I found myself wondering, again, why we were all wasting our time here. So let’s discuss the gossip, which is the real point of this trial. How good was it? Here are my favorite nuggets.

While this trial was meant to punish Altman and arguably already has, I’d like to focus on my actual takeaway here: Elon Musk sucks at AI.

Look, Musk said multiple times that OpenAI wouldn’t succeed. He’s tried, repeatedly, to kneecap it and steal its researchers and in one case — that of Andrej Karpathy, a founding team member Musk lured to Tesla — succeeded. But how’s xAI doing? Well, it’s a black hole for money that’s been acquired by SpaceX. It’s hemorrhaging researchers. One of its huge data centers isn’t going to be occupied by xAI — there’s a deal with Anthropic instead. It might buy Cursor, in an attempt to match the programming-focused products put forward by Anthropic and OpenAI. xAI’s enterprise users, whether that’s the US government or private companies, have been strong-armed into using it. To the degree that its bespoke CSAM machine Grok, aka MechaHitler, works, it apparently works because Musk distilled other people’s models.

Zilis wrote in 2018 that Brockman and Ilya Sutskever thought that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework [on] AI / AGI and that concerns them about working with him.” I am leaving this trial thinking all these fucking liars deserve each other, but in fairness to Brockman and Sutskever, they were absolutely right about this. The question now is if anyone who’s thinking of investing in the upcoming SpaceX IPO has noticed, or cares.