Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I think it's safe to say that most listeners of this show will like vaguely know that there's a conflict between Elon Musk having to do with this, one of his companies, one of his many companies. But they're certainly not following the nitty gritty details of the various lawsuits and of the conflict more generally. So I want to try and summarize it in the most fair way that I can.
And then you'll tell me if I've gotten it. wrong or where I've overstepped. So OpenAI begins in 2015, and it starts as a nonprofit. And in a blog post introducing OpenAI to the world in December of that year, you wrote this, "'OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company.
Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.'" Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. And this was a huge aspect of the brand.
Then, fast forward four years, in 2019, OpenAI moves to what it called a hybrid model with a for-profit arm that got a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft in that year. Since then, Microsoft has poured something like $13 billion—it might be a higher number—more into the company. And Elon was one of the co-founders, as I mentioned, since the beginning.
But his relationship with the company soured over time because he disagreed with the shift that I just described, the shift from this nonprofit model to a hybrid model. And he eventually leaves the company and steps down from the board. And that takes us to this year.
in which Elon has sued you and OpenAI on several different occasions so far this year, and he has given many interviews and posted countless amount of tweets or exes or whatever we're supposed to call them about this conflict. All of the lawsuits claim that you were in some kind of contract violation by putting profits ahead of the public good in the move to advance AI.
And then last month, and this is the most recent development, Elon asked the district judge in California to block OpenAI from converting to this for-profit structure. Okay, that was a mouthful. Did I summarize it properly? And is there anything crucial that I left out or misstated?
Give us like the 10,000-foot version. What is the fundamental conflict between Elon Musk and his various allies, Meta being one of them, and you guys? Like what is the disagreement fundamentally about?
For someone who's just sort of tuning into this topic, why is it important, Sam, that OpenAI has a for-profit arm or converts in the way that you've been talking about? Why is that essential to your growth?
Maybe another way to say it is like it's absolutely essential for the computational power to create.
You've said a lot of different things about Elon in recent days. You gave this interview at Dealbook where Andrew Ross Sorkin is sort of asking you how you feel about the conflict. And you say, sad. And you also say that you think Elon's companies are awesome.
And then he asked you, do you think he's going to use his newfound political influence to kind of punish you or punish OpenAI or punish his competitors? And you said in that interview that you thought he would do the right thing. How do you square that with what you just told me, which is that Elon's a bully? Bullies don't typically do the right thing.
Until now, much of this battle – for those of us who are like perpetually online and perpetually on Twitter, we have been following the conflict via like tweets lobbed, subtweets. It's all sort of been playing out in real time on Twitter for us to watch. OpenAI, though, has sort of been in, like, response mode sometimes or mostly kind of ignoring everything. That's sort of how I'd characterize it.
That changed a few days ago when you guys published this very, very long memo on OpenAI's website. And it's like a timeline going back to 2015, proving from your perspective that, you know, via emails and screenshots of texts and explanations of those screenshots and those texts that... Elon was open to OpenAI being a for-profit going all the way back then. I read all 29 pages.
For those who don't want to do that, they could go to ChatGPT and ask Chat to summarize it. Here's how ChatGPT summarized it. This article details the rift between Elon Musk and OpenAI's leadership, particularly Sam Altman, stemming from Musk's dissatisfaction with OpenAI's shift from a nonprofit to a hybrid for-profit model.
This feud is crucial, Chet told me, because it underscores the broader ethical dilemma of how AI should be developed and controlled, whether it should prioritize public good or corporate profit, especially as powerful AI technologies become increasingly influential in society in the economy. I thought that was pretty good. What do you think?
Anything you would add to it?
In the early days of OpenAI, the brand, like the way I encountered the brand of it was transparency and nonprofit. Like those were the things that it over and over emphasized. And the reason you said that you couldn't take any equity and the reason you took such a small salary is because you said, you know, I don't want to be conflicted.
I want to always be motivated to do the thing that's best for humanity. The day after OpenAI launched in December in 2015, you described it to Vanity Fair as a nonprofit company to save the world from a dystopian future. You also said that trying to make OpenAI a for-profit would lead to, quote, misaligned incentives that would be suboptimal to the world as a whole.
I guess I want to ask, like, do you still agree with that, but simply you've had to adapt to the reality, which is that developing these models takes billions and billions and billions of dollars? Two things.
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