AI safety, yes. AI apocalypse, no.
The California judge overseeing Elon Musk’s civil trial against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman shut down the Tesla CEO’s robot-apocalypse talk on Thursday — drawing a hard line against any further doomsday speculation in her courtroom.
“We’re not going to talk about extinction in this case,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told Musk on this third day of testimony in the high-profile case.
The reprimand came after Musk answered questions about Tesla’s robot-making business and his past comments about “building a robot army.”
“No, we do not make weapons,” said Musk of Tesla, while under questioning from his lawyer, Steven Molo. Musk added, “We don’t want a ‘Terminator’ situation,'” in reference to the 1984 flick starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
When asked to clarify, Musk said, “In the movie it’s not a good situation,” and that the “worst situation would be that AI kills us all, I suppose.”
The trial over the $38 million Musk says he donated to OpenAI entered its fourth day on Thursday. Musk alleges that his fellow OpenAI cofounders, Altman and company president Greg Brockman, abandoned OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the public’s benefit, and not for private gain.
They were “unjustly enriched to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars,” Musk’s lawsuit says.
Despite owning Grok maker xAI, Musk has long been vocal about what he says are the risks of AI. “If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea,” he tweeted in 2017.
Since taking the witness stand on Tuesday, he made multiple references to what might happen if AI gets out of control, even comparing the technology to a small child who might “blow up” without the right guidance.
“That has been my long-standing concern about AI, which is what happens when the computer gets much smarter than humans?” Musk told the jury.
Musk said that if humans and AI ever came into conflict, he’d always be “pro-humans.”
“We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator outcome,'” he said in his day-one testimony.
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