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No thesis this week. Just a pile of things I can't stop thinking about.
Jury selection starts April 27 in Oakland. Altman, Brockman, Satya Nadella, and Musk all testifying. The case gained traction when discovery produced a 2017 Brockman diary entry stating the nonprofit commitment "was a lie.” That's the sentence that got Judge Gonzalez Rogers to let it proceed.
Some say this is a governance war dressed as a legal war. The real question is who gets to steer systems with quasi-civilizational impact. Settlement probably involves Sam stepping down as CEO while the company stays for-profit. Elon amended his complaint to direct any damages to OpenAI's nonprofit arm rather than himself; a move that makes this very hard to dismiss as a billionaire grudge match. He doesn't want the money. He wants the bullet.
Worth noting the elephant in the room: the New Yorker investigation (hit piece? on Sam), which dropped the same week as the trial ramp-up, showed Musk himself pushed for majority control of the for-profit back in 2017. That somewhat undercuts the pure nonprofit-defender framing.
Interesting legal take: is this case completely untested in law. Nobody has ever litigated whether you can raise money for a nonprofit mission, build intellectual and physical capital on that foundation, and then convert it entirely? Seem novel. Whatever the verdict, it sets the precedent for all future time and potentially unlocks enormous value currently locked inside America's research universities, if nonprofits gain a cleaner path to restructuring as public benefit corporations.
Anthropic, meanwhile, is laughing every day. (and devouring my tokens!!)
The Stack Is Being Rebuilt From Scratch
Elon's own quote says it all: "XAI was not built right the first time around. So it's being rebuilt from the foundations up." That's a remarkable thing to say about a company you're pricing for a $2 trillion IPO this summer.
The reorganization is sweeping with eight founding engineers gone including three co-founders, SpaceX operators filling the gaps. The new president of xAI is the former VP of Starlink. A working theory is that the early Grok models smelled like benchmaxing: tuned to perform on specific benchmarks rather than actually reason. When you build rockets, bad outputs are obvious. When you build AI, your team can blow smoke for a long time before anyone notices. Elon apparently has now noticed.
Colossus 2 (one of Elon’s massive data centers)is now running ~700K GPUs targeting models up to 10 trillion parameters. The 10T model probably isn't even meant for release. It's a teacher model you compress down into something shippable. Elon is going brute force on training while the frontier has moved to a different game entirely.
Whether SpaceX operators can run an AI lab as well as they run rocket programs is the open question. Meta had massive compute and still fell behind, gutted the team, and is still catching up. xAI is making the same bet with less runway before the IPO clock runs out.
Question: do you ever bet against Elon? Put politics aside before you answer.
Not metaphorically. An AI named Luna signed a 3-year storefront lease in Cow Hollow (that is in SanFran, not the Shire), hired staff, set prices, picked the mural, and opened a boutique. All on a $100K budget. Read the Andon Labs writeup for the details; it's one of the more remarkable primary sources I've seen this year. Luna lied about signing the lease (she can't, legally), accidentally tried to hire a painter in Afghanistan, and forgot to schedule staff for opening day. The bugs are the story not the failures, but how small they are relative to everything that worked.
Luna didn't answer anything. She just ran a business.
The Job Question
Peter Dannenberg from Google DeepMind, estimated 99% probability a randomly selected white-collar job can be replaced or 10x'd by AI within two years. Marc Andreessen's counter: productivity ramps create new demand, net jobs boom. Altman's position: something like a New Deal, maybe Universal Basic Services rather than UBI.
I don't think any of these people are wrong exactly. I think they're describing different phases of the same transition at different time horizons and calling it a debate. Its a loss first, then a boom.
The Solo Lawyer Story You Should Read
Two pieces landed this week about what AI actually looks like on the ground for the 75% of the legal profession that can't afford the $900/month tools BigLaw buys. The first is a story about a solo practitioner who spent 45 minutes with Claude Code before a pitch meeting and walked out with a client over two 15-attorney firms because he showed up knowing things about the prospect's company that nobody expected a solo to know. The second is an argument that most of what CoCounsel and Harvey sell is a wrapper around the same foundation models you can access for $20–$200/month, and that solos can build their own versions in a weekend.
Both are worth your time even if you're not in law. The dynamic of preparation as the new competitive moat, and the gap between enterprise AI pricing and what's actually available to individuals shows up everywhere in professional services right now.
The Weird Stuff
Anthropic hosted 15 Christian leaders to debate whether Claude could be a "child of God." A separate app charges $1.99/minute to chat with AI Jesus. The commercial end of the faith-tech boom is less measured.
Robotic bird decoys are being deployed at Grand Teton to lure real sage grouse back to restored habitat — built by a local high school robotics team for about $150 a unit. Machines teaching animals how to be themselves.
The world's largest wild chimpanzee group has been locked in violent civil war for eight years. Researchers just published the full account in Science. The timing, given the rest of the headlines, is on the nose.
Quantum D-Day (hypothetical date when quantum computers become powerful enough to break the public-key encryption that currently secures the world's digital data, including banking, personal communications, and government secrets) moved to 2029 per Google. Michael Saylor says Bitcoin will upgrade its protocol before it arrives. That's probably right and somehow not reassuring. BTW - My crypto auto-buy hasn't blinked in years. You can't cancel a gym membership without showing up to cancel it, and you can't cancel a crypto cost-average without admitting it was all hype. So here we are.
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Who is the author, Josh Kubicki?
Josh Kubicki teaches AI and the business of law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and has trained over 3,000 lawyers on generative AI. He is the author of Brainyacts, read by nearly 10,000 legal professionals worldwide.
AI training, courses, and resources: kubicki.ai
Strategic advisory for firm leadership: joshkubicki.com
DISCLAIMER: None of this is legal advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not legal advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any legal decisions. Please /be careful and do your own research.
