A few months before Elon Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in February 2018, he tried to recruit Sam Altman to join Tesla’s “advanced AI lab”. Musk went so far as to offer the OpenAI CEO a Tesla board seat, according to email address and evidence presented in federal court on Wednesday during the Musk vs. Altman an experiment. The emails were shown to the jury during cross-examination of Shivon Zilisa former OpenAI consultant and board member who is also the mother of Musk’s four children.
Musk’s primary claim in this case is that Altman is the president of OpenAI Greg Brockman they effectively stole the nonprofit, using the $38 million Musk invested to create a private company worth more than $800 billion today. On Wednesday, Musk’s lawyers showed a video presentation of the former OpenAI CTO Mira Murat and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, to raise concerns about Altman’s claim history of deception.
OpenAI’s legal team has responded to Musk’s claims by questioning his true intentions, saying that the Tesla CEO has had “sour grapes” since he started. failed to take control of OpenAI in 2017. He has since founded a rival, for-profit AI lab. OpenAI’s lawyers used Zilis’ questions on Wednesday to bring evidence about Musk’s alleged manipulation of OpenAI, and tried to suggest Zilis was privy to the plans. As it relates to this case, one of Zilis’ most important roles at OpenAI was acting as a conduit between Musk and Altman.
In text In a February 2018 deposition, Zilis—then an adviser to OpenAI, as well as a chief executive of Neuralink and Tesla—asked Altman, “Have you thought about going through Tesla’s B Corp subsidiary?”
“There was documentary evidence that, at several points, Mr. Musk had considered wanting to join Sam Altman on the board and offered that option,” OpenAI attorney William Savitt said outside court on Wednesday. “It was part of Mr. Musk’s effort to corrupt OpenAI and bring it into Tesla … he was trying to get Altman to leave the mission and become part of Tesla.”
In email address to Tesla’s Vice President of Communications, Sarah O’Brien, as of November 2017, Zilis shared a draft FAQ page about an event Tesla was planning to hold at the NeurIPS AI conference. “The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world-leading AI lab (?) that will compete with Google / DeepMind and Facebook AI Research,” the prepared FAQ read. The document continues, “One major issue for Tesla is when people think of Elon and AI, they think of OpenAI.”
Another FAQ section titled “Who?” lists several Tesla executives who were slated to lead the division, 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 is marked with details including that Altman may be in charge of the NeurIPS event, which “could be a compelling task for Sam to commit to TeslaAI.” Another message reads that “Tesla’s AI strategy was not yet defined and some may be highly proprietary.”
Zilis testified on Wednesday that Altman never ended up joining Tesla, and the AI lab and NeurIPS launch event never came to fruition. He also testified that Musk contacted Karpathy about signing Tesla. Savitt told reporters that Zilis’ testimony about Karpathy “is directly contrary to what Mr. Musk told the jury a few days ago.” Earlier in this trial, Musk testified that Karpathy left OpenAI of his own accord.
