Time for a reality check.

AI can’t call on years of industry experience to fix a nuanced problem. It can’t demonstrate empathy over shared frustrations or build strong human connections. It won’t even laugh at your bad jokes unless you tell it to.

Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their closing arguments this week, and now it’s up to jurors to decide whether OpenAI did anything wrong as it’s transformed into a slightly-more-for-profit organization. 

But as Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I noted on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, a big theme in the trial’s final days was whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trustworthy — for example, Musk’s attorney Steve Molo grilled Altman about whether statements he’d made during congressional testimony were truthful.

Kirsten noted that Musk has made plenty of misleading statements of his own, and that trust isn’t just an issue for Altman.

“This is a fundamental question [for] a lot of tech journalists, policymakers, and more and more consumers, about all the AI labs,” she said. “It’s really come down to trust, because we don’t have the insight, necessarily — these are all privately held companies, there’s a lot behind the veil still.”

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: [The end of the trial] led to this really provocative headline from one of our writers, Tim Fernholz, [that] just says, “Who trusts Sam Altman?” Does anyone want to take a stab at answering this? 

Kirsten Korosec: Yeah, Anthony, I’m going to throw it right back to you. Do you trust Sam Altman? 

Anthony: It’s an interesting question because it feels like something that’s kind of a wild question to discuss in a journalistic context, but actually that’s the core of the trial, in a lot of ways. 

Sean O’Kane: That’s not a yes.

Anthony: And it actually seems to be [at the] core of understanding so much of what’s happened at OpenAI, especially this big executive power struggle that they now call The Blip.

It just seems like a lot of people who’ve worked with Altman don’t trust him. And he’s acknowledged this a little bit, because he’ll talk about the fact that he recognizes he’s been conflict averse, telling people what they want to hear, and he’s trying to work on that.

I mean, it sounds plausible, and I can understand how that can lead to misunderstandings in some situations. [But] I’m also a very conflict-averse person and I’d like to think that if any of this stuff went to trial, that people would not be asking, “Is Anthony Ha trustworthy?”

Sean: Still not a yes! 

Kirsten: I think that people would say that you are trustworthy. I will say that question, while provocative, doesn’t just encapsulate what this trial was about. I would zoom out even more and say this is a fundamental question [for] a lot of tech journalists, policymakers, and more and more consumers, about all the AI labs. It’s really come down to trust, because we don’t have the insight, necessarily — these are all privately held companies, there’s a lot behind the veil still.

Maybe when they all IPO, we can get a peek, but it is fundamentally about trust and misuse, and do we believe the intent? And what I would throw back is, sometimes the intent can be worthy, noble, and still misused. It can still end up as a bit of a shit show. I think it’s more than who trusts Sam Altman — although that was very interesting in this trial — but more of that bigger question that we can apply to the entire industry. 

Sean: I’ll say it: I don’t trust him. But you know, I don’t trust most people, so I guess that’s just the baseline. 

We’ll see where this goes. The trial wraps up today. I’ve been very curious to hear how the jury decides this all. I think at the start of this, a big motivator of this was Elon Musk trying to sling mud, at a perceived rival and someone who he feels slighted him. And I don’t know if we know enough yet to say that that was completely accomplished, and whether or not he has a shot at winning. But I think all these people came out of this looking a little bit worse. 

Anthony: And just to get specific, why this is coming up this week is that [Altman] was on the stand and he was basically getting grilled about some statements he’s made in the past, in testimony to [Congress], basically saying he didn’t have any equity in OpenAI. And that is not true because he had a stake through Y Combinator, which he used to run. And tried to brush that off by saying, “I assume that everybody understands what it means to be a passive investor in a VC fund.” And I think [Elon Musk’s] lawyer, somewhat fairly, said “Really? You think the congressman who was interviewing you knew that?”

Kirsten: Yeah, I mean, he was playing the whole semantics game. What I thought was so interesting about [this] is the style of how Sam Altman answered questions [compared to] Elon Musk on the stand. 

So Elon Musk, in many, many, many scenarios and many instances, we can point to the fact that he put something out on Twitter that was a lie or a bit of a fib, and on the stand corrected the record. So there’s a history of, I would say, non-truthfulness-slash-lying, blatant or otherwise, in Elon Musk’s world, but how he treated it was incredibly combative and very different than Altman who really took this [attitude of], “I’m working on it,” and tried to seem sort of affable and I don’t know if it’ll work for him.

Because it really comes down to the core facts, and hopefully that’s what the jury pays attention to. But I thought that that was really interesting — both being untruthful, but how they dealt with it was very different.

Security

Multiple researchers using the same tools to find the same bugs are creating ‘unnecessary pain and pointless work’

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has declared the project’s security mailing list has become “almost entirely unmanageable” due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports.

Torvalds used his weekly state of the kernel post to deliver release candidate four for Linux 7.1 and report “fairly normal” progress towards a full release.

He then pointed kernelistas to the project’s documentation, which he wrote “might be worth highlighting” as “the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.”

“People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying ‘that was already fixed a week/month ago’ and pointing to the public discussion,” Torvalds complained.

The Penguin Emperor believes that kind of chatter is “all entirely pointless churn” and isn’t productive because “AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can’t even see each other’s reports.”

He then offered an opinion on how best to use AI to improve software security.

“AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work,” he wrote. “Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience.”

“The documentation may be a bit less blunt than I am,” he added, “but that’s the core gist of it.”

“So just to make it really clear: If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on *top* of what the AI did. Don’t be the drive-by ‘send a random report with no real understanding’ kind of person. OK?”

Torvalds’ remarks contrast with recent comments from fellow kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who recently told The Register that AI has become an increasingly useful tool for the FOSS community. ®

Privacy will be a major theme when Apple unveils a new version of Siri at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The Siri relaunch is widely seen as Apple’s big chance to reestablish its relevance in artificial intelligence. As part of that effort, company executives will argue that they’re taking a more privacy-friendly approach than most other AI companies, Gurman said.

Apple will reportedly launch the first standalone Siri app, powered by Google Gemini and offering users a chatbot experience reminiscent of ChatGPT.  But compared to those other chatbots, the app is supposed to have more limitations on how long user information can be used and stored.

For example, Gurman said Siri could include a feature similar to the Messages app, allowing users to automatically delete conversations after 30 days or one year — or to keep them indefinitely.

Gurman also suggested that Apple might be emphasizing privacy as a way to excuse Siri’s shortcomings compared to competing products — and that this emphasis might obscure the fact that Google is handling some the security.