In August 2017, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever gathered Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed “mansion,” a 47-acre, $23 million estate in Hillsborough, south of San Francisco, to discuss the future of OpenAI. Actress Amber Heard, Musk’s girlfriend at the time, once served the group whiskey and then ran off with a friend, Brockmanfounder and president of OpenAI, testified in federal court during the trial of Musk vs. Altman on Tuesday.
Before the meeting, Musk presented Brockman and Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist, with new Tesla Model 3 cars. “It felt like he was giving us butter,” Brockman said on the stand. “He wanted us to feel indebted to him in some way.” Sutskever tried to take revenge for the event. An amateur artist presented Musk with a painting of Tesla. Musk and other founders wanted to start a profit arm to convince investors to give them billions of dollars to pay for computing. But Musk also wanted control of the company, and Sutskever and Brockman objected to giving the Tesla CEO what they believed to be a “dictatorship” over the future of AI development. They proposed to have joint control.
After several minutes of deliberation, Musk rejected their offer. “He stood up and walked around the table,” Brockman recalled. “I really thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me.” Musk grabbed the painting, said he would cut off his funding to the nonprofit until Brockman and Sutskever left, and left the room, according to Brockman’s testimony. But that night, Musk’s so-called chief of staff Shivon Zilis called Brockman and Sutskever “to say it’s not over,” Brockman testified. “There were future discussions that included us.”
The story of the heated exchange emerged as Brockman finished his testimony on Tuesday. For OpenAI, the events in the hall are representative of frequent events of Musk’s deviant behavior that they believe undermines it his arguments about the company. Musk is vying for about $38 million in donations to OpenAI they were abused and Brockman and others on the way to creating an $852 billion profit project now known for services such as ChatGPT and Codex. Brockman, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and OpenAI deny any wrongdoing, and jury in Musk vs. Altman may begin discussing the advisory decision as soon as next week.
After Tuesday’s testimony, William Savitt, OpenAI’s attorney, told reporters that what Brockman learned in 2017 is how difficult it can be to meet your heroes. Brockman admired and respected Musk’s business acumen, but his desire for control was complete and overwhelming, Savitt said. Marc Toberoff, Musk’s attorney, told reporters that the real concern was Brockman’s motivations for sharing control, and his lust for wealth having faced scrutiny in court a day earlier.
For his part, Brockman offered another story Tuesday to emphasize why he thought Musk had no role in managing an AI company. Brockman recalled the then OpenAI researcher Alec Radford showing Musk an early version of the AI chatbot that didn’t give the answers he liked. Musk “kept saying this system is so stupid, that a kid on the internet can do better,” Brockman said. Radford was “absolutely crushed” and “disheartened” to the point where he almost quit the field of AI research, Brockman said. Brockman and Sutskever “spent a lot of time” rebuilding his confidence. Musk’s inability to see the potential in the original technology—which eventually became the basis of ChatGPT—made him ill-suited to manage OpenAI, in Brockman’s view. “You needed to dream a little,” Brockman said. And Musk hadn’t shown that he could.
Closet Fights
Brockman said Tuesday that he, Sutskever, and Altman considered voting Musk off the board of the nonprofit OpenAI as talks with him about the for-profit company have been ongoing for months. They would meet again over whiskey at Musk’s mansion to discuss alternative funding options. There was agreement on what not to do, but little on what to do instead. But Brockman and Sutskever decided to remove Musk they felt was “wrong,” Brockman testified. Ultimately, Musk went on his own after realizing OpenAI was on a path to “certain failure,” according to an email he wrote in early 2018.
Zilis, then an advisor to OpenAI and Musk, he continued to inform her about the progress in the AI project in the coming years. “He was Elon’s agent in a way,” Brockman said, referring to him as a “friend” he first met in 2012 or 2013.
