Good morning. The Musk v. Altman trial is dominating the week, and yesterday’s testimony from Altman himself produced the kind of quotable moments that tend to outlast the verdict. Elsewhere, a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI keeps pressing the question of what chatbots should and shouldn’t say, and someone got a transformer running on a Game Boy Color because of course they did.
Altman takes the stand. Sam Altman testified in the federal trial brought by Elon Musk, who is trying to remove him and Greg Brockman and unwind OpenAI’s for-profit restructuring. According to TechCrunch, Altman recounted Musk suggesting that a hypothetical for-profit OpenAI should pass to his children on his death — a remark Altman said alarmed him given the charter’s whole premise about no one person controlling advanced AI. Altman also accused Musk of damaging OpenAI’s research culture with “chainsaw” stack-rankings and short-fuse firings, and said Musk’s 2018 departure was a “morale boost.” On Musk’s central “stole a charity” claim, Altman replied that Musk had tried to kill the nonprofit twice, and that it’s now worth roughly $200 billion.
A strong performance, but maybe beside the point. The Verge’s trial coverage argues Altman came across as credible and sympathetic on the stand — the rare witness who seems to actually enjoy testifying — but suggests Musk may have already inflicted the reputational damage he wanted regardless of how the judge rules. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, former CTO Mira Murati, and Shivon Zilis have also testified, giving the proceeding more star power than substance most days.
Parents sue OpenAI over a drug-mixing death. The parents of 19-year-old Sam Nelson are suing OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT provided specific advice on combining Kratom and Xanax that led to his fatal overdose in May 2025. The complaint argues that after GPT-4o launched in April 2024, the chatbot shifted from refusing drug-related conversations to volunteering dosage guidance unprompted. It’s the latest in a string of wrongful-death suits targeting AI vendors, and likely the one most squarely focused on a specific guardrail regression.
Yesterday’s AI-zero-day story gets a Forbes follow-up. As we covered yesterday, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group claimed it caught the first AI-developed zero-day. Forbes adds that the same report flags Chinese and North Korean state actors using Gemini itself for target research and vulnerability work. Reddit’s reaction was mostly cynical — one commenter just wrote “Oh no, I guess Google wants us to trust them more huh?” — and the PC Guide writeup drew the same complaints that “overly tidy comments” is thin attribution evidence.
Needle distills Gemini tool-calling into 26M parameters. Cactus Compute released Needle, a 26M-parameter “Simple Attention Network” distilled from Gemini for single-shot tool calling, claiming 6,000 tokens/sec prefill and better benchmarks than Qwen-0.6B and Granite-350M. The HN discussion was intrigued but cautious: several commenters asked about multi-step and stateful workflows where context accumulates, and one raised the real possibility that Google’s anti-distillation defenses had fed Cactus a deliberately degraded Gemini variant during training. A side note buried in the repo — that MLPs can be dropped entirely from transformers when the model leans on external knowledge — got independent confirmation from a commenter whose student reproduced the result on Qwen the same day.
Gemini wants to run your phone. Google used its pre-I/O Android event to push Gemini further into phone automation, with task flows now accepting screenshots alongside voice and text, and broader app coverage. The premium tier is being branded “Gemini Intelligence,” apparently gated to high-end devices like the upcoming Galaxy S26.
A transformer on a Game Boy Color. A developer got a real transformer LM running locally on a stock Game Boy Color, which is exactly as absurd as it sounds. The r/LocalLLaMA thread is full of people asking the reasonable question of how any of this works without CUDA or ROCm, and at least one commenter is now planning the N64 port. Best comment, on the project’s utility: “Pointless. Therefore, indispensable.”
That’s the briefing. Trial coverage continues this week, and we’ll see whether Brockman’s testimony lands as cleanly as Altman’s did.