Those few employees are probably going to all be developers, and despite there being a bunch of mathematics and engineering involved, being a developer is very much a creative process. Similarly, I wouldn’t begrudge a digital artist for wanting to use a Mac to do their work.

If a developer is asking for a thing, they’re not asking for it because they’ve suddenly developed a nervous tic. There’s typically a reason behind it. Maybe its because they want to learn that thing to stay relevant, or explore it’s feasibility, or maybe it’s to support another project.

I used to get the old “we don’t support thing because nobody uses thing” a lot. The problem with that thinking is that unless support for whatever thing immaculates out of nowhere it’ll just never happen. And that’s a tough sell for a developer who needs to stay relevant.

I remember in like 2019 I asked for my company to host git repos on the corporate network, and I got a hard no. Same line, there wasn’t a need, nobody uses git. I was astounded. I thought my request was pretty benign and would just sail right through because by that point it was almost an industry standard to use git. I vented about it to some devs in another department and learned that they had a system with local admin attached to the corporate network that somehow IT didn’t know about. They were using that to host their repos.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if keeping employees happy is too expensive, then you gotta at least be aware of the potential costs of unhappy employees.

Read a bit of the court filing, not the whole thing though since you get the gist pretty early on. Jornos put spin on everything, so here’s my understanding of the argument:

1. Musk, who has given money to OpenAI in the past, and thus can legally file a complaint, states that
2. OpenAI, which is a registered as an LLC, and which is legally a nonprofit, and has the stated goal of benefitting all of humanity has
3. Been operating outside of its legally allowed purpose, and in effect
4. Used its donors, resources, tax status, and expertise to create closed source algorithms and models that currently exclusively benefit for-profit concerns (Musk’s attorney points out that Microsoft Bing’s AI is just ChatGPT) and thus
5. OpenAI has created a civil tort (a legally recognized civil wrong) wherein
6. Money given by contributors would not haven been given had the contributors been made aware this deviation from OpenAI’s mission statement and
7. The public at large has not benefited from any of OpenAI’s research, and thus OpenAI has abused its preferential tax status and harmed the public

It’s honestly not the worst argument.