Could anything but profit steer AI? The OpenAI trial offered clues but no verdict :: WRAL.com
Could anything but profit steer AI? The OpenAI trial offered clues but no verdict :: WRAL.com
Publish Date: 2026-05-24 00:04:00
Source Domain: www.wral.com
The trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made clear the two billionaires agreed on one thing: building artificial intelligence would require significant resources — and enormous amounts of money.
It may seem obvious now, as an AI-obsessed stock market helps finance a global construction boom of chipmaking factories and energy-hogging data centers to keep chatbots running, but testimony and evidence showed how people with outsized control of the AI industry were privately debating its costs nearly a decade ago.
“Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough,” Musk said in a 2018 email to Altman and other OpenAI co-founders about what he increasingly saw as a futile attempt to compete with Google. “This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”
The soaring costs factored into the trajectory of OpenAI, which began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good and is now a capitalistic enterprise valued at $852 billion. As San Francisco-based OpenAI and other AI companies move toward historically large Wall Street debuts, the trial also raised questions about whether anything but commercial interests can steer AI’s future.
It is possible to build big things only with nonprofit money, but in the case of OpenAI’s early years, the uncertainty around AI also made it a risky investment, said Karan Girotra, a professor of operations, technology, and innovation at Cornell Tech. Now, he said, investment in AI is no longer speculative.
“Now it’s traditional investment in something we know works,” Girotra said. “People want your car, you need to build the factory ahead of…
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