Elon Musk’s Last-Ditch Effort to Control OpenAI: Recruit Sam Altman to Tesla

A few months Before Elon Musk left the OpenAI board in February 2018, he attempted to recruit Sam Altman to join a “world-class AI lab” within Tesla. Musk went so far as to offer the OpenAI CEO a seat on Tesla’s board, according to emails and testimony presented in federal court during the hearing Wednesday. Musk vs. Altman trial. The emails were presented to a jury during cross-examination of Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI advisor and board member who is also the mother of Musk’s four children.

Musk’s main argument in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman effectively stole from a nonprofit, using the $38 million Musk invested to create a private company now worth more than $800 billion. On Wednesday, Musk’s lawyers showed video depositions from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner to raise concerns about Altman’s alleged history of deception.

OpenAI’s legal team responded to Musk’s claims by questioning his true motives, arguing that the Tesla CEO had “sour grapes” since he failed to take control of OpenAI in 2017. He has since launched a rival AI lab for profit. OpenAI’s lawyers used cross-examination of Zilis on Wednesday to adduce evidence about Musk’s alleged plans to overthrow OpenAI, and attempted to suggest that Zilis was aware of those plans. Regarding this matter, one of Zilis’ most important roles at OpenAI was to act as an intermediary between Musk and Altman.

In a February 2018 text presented as evidence, Zilis – then an advisor to OpenAI, as well as an executive at Neuralink and Tesla – asked Altman: “Have you considered a B Corp subsidiary of Tesla?”

“There was documentary evidence that, on several occasions, Mr. Musk had considered seeking to join Sam Altman on the board and had proposed that option,” OpenAI lawyer William Savitt said outside the courthouse on Wednesday. “This was part of Mr. Musk’s efforts to corrupt OpenAI and absorb it into Tesla… he was trying to convince Altman to abandon the mission and become part of Tesla.”

In an email to Tesla VP of Communications Sarah O’Brien from November 2017, Zilis shared a draft of an FAQ page about an event Tesla planned to host at the NeurIPS AI conference. “The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world-leading AI lab(?) that will rival Google/DeepMind and Facebook AI Research,” reads the written FAQ. The document continues: “One of the major problems for Tesla is that when people think of Elon and AI, they think of OpenAI. »

Another part of the FAQ titled “Who?” ” lists several Tesla executives who were to lead the unit, including Musk and Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher. Altman’s name is listed next to Musk’s with two question marks next to it.

The FAQ comes with notes including that Altman could be a moderator of the NeurIPS event, which “could be a function forcing Sam to engage in TeslaAI.” Another note said that “Tesla AI’s strategy had not yet been defined and some of it could be deeply proprietary.”

Zilis testified Wednesday that Altman never ended up joining Tesla and that the AI ​​lab and NeurIPS launch event never came to fruition. She also testified that Musk contacted Karpathy to recruit him to Tesla. Savitt told reporters that Zilis’ testimony about Karpathy is “directly contrary to what Mr. Musk told the jury just a few days ago.” Earlier in this lawsuit, Musk said Karpathy left OpenAI of his own accord.