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Ex-OpenAI staff back Musk’s lawsuit

Ex-OpenAI staff back Musk’s lawsuit

🚦 Musk/Zuckerberg AI voices hack crosswalks

Liam Lawson, Martin Crowley & Amanda Greenwood
April 14, 2025

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Monday’s AI Report

• 1. ⚖️ Ex-OpenAI staff back Musk’s lawsuit
• 2. 💹 Invest in the next biggest disruptor: ModeMobile
• 3. 🚦 Musk/Zuckerberg AI voices hack crosswalks
• 4. 😬 Meta’s Maverick scores low benchmark
• 5. 💼 Become an AI consultant with Innovating with AI
• 6. ⚙️ Trending AI Tools
• 7. 🏗️ Practical AI Applications
• 8. 📑 Recommended Resources

Read Time: 5 minutes

👀 An emergency episode of the AI Report podcast is dropping tomorrow! You don’t want to miss this: Our co-founder, Arturo Ferreira talks to Christine Walker—an attorney and AI specialist—about navigating AI, governance, and liability in law.

More details, tomorrow…

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Ex-OpenAI staff back Musk’s lawsuit

🚨 Our Report

A group of 12 ex-OpenAI employees—including some key research and policy leaders—have filed a brief supporting Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI’s planned transition from a non-profit organization to a for-profit entity, claiming (like Musk) that it would undermine the start-up's original mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity, not corporate gains.

🔓 Key Points

The brief argues that a for-profit structure would “violate” the company’s mission and “breach the trust of employees, donors, and other stakeholders who supported the organization based on these commitments”
It also states that CEO, Sam Altman, would often stress that the nonprofit oversight was “paramount” in “guaranteeing that safety and broad societal benefits were prioritized over short-term corporate gains.”
And warns that if OpenAI was enabled to convert to a for-profit structure, it would be incentivized to “[cut] corners” on safety work and develop powerful AI “concentrated among its shareholders.”

🔐 Relevance

Several of these ex-OpenAI employees have already publicly slammed OpenAI’s approach to prioritizing safety and transparency, believing it’s in a “reckless race” for AI dominance, and it “should not [be trusted] when it promises to do the right thing later,” but in response, OpenAI has remained adamant that the change to a for-profit structure is necessary to secure funding, enabling it to support its mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity.

Should OpenAI's transition to a for-profit be stopped?

From selling Pokemon cards to disrupting a $1 trillion industry

Mark Cuban delivered local papers, Warren Buffet sold packs of gum, Richard Branson bred parakeets… some of the wealthiest business leaders started their entrepreneurial journeys at a young age.

And Dan Novaes’ story is no different.

From selling Pokemon cards at the age of 7 to founding Mode Mobile, Dan’s EarnPhone has led to over $325M in savings for over 45M users worldwide. His company was ranked the #1 fastest-growing software company in 2023 by Deloitte and plans are underway for a potential IPO on the Nasdaq (ticker: MODE).

From humble beginnings to generating over 32,481% revenue growth from 2019-2022, Mode Mobile is on the verge of disrupting a $1 trillion industry, and the window for investing in Mode’s vision—at $0.26/share—is closing soon.

*Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com

🚨 Our Report

12 crosswalk buttons in three California cities—Redwood City, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park—were hacked on Friday, playing fake, AI-generated, sound-alike messages from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, when pressed.

🔓 Key Points

The crosswalk buttons in these cities have been designed to play built-in, automated safety messages to help people with impaired eyesight know when to wait and when to cross the road safely.
On Friday, AI-generated voices of Musk begging people to be his friend in return for a cyber-truck, and Zuckerberg bragging how proud he was of undermining democracy with AI, played, alongside the safety messages.
City officials confirmed that while signaling wasn’t affected by the hack, nor were the original safety messages, they have since disabled the voice feature, and are working on a fix to prevent further voice hacks.

🔐 Relevance

While some have described this incident as nothing more than a humorous prank, others have raised concerns about the security of public infrastructure—for example, what security features are on stop lights?—and the bigger picture of what’s going on with AI and “the consequences of data ending up in centralized databases.”

Meta was criticized last week after releasing a different version of its latest Llama 4 model, Maverick, to the one that’s available to the public, on the popular benchmarking platform, LM Arena, just to get a higher score.
It’s well-known that LM Arena isn’t the most reliable way to measure the performance of an AI model as it uses humans to rate outputs, and Meta seems to have exploited this by “optimizing Maverick for conversation.”
However, LM Arena has since re-scored the un-modified, publically available Maverick and found that it ranked below OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro.

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STARTUPS

Name: Heap
Value: $960M
Funding raised: $218M (Series D)

Heap is an AI-powered user analytics platform that automatically sets up tracking and gathers data about user behavior across various digital platforms to give businesses insights and a complete, full-circle understanding of their customer’s digital journey so that they can improve conversion, retention, and customer experiences.