OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is in a legal dispute with Elon Musk’s rivalhe said he’s “not that worried” about Musk’s influence in the incoming Trump administration.
Altman told the New York Times on Wednesday that he “could be proven wrong” but firmly believes Musk will do the right thing.
“It would be extremely un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and favor your own business,” Altman said. “And I don’t think people would tolerate that. I don’t think Elon would do that.”
Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued an artificial intelligence company earlier this year claiming that ChatGPT’s creator betrayed his founding goals for the benefit of the public good rather than profit. Musk recently escalated the lawsuit, asking a federal judge to stop it OpenAI’s plans in order to turn it more fully into a profitable business.
President-elect Donald Trump appoints Musk, the richest man in the world, and Vivek Ramaswamyentrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate, in charge of the new The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is an outside advisory board that will work with people inside the government to reduce spending and regulations.
Musk, whose companies include Tesla, SpaceX and a social media platform Xlaunched his own rival artificial intelligence company, xAI, which Altman said he sees as serious competition.
Asked about his strained relationship with Musk, Altman said he felt “terribly sad,” but also characterized Musk’s legal battle as one about business competition.
“He’s a competitor and we’re doing well,” Altman said.
Altman also addressed another pending lawsuit against OpenAI from The New York Times, host of Wednesday’s DealBook summit of business and political leaders.
The Times is among several news outlets that have sued San Francisco-based OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for copyright infringement in using newspaper articles to train AI systems like ChatGPT. The companies argued that they were protected by the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law.
“If an AI reads something — a physics textbook — it can learn physics, it can use it for other things like a human can,” Altman said.
Lawyers for both sides gathered in front of a federal magistrate judge in New York for more than four hours on Tuesday to resolve disagreements over how they would gather potential evidence from each other. The exhibition should begin in January. The newspaper’s lawyer told the court that the publications confirmed that millions of newspaper articles were used to train artificial intelligence.
“Look, I don’t believe in showing up at someone’s house and being rude, but I will say, I think The New York Times is on the wrong side of history in a lot of ways,” Altman told Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin during an onstage interview Wednesday.
“We could argue that and we will, I think, in court,” Sorkin replied, to laughter from the audience.
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Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this report.
The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP text archives.
