and it's going to be fine. And this is like what you see in in WeWork, another thing where there was just an outrageous amount of self-dealing. Uh, as long as the numbers keep going up and as long as everybody's getting rich, the things people will turn a blind eye to in that realm are outrageous, right?
But then we we come to the the you know falling out between Elon Musk and the OpenAI team and uh I think this is the part where Elon's case kind of even in the very best case scenario looks bad because essentially what it seems like is again and we said this a little bit last week there was this big fight over who was going to control OpenAI. Uh Elon Musk demanded everything. He at one point tried to make OpenAI part of Tesla. He said he was going to run OpenAI inside of Tesla in secret and apparently offered Sam Altman a board seat at Tesla. It was like he he he wanted to subsume this whole thing. Um he he would say his motivations were to save the world. You you can feel about that however you want. Um he lost that fight um basically because the the others teamed up and said giving essentially unilateral control to Elon Musk is is not the right thing to do. And he took his ball and went home making aggressive threats about starting up a competitor, about how they were going to fail, about how Demis Hassabis, who was running DeepMind, uh, who is like the looming big bad in everybody's mind, which is very funny in retrospect, is going to like ruin the world because OpenAI can't do it. He he has such like sore loser energy in this whole split that it's like it just it just looks bad. There's also some just extremely weird Elon stuff in the mix. Shivon Zilis, who is the mother of some of his children, is part of OpenAI. Her job is to take notes basically on what everyone is talking about.
Uh so there's a lot of notes about what Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Elon Musk are are talking about. And then when Elon leaves, she's still there. She's passing intel back to Elon. And then reports come out that she's had his children and she has to go and tell OpenAI that she's also the mother of Elon Musk's children, right? And everyone is like, "What are you talking about?"
Changes the dynamic slightly.
It's just like one of the more Elon situations in all of this that now the mother of his children is on the stand and even the way that she talks about things in her affect is it's just very Elon. Uh on on the stand instead of saying I don't recall or I don't remember, she would say it's not in my neurons.
I hate that. I got to tell you, there's something about that that just makes my skin crawl.
That when it when she said it, our entire Slack room of reporters tracking the trial, they all typed it's not in my neurons like at the same time.
Perfect. That's Yeah, it's exactly right. So, yeah, this whole thing is just bizarre. And it really does seem like that the further we get into this trial that it is that the the outlines of this split were that Elon Musk wanted control of OpenAI. He lost the fight and he he went away. He says there one thing in 2017 after a discussion about going for-profit which again is this is a big piece of this right who wanted to go for-profit and when was Musk for this? Was Musk against this? Did they steal a charity? Like this is a whole a big part of the whole thing here. Um this is Brockman writing this. He says at the end of the meeting he said you guys are great but I could start another AI company tomorrow. One tweet is all it takes which is a 5 years before Elon Musk bought Twitter. There's the whole reason Elon Musk bought Twitter. Uh and b just a perfect summation of what a sore loser he is in this particular way.
I thought this this one is very interesting to me. There is so much in this that is just about who is the talent and where will they work.
Sure. This is why they're all afraid of Demis Hassabis. He's got Google's resources. He's got runway. He seems to be attracting the talent. They all think he's very smart. Uh, and Elon's like, I'm going to take Andrej Karpathy. I'm going to take Ilya Sutskever. I've recruited this person. And it's just a handful of people at the bleeding edge of this technology.
Especially at this time, it was like a really, really small number of people who were really leading this stuff.
Yeah. And they were all basically deciding whether they were going to go out on their own or go work for Demis at Google. Like, these are your choices at the time.
Mhm. One tweet is all it takes really implies that there's like a bunch of AI people he can like address via tweet. It's it's a very odd empty threat at this moment in time when so much of the drama is basically where's Ilya going to work. Can we keep him away from Demis? Right? And it maybe there's more characters in the mix. Maybe there's vastly more AI researchers at that time just waiting for a tweet. But it it just struck me as such a classic Elon threat. Like I can tweet this into existence when every fact that had preceded it indicated that actually you need to hire one of like four people to make this work.
Yeah. And then and there's the moment where he hires away Andrej Karpathy to Tesla and and he goes back to OpenAI and is like, "Oh, I I have I have an announcement and a confession. Uh, I've hired this guy who is like very important and is now like a a celebrity in the AI world uh to go work at Tesla, which is a thing that if you care about OpenAI and want it to succeed, you probably don't do."
Yeah. At the same time, there's, you know, there's emails in the record now of Sam emailing Elon apologizing for having recruited even one person away for Tesla, right? Like, I I'm so sorry about this. There's some real, you know, I'm watching The Boys. There's some real Homelander vibes around Elon throughout this entire, you know, everyone's just like afraid of him. Mhm. And then he's But his instead of lasers from his eyes, he has Twitter. Like that's basically what this feels like at all at every turn.
Well, it's more than that, though. There I I wrote down uh these texts from Ilya came up where he says, "Elon might spend half a day a week with us. I imagined how it will be and I worry that our work environment can become very stressful and since he'll be bankrolling it, it'll be hard to stop it." Like, you're right. And it is it is fear and flattery in equal measure. And there is the sense of like we have to take his money to do this thing, but we also have to figure out how to keep him out of it as much as possible because he will ruin it.
Yeah. And then they're talking about all these conversions and what structure it will be. And the whole time he's like, I'll just take it. Give it to me.
And now we're in this lawsuit, which by the way, he insistently filed. Like he's trying to kill OpenAI. Elon Musk wanted this lawsuit. This is all happening because he wants it to happen.
Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. So, the other thing which I think is frankly vastly more fun in terms of the things we got to learn, uh, is all the stuff that happened during Sam Altman's firing, this very brief couple of days where Sam Altman was fired unceremoniously and kind of out of nowhere. Uh, staged a coup is like a non-generous but not wrong way to say it. A lot of people on the team threatened to quit. It became a whole thing. Gets reinstated as CEO. Um, we learned a bunch about what happened in the midst of this. What jumped out to you as somebody who covered this in real time particularly aggressively. Was there new stuff that really jumped out to you?
All of these people text like children, like just pure children. And I'm not saying I'm like the world's best texter. Uh it's just you you read these these texts between Mira and Sam, Mira Murati the CTO who was also the CEO for five minutes for all of this and if you will recall we broke a lot of news during this time on The Verge. Like Heath and I broke a lot of news throughout all this and we were texting and calling everyone all the time. Other great reporters broke a lot of news too. Like everyone was talking.
Yeah. Shout out to Ashlee Vance who now at Core Memory who who shows up in the one of the messages.
Yeah. He's like in the screenshots as a notification being like there's gonna be a new CEO. Uh-huh.
Mike Isaac is like he's doing a victory lap because he was he was correct that Mira Murati tried to lead some of this charge to push Sam out. But everyone was like talking and everyone was reporting and I just remember my texts were like very formal. You know I was like I'm going to text somebody and see if we can get some news out of this person. And it's like here. Yes. Pretty much. And I'm like, you're on the back end and you're seeing what they're all saying and they're like, there's chatter, blah, blah, blah. Like, it's all lowercase. Like, no one knows what's going on. Uh, there's something about that, you know, it's like it's always interesting to see the other side of a thing you were even loosely a part of.
Yeah, I do think the the back and forths between Mira and Sam as all of this is going on are maybe the best thing that came out and have led to some really like delightful memes. Uh there is to your point about Mike Isaac who wrote a story concurrently as all this was happening saying that Mira Murati was one of the people intimately involved with ousting Sam in the first place. Um got a lot of criticism for that piece. A lot of people who said that wasn't the case. Um turns out it it functionally was the case. And on the stand she said over over and over essentially like no I didn't trust him. No, when he came back I still didn't trust him. And that's like that's that's under oath what she said. Um, and meanwhile, as all of this is going on, she seems to be the person Sam is most consistently messaging trying to get information about what is going on. Because, as we know, he basically like a lot of this comes up in that New Yorker piece you're talking about. He just like holed up with a couple of his confidants and lawyers and desperately tried to figure out what was going on.
Yeah. Like spent a weekend basically frantically calling and texting everyone. Uh, and Mira Murati is like a source of his in the room. Uh and and the one exchange that has come out that is now I think just the most useful meme we've had in a while is Sam Sam texts uh can you indicate directionally good or bad Satya and others anxious and Mira just text directionally very bad which is such a brutal incredible own. Well no it keeps going and he goes okay can you wrap up soon lots of pressure from Microsoft for an update and then Mira replies Sam this is very bad she's like no no you don't understand there's not an update like you're fired.
Yeah. The you know the background here and the I will say this again criticism of of one person in the context of the story has nothing like praise for the other people. Everyone screwed all of this up from top to bottom. The board never communicated why they had taken the step of removing Sam as CEO. They never put out a statement. They never said here's all the things that went wrong. Here's our evidence for doing this. They had asked Mira to collect evidence of Sam's management style and these challenges and Mira had done it. She testified she didn't know why she was doing it. It's like no, you definitely what we we've all like you put him on a PIP. Like what? We all know what's going on here, right? Oh, you want me to prepare a dossier on my boss? That's probably fine. Like where do you think this was going? The boss that you had concerns about you were supposed to document your concerns. Um, and so when the board fired Sam, it was like this shot out of the dark and no one knew why. And there was all they said was he was not consistently candid in his conversations, right? This like totally opaque thing that could mean anything. And so he's texting her. He's legitimately like, "What happened?" And I think he thought there was some middle path. And there's this one set of texts here that is just, and again, they're all text like children. Sam says to Mira, "Can you please tell them I just want to resolve this, however, and would like to join?" And Mira says, "They're convinced about their decision, and I just want everyone to pay attention to this response, which indicates everything about this process and how this company works." And Sam says in response to, "They're convinced about their decision for me to be fired or some other thing." And Mira has to confirm, "Yes, for you to be gone." And Sam just says, "Okay." He's like, "So, I'm still fired, right?" Like, "What? What decision have they made this time?" You can tell no one was communicating successfully at any level of this entire process.
No one is communicating. And the again the entire process here is they're communicating through Mira. So, both sides are communicating through Mira. And I think at one point she becomes the CEO of OpenAI.
So, just a lot of back and forth confusion here. Uh, and then we have to we have to talk about Emmett Shear being the CEO for five minutes. So Sam texts Mira, "Can I come in and talk about a path forward with them?" Mira says, "No, they need more time." Sam, once again, more time for what? Which is just a totally reasonable question. And then Mira says, "They walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you and why you can't be the CEO." Again, we still kind of don't know, right? There's been a lot of reporting, but we still kind of don't know. And then Sam says, "Can you ask why they've been saying all weekend they want me back?" Mira says they want a new CEO in place. Sam oddly says, "Can you say you will call back in 10 minutes?" And then Mira says, "They want to have a new CEO in place tonight, not me." Sam says, "Do they know who?" Uh, "Can I tell Satya is it final?" Mira says, "Trying to add Satya now." Sam says, "Please still don't want me." Sam says, "Somebody is texting Satya a Zoom link." And Satya's going, "What? Nope. It's not happening." And then Mira finally ends all this with new guy is a rando Twitch guy, which is so good. That random Twitch guy, by the way, Emmett Shear, uh, who was the CEO of Twitch for a long time, uh, I think by most accounts, like a like a good egg in Silicon Valley circles, um, had a weird moment in the sun as part of this entire story.
Yeah. I mean, he he's enjoying it. He I remember again during this reporting when they announced it was Emmett Shear. There was some amount of like, oh, we know him, you know. Sure. Yeah, that's a that's a guy that we were all in like this the incubator with. But wait, the texts keep going here. So Mira says, "New guy's rando Twitch guy." And then she says, before Sam can even respond, she goes, "They don't want you." And then Sam responds, "Emmett with two question marks." She says, "Yeah, but hold on. I'm pulling Satya now." Like it's it's just bananas. And then Mira is telling Sam that she is trying to bring him back, which may or may not be like it seems very clear she is like engaging in different ways on both sides of this as this is all going down. It's just it's just bizarre. And then they bring in Satya to try to get him to undo it because he is he ends up being like the grown-up in the room in a lot of ways throughout this entire thing. Uh it's all just so insane, man. There's a moment where they they're gonna sell the IP to Anthropic and Mira says they just don't want your hands on AGI which very funny. It's years later we are no closer to AGI with Sam's hands on it or not. Um this by the way they do finally get Satya Nadella. Sam goes Satya get on the call. Mira says yes with him. Sam says wait I have an interesting idea goes still with Satya. Just totally sets him aside. You will recall this is where um Nadella decided to react to all of this which I fully believe he regarded as completely juvenile and nonsensical and very threatening to the valuations of a lot of companies. A lot of things invested in OpenAI including his he was like I'm just going to hire everybody. Yeah, Microsoft will just hire you can have whatever shell of OpenAI remains. This is his famous quote about we are above them, below them, around them. He's like I'll just hire everybody. Sam is going to work here now. And that was a bunch of leverage in the middle of this. I mean, this is all very funny because it is just evidence that these things happen in a much more casual way. Like, this isn't lawyers. This is just two people texting each other, obviously being pulled in five different directions, talking to all the same people who are also pulled in five different directions. I'm pretty sure, you know, Musk's attorneys brought this all up to indicate that Sam was unreliable, untrustworthy. At one point, he was fired from OpenAI. I have no idea if this is going to convince a jury that the structure of OpenAI constituted stealing a charity from Elon Musk, who was again and again presented with this exact scheme and didn't read the paperwork.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it does. It really seems like the the easiest takeaway from all of this is that all of this is just a gigantic mess. And that it's like you could make a lot of arguments about how poorly run this company has been throughout this entire process. I will say there are two things that came up in the why they fired Sam Altman bits of testimony that I thought were really interesting. And the the one was like we were talking about this sort of circular set of deals that there was a sense that the board uh Helen Toner who's also a board member at the time testified and and talked about some of this that the board felt like it wasn't being properly made aware of all of Sam and Greg's financial entanglements. Uh they made this deal with a company called Helios which is a nuclear energy company that both Sam and Greg were invested in. That's a weird thing for OpenAI to be spending its time and resources on. And they felt like they maybe weren't properly notified that one reason to make this deal is that it's going to help make Sam and Greg rich. Um, another one that came up that I thought was really interesting is uh Shivon Zilis said this too, that OpenAI's board was really concerned that it hadn't been notified in advance of ChatGPT being released, which is totally sensible in retrospect, right? The the launch of ChatGPT like legitimately changed the tech industry forever. Like it really did. I don't think that's an overstatement at all. Um I am I am quite confident that no one at OpenAI up to and including Sam Altman knew that was going to happen on the day they shipped ChatGPT, right? It was it was a little research preview that they barely announced.
It was a research preview. They just they just they just put it out into the world in a very sort of academic way. They were like, "Look, we made a thing. Test it out. Let us know what you think." And then it it it caught like wildfire. So the idea that this that they should have known ahead of time to warn the board that this earthshattering thing is coming strikes me as obvious in retrospect but sort of implausible at the time.
Wait, I can academically argue the other side of this.
I I tend to agree with you. Google had something that looked very much like ChatGPT in its labs forever.
Yeah. Google remind you it invented all of this technology. The T in chat is transformers which were invented at Google.
They're now the Google executive hiding in my bushes to remind me of this.
They say it all the time. Um uh they had this they had this technology. They had transformers. They demoed it in a variety of ways. It never made any sense because they always did it in increasingly esoteric ways. I will never forget the I/O where where Sundar is like and now I'll have a conversation with Pluto the planet about what it's like to be a planet. And no one knew what was going on. And if instead he was just like, "Look at this ChatGPT." Like everyone would have been like, "Google has invented the future." Yeah, you can see that split here in all these texts and emails because everyone's afraid of Demis who is building the Transformers at Google, right? Like it's like they've all seen the actual product and the public is like Sundar's talking to Pluto again.
Oh, that's interesting. Right. And they and they knew Google knew not to release this product to the public. Their own safety culture kept them away from releasing what was at the time like a GPT-1 or 2 class model to the public. Like this is dangerous. There's all this stuff that can go haywire. Blah blah blah blah blah. We're going to do Pluto demos instead. All of the principles were like this is the future.
Literally paper is called attention is all you need. Right.
Right. And so I can see, again, I'm making the argument academically because I agree with you that no one knew what would happen. But I can see why a bunch of people immersed in the safety culture of that time were like, "Everyone knew that you shouldn't do this. OpenAI exists because Google wouldn't do this and you did it anyway without asking us if you should." That's fair. And especially if you come from a safety-first perspective, which in theory OpenAI at the time did, uh, you would say, "Oh, this is a potentially like problematic thing we're putting out into the world to see what happens when it's out in the world. You should know that it's coming, right? This is the thing that Google won't do."
Yeah, I suppose I buy that argument. I also still think it's true that they honest to God did not think anybody would care. Like I I really earnestly believe OpenAI shipped ChatGPT. If you if you think you're releasing a product that's going to change the world, do you call it ChatGPT? Like, no.
No. That's what I'm saying. I agree with you on balance. Like, I I I I think I'm making this argument for the sake of making the argument. I understand.
But there was a reason Google did not release this product and then OpenAI did. Now, OpenAI was nowhere ready to be a company. They were not ready to commercialize it. They were still chasing AGI, like all this stuff. And now they're a totally different company that, you know, in in its heart of hearts wants to be a for-profit enterprise competing with Google.
Yes, that company is positioned very differently. And the OpenAI at it was like, look at our research preview, right? But I I understand why the board, which was our job is to keep everything safe and to like pull the rip cord as we get closer to AGI was like, wait, this is the this is the one thing the big player in the space wouldn't do.
Yeah. No, that's fair. I I buy that. Wait, can I can I just add one more thing? Oh, please. So, I keep forgetting this as well, but Liz is in the courtroom. You should read her live blog and her coverage. It's very funny. She's so angry. Everyone appears to be very tiresome. Um, also, this is Liz at her finest. Liz being annoyed that she's watching billionaires yell at each other is perfect. This is this is why The Verge exists. Um, Hayden's doing great coverage on the exhibits, but I keep forgetting myself that Microsoft is a party to this case because they had the big investment in OpenAI. And Liz keeps mentioning that every single witness ends with Microsoft's lawyer standing up and saying something like, "And Microsoft wasn't there." And then following that
up with, "And Satya Nadella wasn't there either." And she's like, "This is literally the only thing they're adding to this trial."
So, we didn't do that, right? We have nothing to do with us. See you later. Uh, it's just a very funny dynamic in this case that I can't get enough of.
That's it. That would be a really fun job as a lawyer. You just stand up and be like, "But not me though, right?" And they're like, "No, not you." And you're like, "See you. No further questions."
It's pretty good. Yeah. Uh, I really hope at some point we get some Satya texts. Some texts.
He's too smart for that, man.
He is. Satya wouldn't even be caught on a Zoom call, it appears. So kudos to Satya.
Um, all right, we should take a break and then we're going to come back. We got some gadgets to talk about. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Just as a transition out of OpenAI, we should talk about this rumor report that's now floating around that suggests that OpenAI is building a phone for ChatGPT. It's a phone GPT. What do you make of this, Nilay?
