Last week I reported that Elon Musk spent more than seven hours on the witness stand across three days during the first week in his federal lawsuit against OpenAI, which accuses CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman of betraying the company's original nonprofit mission when they converted it into a for-profit venture.
I shared some highlights from the trial which included Musk repeating throughout the trial that “it's not OK to steal a charity,” but that he never had a written agreement with OpenAI about how his donation would be spent or if the organization could pivot into a for-profit in the future.
Since then, more witnesses have taken the stand and revealed shocking new information about OpenAI. Highlights include:
- OpenAI President Greg Brockman testified that the company is exploring an IPO and that his personal stake in the business will be worth nearly $30B, placing him among the 100 wealthiest people in the world. Brockman also revealed a $471M investment in Stripe, where he used to work, a stake in CoreWeave, and a financial interest in Sam Altman's family office, which Musk's attorneys used to suggest Brockman was financially motivated to side with Altman.
- Brockman also testified that during a key August 2017 meeting, Elon Musk demanded full control of the company's planned for-profit conversion, and that when the co-founders refused to give Musk unequivocal control, he said, “I decline,” and stormed out of the room.
- Lastly, Brockman admitted that OpenAI expects to burn $50B on computing power before the end of the year. They better start selling some ads!
- OpenAI's former CTO Mira Murati testified in a video deposition that Sam Altman lied to her about the safety standards for a new AI model, falsely telling her that OpenAI's legal department had determined a new AI model did not need to go through the company's deployment safety board. However, when she checked with general counsel Jason Kwon, she “confirmed that what Jason was saying and what Sam was saying were not the same thing.” Murati said that Altman made her work more difficult.
- Other former OpenAI employees and a former board member also testified that the company's push to launch AI products compromised its commitment to safety. Former board member Tasha McCauley shared that Altman was not forthcoming enough with the board and demonstrated a pattern of misleading board members and failing to inform them about the decision to launch ChatGPT publicly.
- Emails between more than a dozen Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, were shown in court revealing that Microsoft was skeptical of investing in OpenAI in 2018 but worried about pushing the lab into Amazon's arms if they didn't. The emails showed that Microsoft's AI team saw “no value in engaging” with OpenAI, the research team thought its own work was “more advanced,” and the PR team didn't like supporting a group pushing the idea of “machines beating humans.” However, ultimately the company invested $1B in OpenAI in 2019 to avoid the PR downsides of “having them storm off to Amazon in a huff and shit-talk us and Azure on the way out.” WTF Microsoft? Can I have $1B to avoid the PR downsides of me shit-talking you?
Ooo Weee this case is getting juicy! Stay tuned for more. Next week it may be revealed that Sam Altman and Elon Musk were lovers and that the romance ended bitterly, which is what spurred the breakup. Or was that the story of how Anthropic got started? I cover a lot of news and can't remember.
