Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Elon Musk tried to hire OpenAI’s founding team, including Sam Altman, to lead a new AI lab within Tesla in 2018, as the AI start-up’s leaders grappled over who should control the company and its direction.
Musk, a co-founder of the AI group, proposed bringing Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever to his carmaker, appointing Altman to the board or making OpenAI a Tesla subsidiary, according to evidence in a high-stakes trial between the billionaire and the ChatGPT maker on Wednesday.
The disclosures shed light on a crucial issue in the case, in which Musk has claimed that Altman “stole a charity” by converting the company into a for-profit. OpenAI’s lawyers have argued the Tesla chief executive was happy to commercialize the lab, provided that he remained in charge.
Emails, texts, and testimony on Wednesday showed that by late 2017 Musk had lost confidence in the non-profit OpenAI’s ability to build artificial general intelligence, a powerful form of AI—and was exploring building his own AI lab within Tesla.
“There is little chance of OpenAI being a successful force if I focus on TeslaAI,” Musk wrote in a message at the time to Shivon Zilis, who testified in court on Wednesday.
Zilis, an OpenAI adviser from 2016 and board member from 2020 until 2023, is the mother of four of Musk’s children and was an important interlocutor between the billionaire and the AI lab’s other founders during the six-month period on which much of the case hinges.
In late 2017, Zilis sketched out plans for an event to “share that Tesla is building a world-leading AI lab (?) which will rival the likes of Google / DeepMind and Facebook AI Research.”
By early 2018, she laid out nine possible scenarios for achieving AGI. The bulk of those centered on Tesla and included bringing Altman in to run AI at the carmaker. Another proposal was to poach DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis for the same role.
These were among the options explored by OpenAI’s founders as they weighed the best structure to enable the company to raise enough capital to take on Google while retaining its non-profit mission.
Ultimately, OpenAI’s executives were not persuaded by Musk’s proposals. Zilis told Musk’s then-chief of staff Sam Teller in a February 2018 email: “They all think Elon is an incredible human being but that he really hasn’t done his homework AI/AGI and that really concerns them about working with him.”
Musk left OpenAI’s board in early 2018, and OpenAI went on to restructure as a for-profit entity with a charitable arm.
The world’s richest man is suing the company in a case that could alter the fate of OpenAI, which has grown to be an $852 billion behemoth with aspirations for a public listing as early as this year.
Musk claims Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI unjustly enriched themselves by converting the start-up into a for-profit company.
William Savitt, OpenAI’s lead attorney in the case, said he believed Zilis’ testimony showed Musk was “prepared to do the for-profit, provided he would get control.”
Speaking after Wednesday’s court hearing, Savitt said Musk sought to control governance and “fold OpenAI into Tesla… when neither option was available to him he picked up his marbles and went home.”
Brockman, OpenAI’s president, on Tuesday told the jury in Oakland that Musk was seeking “unilateral control over AGI,” which he and other founders could not accept.
Zilis, a technology expert who has also worked as an executive at Tesla and Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink, told the court on Wednesday that her “allegiance [is] to the best outcome of AI for humanity.”
She and Musk first had a romantic relationship roughly a decade ago and decided to have children via IVF in 2020. “I… really wanted to be a mum. [Musk] was encouraging everyone around him to have children… he said if that was ever interesting he’d be able to make a donation,” she said.
In 2020, two years after the pair had fought over the direction of OpenAI, Altman texted Zilis to ask advice on approaching Musk. She was encouraging, but warned him: “the only thing I wonder is if he’ll pull the ‘you should have gone with Tesla’ card on you.”
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