Elon Musk Had'Hair-Raising' Idea of Passing OpenAI Onto His Kids, Sam Altman Says Musk's lawyers questioned Altman over allegations of deception and his network of financial investments, but the OpenAI CEO painted a picture of Musk as obsessed with controlling the company. Sam Altman took to the witness stand to defend his reputation in the trial on Tuesday, as Elon Musk's lawyers peppered the OpenAI CEO with hours of questions regarding his alleged history of deceptive behavior . The cross examination was a much needed win for Musk, who has so far struggled to make a convincing case. Tuesday's testimony included several heated exchanges in which the OpenAI CEO had to respond to allegations from former colleagues suggesting he's untrustworthy . Highlighting this evidence is not only important for Musk winning over a jury, but also for beating OpenAI in the court of public opinion.

Plus: the first zero-day exploit built by AI has been discovered. A few months before he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. He argued that AI would give only a small boost to US productivity and would not eliminate the need for human work. Two years later, Acemoglu's measured take has not caught on. The technology has advanced quite a bit since his cautious predictions, but the data is still largely on his side. Here are the three things Acemoglu is paying closest attention to in AI right now .

Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman's OpenAI Ouster: 'I Didn't Want It to Be Destroyed' The former OpenAI chief scientist may be estranged from the company, but he still came to its defense as he testified on Monday. Elon Musk's trial against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its final stretch on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. Sutskever drew the spotlight, revealing an ownership stake in OpenAI's $850-billion for-profit arm that is currently worth about $7 billion. That makes him one of the largest known individual shareholders of OpenAI. Earlier in the trial, OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged for the first time that he has around $30 billion worth of OpenAI shares .

Showdown between Musk and Altman has rendered the world's most wealthy comical under egalitarian eye of court For the past couple of weeks, on the fourth floor of a courthouse on a quiet street in downtown Oakland, the world's richest man and one of the world's most valuable startups have been at war over the future of artificial intelligence. Being one of the reporters in the room has felt like watching an updated, opposite-coast version of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities - ambition, ego, greed and the spectrum of social class on full display. The supporting cast has included Elon Musk fanboys, a stern judge and a who's-who of Silicon Valley's most influential people. All courtroom battles are theatre, but this one has proved to be a unique spectacle, with the judge chastising the lawyers for leading the witness, raising meritless objections and even too much coughing. With Musk on the stand, he griped that an opposing attorney had asked a leading question, to which the judge told him to "tell the jury you're not a lawyer".

Leaders at the tech giant were skeptical of OpenAI--but wary of pushing it into the arms of Amazon, according to evidence revealed during the trial. OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft, its longtime investor and cloud partner, has grown increasingly complicated over the years as the ChatGPT-maker has grown into a behemoth competitor . But Microsoft executives had reservations about sending additional funding to OpenAI as far back as 2018 when it was just a small nonprofit research lab, according to emails between more than a dozen Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, shown in a federal court on Thursday during the trial. The emails show how Microsoft, at the time, wavered over what has since been held up as one of the most successful corporate partnerships in tech history. Several Microsoft executives said in the emails their visits to OpenAI did not indicate any imminent breakthroughs in developing artificial general intelligence.

Plus: After years of insults, Anthropic and SpaceX have teamed up. IVF has brought millions of babies into the world over the last four decades. But the process can still be slow, painful, and expensive--and far from guaranteed to work. Now, a wave of new technologies aims to change that. Researchers are using AI to identify promising sperm and embryos, developing robotic systems that could automate parts of the IVF process, and even exploring controversial genetic editing techniques designed to prevent inherited disease. The technologies could make IVF more effective and accessible.

Messages between Shivon Zilis and Tesla executives reveal plans in 2017 to start a rival AI lab, potentially led by Altman or Demis Hassabis. A few months before Elon Musk left OpenAI's board of directors in February 2018, he tried to recruit Sam Altman to join a "world-class AI lab" within Tesla. Musk went as far as offering the OpenAI CEO a Tesla board seat, according to emails and testimony presented in federal court on Wednesday during the trial . The emails were shown to a jury during the cross examination of Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI adviser and board member who is also the mother of four of Musk's children. Musk's core claim in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman effectively stole a nonprofit, using the $38 million Musk invested to create a private company worth more than $800 billion today.

OpenAI's cofounder and president revealed in federal court on Monday that he's one of the largest individual stakeholders in the AI lab. Two days before the Musk v. Altman trial began, Elon Musk asked OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman about reaching a settlement. When Brockman suggested both sides drop their claims, Musk responded, "By the end of this week, you and Sam [Altman] will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so be it." The message --which OpenAI's lawyers made public on Sunday, and which Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers subsequently refused to let the jury hear about--underscores what may be Musk's larger goal in this trial.

Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI's models Musk kept his cool, and OpenAI's lawyer bulldozed him with piercing questions about his motivations for suing the company. In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could destroy us all and sat through revelations that he had poached OpenAI employees for his own companies. He even confessed, to some audible gasps in the courtroom, that his own AI company, xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, uses OpenAI's models to train its own. The federal courthouse in Oakland, California, was packed with armies of lawyers carrying boxes of exhibits, journalists typing away at their laptops, and a handful of concerned OpenAI employees. Outside, protesters lined the streets, carrying signs urging people to quit ChatGPT, boycott Tesla, or both.

In this episode of “Uncanny Valley,” we get into how the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial goes way beyond their rivalry and could have major implications both for OpenAI and also the AI industry at large.