Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian. Let’s recap a whirlwind five days that may determine the future of AI.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman can’t stop thinking about each other

Control over artificial intelligence is concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of people. And those people are obsessed with each other. Sam Altman and Elon Musk are engaged in a contest of one-upsmanship with stakes in the trillions of dollars, and the heated rivalry was on full display last week.

On Monday, Musk lost his lawsuit against Altman, with whom he cofounded OpenAI in 2015. A federal jury in Oakland, California, found Altman, OpenAI and its president, Greg Brockman, not liable for Musk’s claims that they unjustly enriched themselves and broke a founding contract made with Musk when founding the startup.

The verdict, delivered after less than two hours of deliberation, is a stark rebuke of Musk and his lawyer’s claims that Altman “stole a charity” through his leadership of OpenAI. It also provides OpenAI with a clear path ahead to pursue going public later this year at about a $1tn valuation.

SpaceX will list on the US stock market before OpenAI, though. On Wednesday, Musk revealed SpaceX’s plans for its $1.75tn initial public offering. The rocket and satellite operations company will go public on the Nasdaq exchange at a valuation of about $1.75tn under the symbol SPCX, likely on 12 June. It is seeking up to $80bn in investment.

The disclosure on Wednesday shed light on SpaceX’s usually secretive finances, showing that it is plowing billions of dollars into its AI subsidiary, xAI, and had a capital expenditure last year of more than $20bn against $18.7bn in revenue for 2025. It also showed that the company lost over $4.2bn in the first three months of 2026.

SpaceX’s investor prospectus lists OpenAI along with other major AI firms such as Anthropic as key competitors to its business.

Then on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was hurtling towards an initial public offering (IPO), perhaps even as soon as Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The company did not file to go public that day, but the possibility did shorten the excitement over SpaceX’s IPO.

Musk and Altman’s moves this week read as each trying to outdo the other and get the last word–win the court battle, hit the stock market first, be the king of AI.

Rumored to be next up: Anthropic. With all three AI businesses set to go public this year, each at valuations of hundreds of billions or more than a trillion dollars, it’s one of the most blockbuster periods for public offerings in market history.

What should the rest of us do? If such a small group of people is in control of the most consequential technology of the past decade and perhaps the next, what can we do while this tiny cadre of men obsesses over one another? It’s a question that even people in Silicon Valley are asking themselves.

Visiting San Francisco in the days surrounding Google’s I/O conference, I found that my conversations with people working in AI predictably revolved around its potential and its success. Discussions with friends one step removed from AI, however–those still working in tech but not in the sector attracting hundreds of billions in investment and trillion-dollar valuations–resembled heightened versions of ones we have outside the AI bubble. If you’re not the CEO of an AI company, will your job be safe? The question is on everybody’s mind except for Altman and Musk’s. They’re only thinking about each other.

The SpaceX IPO

What does Google want to give us so much AI?

Throughout the last decade, Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have fought hard to own the ecosystem that orchestrates your life, a concept I’ll call the “whole tech person”. Google made the most convincing play yet for dominance in that realm on Tuesday at its annual confab for software developers.

At Google I/O in Mountain View, California, Google unveiled an integrated personal assistant, Gemini Spark. The company describes it as “a 24/7 personal AI agent designed to proactively manage tasks and help you navigate your digital life, all under your direction”. A demo showed the bot taking on the many small tasks involved in organizing a party, pulling from a calendar, email inbox, Google Docs, and more programs. Other potential uses Google cites are recurring reviews of your credit card statements; checking your inbox for action items from your child’s school, which can be translated to your calendar; or translating meeting notes in Google Chat into a summary document. Spark showed a substantial degree of autonomy, and, what’s more, it will likely be able to communicate with Google programs you already use. The product seems poised to integrate all the company’s other deeply ingrained services–Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. Coupled with the capabilities of Gemini that Google put on display Tuesday, it’s a strong proposal for the whole tech person’s life.

Other companies have tried it before. Apple has tried to own everyday life with its fitness and health services as well as complementary devices like the Watch and the HomePod. But an all-Apple life is an expensive one, and Siri isn’t smart enough to execute commands relating to all these devices and services. Amazon made a similar attempt with the Echo and Alexa. Smart home has not taken off as much as the shopping giant thought it would, and Alexa did not integrate natively with either Androids or iPhones. I’d bet on Gemini in a fight between the three bots.

What would you choose as the primary orchestrator of your life: a phone or an AI assistant? By extension, how much control do you want, and how much effort do you want to expend? A smartphone offers more control with more effort, whereas an AI assistant offers less of each.

For the past 20 years, the smartphone has proven to be the dominant and central piece of technology in most people’s daily lives. With the potential move from device to AI as the primary point of contact, from device that requires more of your input to an autonomous agent that requires quite a lot less, Google is expecting a lower degree of self-direction from its users.

Google Search is changing into something less directed by the user, too, the company announced Tuesday. Search results will now by default resemble a chatbot interface, as Search’s AI Mode does. “Web Mode”, the current list of 10 blue links, will no longer be the default. Google will summarize the relevant points and the gist of your answers for you rather than having you navigate to them yourself.

Gemini Spark and the changes to Search predict a future where each of us does less. In a piece that argued the upcoming changes would ruin the internet, Katie Notopoulos at Business Insider wrote: “The internet should be a place you go, not a place that comes to you.”

Whether you hand your personal information and the orchestration of your life over to an AI agent depends on the kind of future you want, or that you think you want. Social media users love to tweet about how awful algorithmically ranked feeds are, but the makers of social networks say that users prefer algorithmic feeds and engage with them at far greater rates than chronological ones. The Washington Post eloquently summarized this contradictory dynamic: “AI is just another technology Americans don’t like but can’t stop using.”

Gemini Spark may strike you as sinister in character but convenient in reality. You may not like the idea of an AI agent directing your life but find it extremely useful to have a virtual secretary who manages your calendar and never needs a day off. That’s how I feel.

Read more: Google announces glasses are back and search is getting an AI makeover

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