Everyone Lost with Musk v. Altman

A logic puzzle about knights who never lie and knaves who always lie can be solved by asking what the other would advise and then choosing the opposite path. The method depends on someone being honest. A Cretan-style scenario replaces that stability with self-referential paradoxes, such as “all Cretans are liars,” which undermine their own claims. The Musk v. Altman trial is framed as an Oakland courtroom version of lying Cretans. The dispute is described as being about good-faith control of artificial intelligence. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Musk and Altman later disagreed over leadership, leading to a legal conflict after significant funding and separation.

"A famous logic puzzle takes place on a mythical island divided between the knights, who never lie, and the knaves, who always do. A foreign traveller encounters a fork in the road: one way guarantees safe passage, the other certain death. A member of each tribe is present, though it isn't clear which is which, and the traveller is granted only one question. The solution is well known: ask either of them what the other would advise, and then to choose the opposite path. (An accurate account of a lie and an inaccurate account of the truth amount to the same wrong answer.) But this works only if someone is honest."

"What if nobody can be trusted? The Cretan philosopher Epimenides inspired an alternative scenario set on his own island, when he supposedly said that "all Cretans are liars." Logicians call unstable statements like these "self-referential paradoxes," or utterances that undermine their own claims. Epimenides would presumably have felt at home at trial of Musk v. Altman, which over the past few weeks turned an Oakland courtroom into an island of lying Cretans."

"In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI together as a nonprofit. Its mission-"to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity"-was explicitly intended to counter Google's potential dominance of the technology, which seemed almost foreordained at the time. Musk pledged up to a billion dollars to prevent that outcome. It didn't take long for the two men to disagree over the chain of command. Each thought he alone deserved to run the show."

Read at The New Yorker