How Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s Partnership Turned Toxic

WSJ Tech News Briefing

The Wall Street Journal

News, Tech News

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2024

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Elon Musk and Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 with the mission of creating artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. The two built an alliance to try to prevent Google from dominating the AI industry. A lot has changed since then. OpenAI has gone commercial, with billions of dollars of funding from Microsoft. And last week, Musk filed a lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI, alleging that he’d abandoned the startup’s core mission in pursuit of profit. WSJ reporter Keach Hagey tells host Cordilia James how the tech leaders’ bromance turned toxic and what their legal battle means for AI development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by Alex Partners.
0:03.0	Read the results of the fifth annual Alex Partners.com.
0:17.8	Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, March 7th.
0:19.8	I'm Cordelia James for the Wall Street Journal,
0:22.0	filling in for Alex Osala.
0:24.7	Coming up on today's show, Adobe has been quick to embrace generative artificial intelligence,
0:30.9	but Open AI's announcement of a new tool called SORA helps send Adobe's stock tumbling.
0:37.0	W.S.J. Hurt on the street columnist Dan Gallagher tells us why AI Hype is a double-edged sword for the Photoshop
0:44.3	maker and what it means for investors. And then Elon Musk and Sam Altman
0:50.6	shared the same mission when they co-founded Open AI in 2015.
0:55.5	But the partnership that launched the artificial intelligence boom has turned toxic.
1:00.6	W.S.J. reporter Kich Haagee, tells us how their legal battle could affect AI development.
1:07.0	But first, Adobe has rapidly embraced generative AI tools and that helped make it one of the hottest stocks among software firms last year even outperforming Microsoft
1:20.6	But a lackluster forecast in the company's December earnings report plus
1:24.6	product announcements from competitors have made some investors wary
1:28.3	about Adobe's place in the AI race. Heard on the street columnist Dan Gallagher joins us now with more on Adobe's roller coaster stock performance.
1:37.0	Dan Adobe is projecting growth but not from AI.
1:42.0	Why is that such a disappointment to investors?
1:45.0	What happened is when they first put out their growth target for the current fiscal year
1:50.0	that we're in and they did this couple of months ago is that that growth was essentially what they did the previous year.
1:58.2	And investors at the time were really excited expecting to see some lift from AI because Adobe last year introduced a bunch of new
2:06.2	AI-based tools that works with a lot of Adobe's products.
	...

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