Sean McLean (2:48)

There's a couple of things. One, if you've been in some place like Austin or Phoenix or Los Angeles or San Francisco, robo taxis are increasingly commonplace. I personally take a Waymo around the west side of LA quite often. It's very convenient. It feels very safe. There are hiccups like getting lost in a parking lot, and there has been some sort of highly public incidents and accidents on the road. But the market and analysts feel that the technology is becoming more stable and people are becoming more comfortable with it, and that's giving the industry confidence to roll out into more places like Detroit, Minneapolis, even trying to tackle midtown Manhattan.

Imani Moise (3:29)

So it's a bit of a horse race in the robo taxi world right now. Can you give us a scouting report who's currently out front?

Sean McLean (3:35)

It's currently a one horse race. If we look at a map of where these cars are deployed, how many vehicles on the road right now, it's Waymo. There are a host of challengers, including Tesla with its robo taxis, and Uber, who is agri, a bunch of different robo taxi players into their network. And, you know, even startups like Zoox. All of these companies are starting to deploy vehicles or getting close to being able to deploy their vehicles. And I think that's why it feels like a moment of pressure building where these things are about to explode onto the roads.

Imani Moise (4:10)

Some of those companies, robo taxis, are also unconventional vehicles. What challenges do they face?

Sean McLean (4:16)

There are additional hurdles for companies like Tesla and Zoox who want to build a vehicle without a steering wheel or brake pedals or gas pedals. And that presents a challenge both from a technical and a safety concern standpoint, but also from a regulatory standpoint. The federal government sort of sets safety standards for vehicles, and one of the key requirements is that it have a steering wheel and pedals. And so they need to apply for a special exemption not only to test these vehicles on the road, but also to operate a ride hailing service.

Peter Ciampelli (4:49)

That was our colleague Imani Moise talking with Wall Street Journal reporter Sean McClain. Have you taken a robo taxi? What did you think? If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. Coming up, we're taking you inside the legal battle and federal courtroom that's become a showdown between many of the biggest names in tech. That's after the.

Atlassian Rovo AI Announcer (5:14)

This podcast is brought to you by Atlassian Rovo, the AI that takes your team from AI novice to AI native. Using AI at work shouldn't feel like extra work Rovo works inside the tools you already use, like Jira and Confluence. It takes care of status updates, backlog, cleanup and repetitive tasks for you so you can focus on what actually moves work forward. Try Rovo from atlassian@rovo.com that's rovo.com.

Peter Ciampelli (5:48)

The second week of the hotly anticipated trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI kicked off Monday. Musk alleges OpenAI took $38 million in donations when it was founded as a nonprofit, then used it to turn it into a for profit company. The ChatGPT maker says Musk was aware of the conversion plans and even supported them. Wall Street Journal finance and tech reporter Angel Ah Young has been closely following the case and joins us to explain the latest. And before we get into it, a disclaimer. News Corp. The owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Angel, thanks so much for joining us. Can you explain Musk's argument and what are his claims that he's making to the court?

Angel Au Young (6:28)

Sure. So Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and two of its co founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, for breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. And in terms of what he's asking the courts to do, it's a number of remedies. So they include removing Altman and Brockman from their leadership roles at OpenAI, up to $180 billion in damages to be transferred from the company's for profit arm into its nonprofit parent. And he's also asking the courts to unwind a recent conversion that OpenAI did to a more traditional corporate governance structure.

Peter Ciampelli (7:12)

Has OpenAI filed any claims against Musk throughout this process?

Angel Au Young (7:16)

What OpenAI has said is that this is a way for Elon to slow down OpenAI's progress. The company has said that this is all just a ruse, a strategy for Elon to help his own AI company. So OpenAI has said that there is no merit to this lawsuit and in fact the company actually called this lawsuit the latest quote unquote variant for Elon's efforts to disrupt OpenAI's progress.

Peter Ciampelli (7:47)

So how is the trial going? What were the biggest standout moments from the first week?

Angel Au Young (7:52)

There weren't too many surprises in the first week. The biggest surprise probably was the fact that Elon himself testified. I think the most interesting parts came out of cross examination when OpenAI lawyers asked him a number of questions. Those interactions, it did get a little heated. Elon seemed very frustrated with the cross examination. Surprising things that we learned actually were mostly about XAI Elon's own AI company. He admitted that XAI is a very small company in comparison to the other AI labs. And one part of the trial that I thought was really interesting was that Elon, he started ranking the AI labs without prompting from any attorneys. And along the way he slighted OpenAI in his ranking. He put Anthropic as number one and OpenAI as number two. And he put Xai as the fifth biggest AI company. Something interesting that did happen over the weekend though was that there was a new filing from OpenAI. The company alleged that Elon had actually texted Greg Brockman, co founder and current president of OpenAI, asking if they wanted to settle. And Greg Brockman, he suggested to Elon that both sides should drop their claims. Elon apparently responded with a threat. He texted Greg, by the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist. So it will be.

Peter Ciampelli (9:31)

And yesterday saw OpenAI President Greg Brockman take the stand and more. Is there anything notable so far this week?

Angel Au Young (9:38)

One new piece of information that we have learned from Brockman's testimony is that he actually revealed on the witness stand that his stake in OpenAI is now worth close to $30 billion. And that's something that we did not know before. Pieces of evidence that have come up during the course of this lawsuit include some private diary entries that Greg Brockman actually wrote around 2017. And he wrote, we've been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for profit making the money for us. Sounds great and all. And so this journal entry came out during discovery and Elon's attorneys have basically pointed to those journal entries as basically evidence that the OpenAI founders have been plotting against him all along and trying to start a for profit company.

Peter Ciampelli (10:30)

We've had a lot of big names testify so far, but there are still more to come this week. Can you give us a preview of who we can expect to see take the stand?

Angel Au Young (10:37)

Yes. So one witness who is expected to testify this week is a woman named Siobhan Zillis and she was a former board member of OpenAI, but she is also the mother to four of Elon Musk's children. She's getting pulled into this trial because she was a board member at OpenAI, but she also did chief of staff like work for Elon during OpenAI's early years. Other people who are also expected to testify include Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Mira Muradi, who was formerly chief technology officer at OpenAI but has now started her own competing AI company as well as Ilya Sutskever, who is also a former OpenAI co founder and is one of the leading AI scientists in the world.

Peter Ciampelli (11:31)

That was our reporter Angel Au Young. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Katie Ferguson. I'm Peter Ciampelli for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

Atlassian Rovo AI Announcer (11:55)

This podcast is brought to you by Atlassian Rovo AI that takes your team from AI novice to AI native. What if AI handled the busy work for you? Updating JIRA tickets, drafting campaign briefs and confluence writing project updates, all without you lifting a finger? Meet Rovo AI that works where your team already works, using your company's data and permissions to take action. Get started with rovo@rovo.com that's rovo.com.