The Musk v. Altman trial entered its third week Monday, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former OpenAI co-founder and renowned AI researcher Ilya Sutskever taking the stand. Nadella testified that Elon Musk never raised concerns to him that Microsoft's investments in OpenAI violated any special commitments, and said he viewed the partnership as clearly commercial from the start. He also described OpenAI's 2023 board crisis as "amateur city."
Meanwhile, Sutskever testified that he had raised concerns about Sam Altman because he feared OpenAI could be "destroyed." He expressed concerns about Altman's behavior to the board, in part because he said he felt "a great deal of ownership" over the startup. "I simply cared for it, and I didn't want it to be destroyed," Sutskever said. CNBC reports: Nadella said he was "very proud" that Microsoft took the risk to invest in OpenAI when "no one else was willing" to bet on the fledgling lab. Musk, who testified late last month, said Microsoft's $10 billion investment was the key tipping point that made him believe OpenAI was violating its nonprofit mission. He testified that the scale of the investment bothered him, and it prompted him to open a legal investigation into OpenAI. "I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity," Musk said from the stand.

Nadella said he did not believe Microsoft's investments in OpenAI were donations, and that there was a clear commercial element to their partnership from the outset. He said during the partnership's early years, Microsoft gave OpenAI sharp discounts on computing resources, and Microsoft believed it would reap marketing benefits from doing so. During a separate video deposition that was played on Monday morning, Michael Wetter, a corporate development executive at Microsoft, said the company has recognized approximately $9.5 billion in revenue to date through its partnership with OpenAI as of March 2025.

[...] Nadella said he was "pretty surprised" by the board's decision [to fire Altman in November 2023], and that his priority was to try and figure out how to maintain continuity for Microsoft customers. Immediately after Altman was removed, Nadella said he made an effort to learn more about what happened, adding that he suspected jealousy and poor communication was at play. During conversations with OpenAI board members after the firing, Nadella said he was simply trying to understand the language in the OpenAI's statement about Altman being "not consistently candid" while communicating with the board. That language, Nadella said, "just didn't sort of suffice, because this is the CEO of a company that we are invested in and we're deeply partnered with, and so I felt that they could have explained to me what are the incidents or what is the detail behind it." There must have been instances of jealousy or miscommunication that could have justified pushing out Altman, Nadella said. He wanted more depth from the board members after the remark about candor, but no such information was available, he said. "It was sort of amateur city, as far as I'm concerned," Nadella testified.

[...] Musk testified that he is not entirely against OpenAI having a for-profit unit, but he said it became "the tail wagging the dog." He repeatedly accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a nonprofit. "Microsoft has their own motivations, and that would be different from the motivations of the charity," Musk said from the stand. "All due respect to Microsoft, do you really want Microsoft controlling digital superintelligence?"

During a videotaped deposition shown in court last week, former OpenAI director Tasha McCauley recalled a discussion with Nadella and her fellow board members after the 2023 decision to dismiss Altman as OpenAI's CEO. "To the best of my recollection, Satya wanted to restore things to as they had been," McCauley said. The board members didn't think that was the right move, she said. But as a court witness on Monday, Nadella said he never demanded that the board reinstate Altman as OpenAI CEO. Recap:

Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight)
Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven)
Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six)
OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five)
Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four)
Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three)
Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two)
Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twee private inlichtingenbureaus onderzochten in het geheim medewerkers van het Internationaal Strafhof in Den Haag. Voornaamste doelwit was de advocaat die in 2024 de hoofdaanklager van de rechtbank, Karim Khan, van seksueel misbruik beschuldigde.

Na de kabinetsvergadering van deze dinsdag verklaarde de Britse premier aan te blijven. Er is geen formele procedure voor een leiderschapswissel ingezet, ondanks toenemende druk in de Labourfractie.

Apple and Google have taken a big step toward securing cross-platform texting, ending years of messages bouncing around in glorified plaintext. Apple announced this week that encrypted Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging is rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. The feature works across supported carriers and adds end-to-end encryption to cross-platform chats that were still taking the scenic route through carrier-era messaging infrastructure. Users will know it's enabled when a lock icon appears in RCS conversations. Apple says E2EE RCS messages cannot be read while traveling between devices, bringing Android-to-iPhone chats closer to the protections offered by WhatsApp and Signal. The move lands as other platforms head in the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Meta confirmed it was backing away from parts of its encryption rollout for Instagram DMs, telling The Register that "very few" people actually used the feature and suggesting privacy-minded users head over to WhatsApp instead. Apple, meanwhile, appears content to lean harder into the privacy angle, finally plugging one of the more obvious holes in modern messaging security. That gap has been hanging around for years. While iMessage chats between Apple devices were already encrypted, conversations involving Android phones could fall back to SMS or unencrypted RCS, depending on carrier support. Google had offered encrypted RCS chats inside Google Messages for years, but only when both sides used Google's ecosystem. Apple joining the party means cross-platform RCS encryption is finally starting to span the two largest mobile ecosystems. The rollout is still marked as beta, and carrier support varies by region, so not everyone will get encrypted chats immediately. UK availability remains unclear for now, as none of the major UK networks currently appear on Apple's published compatibility lists for the feature. Still, after two decades of the mobile industry insisting that interoperability and security could not coexist, cross-platform texting may finally be catching up with the rest of modern messaging. ®

At the German pavilion, the artist has re-created the housing estate where she grew up to tell the forgotten history of migrants, including her parents, hired under a socialist agreement between East Germany and Vietnam – then abandoned

An air of civilisational wipeout hangs over the Gehrenseestrasse complex, an abandoned housing estate on the north-eastern outskirts of Berlin, where the city still looks shabby without the chic. The insides of the nine prefabricated blocks have long been gutted; six floors of empty window frames stare hollow-eyed over multi-lane carriageways. In the courtyard, paintballers have left behind wooden barricades from when they played at World War III.

Yet in one of the second-floor rooms of Berlin’s largest ruin, artist Sung Tieu is waltzing across the concrete floor and reliving scenes from her childhood. “Here was the single bed I shared with my mother for three years,” she says, pointing into a corner of the small room. “Two metres by 90cm, can you believe it?” There in the corridor is where her neighbours used to make bánh bao dumplings on camping stoves, for lack of private kitchens. “I still remember the smell.” Here was the door through which she used to entertain her best friend when his mother locked him in during working hours. “We played cards through the gaps,” she recalls with glee.

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In UK politics news: things are looking a bit dicey for Sir Keir. The first government minister has resigned, joining 77 other Labour MPs who have urged the PM to quit immediately or draw up a timetable. This follows a threat from Catherine West, now withdrawn, to challenge him as leader. Of the current names being suggested as a potential challenger, Wes Streeting is mentioned most frequently. Current odds make Andy Burnham the favourite to be next Labour party leader (and, by default, UK Prime Minister till the next election), though he has the hurdle of not (currently) being an MP and therefore not eligible.

CATANZARO (ANP) - Wielrenner Wilco Kelderman gaat niet van start in de vierde etappe van de Giro d'Italia. Hij heeft volgens zijn ploeg Visma - Lease a Bike te veel last van de gevolgen van een valpartij in de tweede etappe.

De 35-jarige Kelderman was een belangrijke teamgenoot voor zijn Deense kopman Jonas Vingegaard, de favoriet voor de eindzege van de rittenkoers. Hij reed zondag nog wel de derde etappe uit, maar kon tijdens de rustdag onvoldoende herstellen.

Kelderman was zaterdag betrokken bij een grote valpartij 23 kilometer voor de finish. Bekende renners als Adam Yates, Jay Vine en Marc Soler smakten ook tegen het asfalt en hebben de Ronde van Italië ook verlaten. De eerste drie etappes van de Giro d'Italia werden in Bulgarije afgewerkt.

De renners zijn op de rustdag naar Italië gereisd. Daar staat de vierde en vlakke etappe van Catanzaro naar Cosenza op het programma.