Michelle Fleury

I can't believe you're starting this show with a dad joke. Well listen, it's better than most of my other jokes. We are of course talking about on the one side Elon Musk, one of the most powerful tech figures in the world. On the other, Michelle? Sam Altman from OpenAI. I mean this is like a divorce playing out and it's kind of parents fighting over who gets the good silver, although in this case of course we're talking about AI.

It's adult toddlers with God complexes. It's classic Silicon Valley. You've got Elon Musk doing his maximum chaos routine. You've got Sam Altman, the tech saint, both fighting over a company that started as a charity but ended up as this huge cash machine. Is this now completely over, Lily, given the central question wasn't answered?

I was reading something in The Verge Lily, which was talking about Musk versus Altman, and it shows that this was led by the wrong people. But what about OpenAI itself? Doesn't it leave it with a massive branding problem? OpenAI is...

We just heard there from William Savitt, OpenAI's lawyer. I want to go back to kind of the other side, the argument being made by Elon Musk's lawyer, Mark Tobaroff, who kind of described this, I guess, as a dangerous precedent.

I'm fascinated by the signal it sends to the rest of the tech world when you've got two such huge names involved in such a big, nasty and expensive and high-profile visible fight. If you are a startup trying to build AI, particularly if maybe you want to pick up that mantle and make it for the good of humanity, good luck trying to survive the crossfire from these giants that are racing to dominate this industry.

The other thing is also it proves in some ways that the wild west of AI isn't being tamed by government or anyone else. It sort of seems to be being led by billionaire grudges. And I think for people who are feeling skeptical about AI at the moment, and we've touched on that a bit, and polls keep showing that Americans are increasingly less favorable in their opinions and their views of kind of the speed with which this is being developed. I think you're seeing that chasm growing even more from this track.

I've got to say, I don't like it when you put me on the spot like this because I feel like it's every time you and Raul look at me before we start recording.

Yeah, I mean, if you think back, 2017, that's when Donald Trump was doing that sort of hyper grand state visit.

In between, Joe Biden, he never went.

Barack Obama went about three times trying to figure out the relationship between these two superpowers.

And you're sort of wondering what's going to happen.

Are we going to see sort of some groundbreaking diplomatic shifts like we saw when Richard Nixon visited Chairman Mao or during the Carter years?

Or, you know, is this going to be a bit more of a damp squib?

I think I know where you're going.

Yeah, I had a feeling you'd be going for T for tariffs.

We've come a long way, both from the first term when Donald Trump was focused on tariffs on China.

Then his second term, he sort of globalized it and put on tariffs on pretty much every country around the world.

Where we are right now is...

Tariffs are at around 23%, which may sound bad.

But then just remember last year, we were pretty much at an economic freeze between these two.