After years of trading barbs on social media, Elon Musk and Sam Altman – two of Big Tech’s most influential billionaires who once came together to form a little-known nonprofit called OpenAI, which went on to launch ChatGPT and spark the AI arms race – are now set to make their respective cases in a courtroom. The case stems from Musk’s 2024 lawsuit against OpenAI, in which he has alleged that the ChatGPT-maker and its leadership abandoned the organisation’s original nonprofit mission, a vision Musk has claimed he helped fund, to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) serves the broader interests of humanity. The highly anticipated trial begins today (April 27) in a US district court in Oakland, ​California, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers – who also heard Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple over its control of the iPhone App Store – with guidance from a nine-person jury, will decide whether OpenAI has in fact drifted from its founding mission to ensure that AGI benefits humanity.…