Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman’s OpenAI Ouster: ‘I Didn’t Want It to Be Destroyed’

That of Elon Musk The lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its home stretch on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI president Bret Taylor.

Sutskever attracted attention by revealing a stake in OpenAI’s $850 billion for-profit arm, which is currently worth around $7 billion. This makes him one of the largest known individual shareholders of OpenAI. Earlier in the lawsuit, OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman admitted for the first time that he owns approximately $30 billion worth of OpenAI stock.

Brockman was an early co-founder of the research lab, and Sutskever joined soon after, turning down a $6 million annual compensation offer from Google. Brockman said he and Sutskever were “joined at the hip,” until Sutskever helped lead the brief removal of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI in 2023. Sutskever had helped gather evidence to show Altman’s alleged history of cheating, and even helped draft a memo to the board of directors. Although they tried to repair the relationship, Sutskever has since been estranged from Brockman and Altman, an OpenAI lawyer said Monday.

Sutskever, who arrived in the courtroom wearing a shirt and pants, the first male witness to testify without a suit jacket, seemed discouraged at no longer being involved with OpenAI. (He left and started a competing AI lab in 2024.) “I felt very ownership of OpenAI,” he said at one point Monday. “I felt like I dedicated my life to it, and I just cared about it, and I didn’t want it to be destroyed.”

Sutskever’s testimony reinforced Musk’s claim that Altman is not the right person to run an AI lab capable of creating artificial general intelligence. Additionally, Sutskever mentioned how the superalignment team he helped lead, which focused on the security of future models, was doing the most important work at OpenAI “in the long run.” The team was disbanded in May 2024, shortly after Sutskever left the company.

But Sutskever also added to OpenAI’s defense that Musk never negotiated any special promises when funding the nonprofit OpenAI. Musk’s allegations that such covenants existed and that Altman and Brockman violated them by pursuing a for-profit business are at the heart of his allegations in the lawsuit. Sutskever said OpenAI needed “a lot of money” to build a computer as big as the human brain, and while seeking donations had “reasonable success,” becoming a for-profit company was the consensus path forward.

“I would describe it as the difference between an ant and a cat,” Sutskever said in response to a question from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers about how more computing has helped OpenAI advance. “If there’s no funding, there’s no mainframe.”

In the end, Sutskever, a prominent AI scientist who paints in his free time, testified for about an hour, barely making eye contact with anyone during his time on the witness stand.

Musk’s legal team had unsuccessfully attempted to treat Sutskever as a hostile witness because of his financial stake in OpenAI. But Gonzalez Rogers agreed to give Musk and OpenAI’s lawyers additional leeway in their questioning of Sutskever because of what she described as his “unique position” in the case.

The clip

Much of Monday’s testimony focused on the well-covered events of Altman’s ouster and his reinstatement as CEO in November 2023. Nadella described Sutskever and other board members firing Altman as “amateur town” and reiterated that he “never had clarity” about the lack of candor that led to their decision. Nadella also acknowledged during his testimony that he and his colleagues discussed 14 potential board members who would join OpenAI if Altman returned, including at least two who were vetoed by the Microsoft group and one who later joined. Nadella described Microsoft’s input as suggestions.

Sutskever said he supported Altman’s firing because an “environment in which leadership does not have the correct information” is not “conducive to achieving a great goal.” But he criticized his board colleagues for rushing the process, lacking experience and accepting “legal advice that wasn’t very good.”

Microsoft’s bet

In his lawsuit, Musk accused Microsoft of helping turn OpenAI into a money-making machine beyond what Musk had planned. Nadella testified that Microsoft initially supported OpenAI with discounted cloud computing, but could no longer afford to do so “once the bill started to rise.” A for-profit arm that Microsoft could invest in, in exchange for a potential financial return, was more acceptable.

But as the years progressed and the bills continued to rise, Microsoft wanted to get more out of the partnership. Microsoft “will lose 4 billion next year!!! » Nadella exclaimed in a 2022 email to her lieutenants about the OpenAI partnership. He called for a new deal that ensured Microsoft would also get the startup’s AI “know-how,” which he continued to spell “Open AI.”