Elon Musk’s an experiment against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its final part on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadellaformer OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor.
Sutskever highlighted, revealing an ownership stake in OpenAI’s $850-billion profit arm that is currently worth about $7 billion. That makes him one of the largest known shareholders of OpenAI. Earlier in the trial, OpenAI president Greg Brockman admitted for the first time that he owns OpenAI shares worth about 30 billion dollars.
Brockman was one of the original founders of the research lab, and Sutskever joined soon after, turning down an offer of $6 million in annual compensation from Google. Brockman said he and Sutskever were “joined at the hip,” until Sutskever helped lead Sam Altman’s squad. ousted as CEO of OpenAI in 2023. Sutskever had helped gather evidence to demonstrate Altman’s alleged history of fraud, and even assisted in drafting a memo to the board. Although they tried to repair the relationship, Sutskever has been estranged from Brockman and Altman since then, OpenAI’s attorney said Monday.
Sutskever, who arrived in the courtroom in a dress shirt and trousers, the first male witness to testify without a suit jacket, appeared sad to no longer be involved with OpenAI. (He left and created competing AI labs in 2024.) “I felt a great ownership of OpenAI,” he said at one point on Monday. “I felt like I put my life into it, and I just took care of it, and I didn’t want it to be ruined.”
Sutskever’s testimony reinforced Musk’s claims that Altman is not the right person to lead an AI lab that could create a general artificial intelligence. In addition, Sutskever mentioned how the superalignment team he helped leadwhich focused on the security of future models, was doing the most important work in OpenAI “for a long time.” The team disbanded in May 2024, shortly after Sutskever left the company.
But Sutskever also added to OpenAI’s defense that Musk never discussed any specific commitments when funding the nonprofit OpenAI. Musk’s claims that such promises existed and that Altman and Brockman violated them by seeking a lucrative hand are the basis of his claims in the lawsuit. Sutskever said OpenAI needed “a lot of dollars” to build a computer as big as the human brain, and while seeking donations had “reasonable success,” being profitable was a compromise way forward.
“I would describe it as the difference between an ant and a cat,” Sutskever said in response to a question from US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers about how more computers have helped OpenAI scale. “If there is no funding, there is no supercomputer.”
Finally, Sutskever, a renowned AI scientist who draws in his spare timehe testified for an hour, without looking anyone in the eye when he was on the witness stand.
Musk’s legal team unsuccessfully sought to treat Sutskever as a prejudice witness because of his financial stake in OpenAI. But Gonzalez Rogers agreed to give Musk’s and OpenAI’s attorneys more freedom in questioning Sutskever due to what he described as his “unique position” in the case.
Blip
Much of Monday’s testimony centered on the well-covered events of Altman’s firing and reinstated as CEO in November 2023. Nadella described Sutskever and the other board members who fired Altman as “a city of underdogs” and insisted that he “had no clarity” about the dishonesty that led to their decision. Nadella also admitted during his testimony that he and his colleagues discussed it 14 board members who would join OpenAI if Altman were to return, including at least two that the Microsoft group vetoed and one that joined later. Nadella described Microsoft’s entry as a proposal.
Sutskever said he supported Altman’s firing because “an environment where executives don’t have the right information” is not “easy to achieve any major goal.” But he criticized his board colleagues for rushing the process, lacking experience, and accepting “legal advice that was not very good.”
Microsoft bets
In his lawsuit, Musk accused Microsoft of helping turn OpenAI into a more money-making machine than Musk intended. Nadella testified that Microsoft first supported OpenAI with discounted cloud computing but could no longer afford to do so “once the bill started going up.” The part of the profit that Microsoft could invest, rather than the financial profit, was more interesting.
But as the years went by and the bills kept mounting, Microsoft wanted more from the partnership. Microsoft “will lose 4 billion next year !!!” Nadella was surprised in an email in 2022 to its delegation regarding OpenAI cooperation. He called for a new agreement to ensure Microsoft would also get AI “know-how” from the startup, which he went on to write as “Open AI.”
