AI

That’s what I’ve learned from his emails. Me too, Sam!

A separate ideation email to Altman lays out certain options for changes to OpenAI’s structure, including one option of rolling all of OpenAI into a B-corp, or a for-profit company with a public mission, and another option of having both an OpenAI C-corp and a nonprofit.

Zilis’ answers on the stand are often slightly different from the ones she gave in her deposition. We’ve now had two videos played in the courtroom. She’s also being represented by Musk’s lawyers.

The message, according to exhibits read aloud in court proceedings, said, “I just wanted to say I hope you are [OK]. I have no idea what’s going on but … I care about you as a person first and foremost. Sending all of my positive vibes your way.”

Altman and Brockman were both investors in the nuclear energy company, and since the company didn’t have an official product yet, she said that OpenAI potentially entering into a deal with Helion “felt super out of left field … How is it the case that we want to place [a] major bet on a speculative technology?”

under better light, Zilis’ top is green and not gray.

First, she says that the broad release of ChatGPT wasn’t discussed with the non-profit OpenAI board. This was discussed in a board meeting. Second, the deal with Helion raised eyebrows because Altman and Brockman both had investments and the tech was still speculative. She also felt that “it was probably the only time where I remember feeling in the pit of my stomach -- just being like, I voiced my concerns.”

She said she and the “entire board had voiced extreme concern about that whole massive thing happening without any semblance of board communication.” That was the first concern she raised internally about Altman, she said.

Shivon Zilis recalled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying of OpenAI at the time that Microsoft was “below them, above them, around them.” Zilis said this denoted complete control, calling it “terrifying because [it] was just not the thing that we had been fighting so hard for.”

She said he goes into “maniac mode” and had trouble thinking of a more quantifiable amount of hours. She added, as an answer to a follow-up question, that their time spent together was a brief break from “the insanity … that is his entire work life.”

She is wearing a black cardigan and black pants with a gray shirt. She is saying that after graduating from Yale, she took a job at IBM, then joined Bloomberg Ventures, and launched Bloomberg Beta, where she focused on AI investments. “I was 13 years old and I read a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil,” and that opened a new world for her. “I read it 10–15 times.”

Sam Altman wasn’t making decisions quickly enough and dragging things out, or not making decisions on controversial things at all, Murati says. He told people what they wanted to hear. “Those are the big themes.”

Satya Nadella met with the OpenAI board. And Murati told Microsoft’s Kevin Scott about Ilya Sutskever signing a petition to reinstate Altman. Murati also wanted Altman back. “The board had not followed a process that could be trusted and it wasn’t transparent with regard to firing Sam.”

It is specifically about how OpenAI and Microsoft worked together. She says that when GPT models were developed, there was no sense they would be commercializable. She also says that Altman undermined her in her ability to do her job, and pitted executives at OpenAI against each other.

Closing statements are likely next Thursday, not early next week. Also, Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo suggested that OpenAI came up with “small adjunct” as a phrase while cross-examining Brockman. In fact, Musk used that phrase.

The minority investment is “in the millions” of dollars, the CEO of the newly independent and rebranded Fenris Creations told Bloomberg.

YGR has sternly warned the lawyers about how much time they have left. We expect closing arguments a week from tomorrow.

The two companies’ famed 2019 contract was made public as part of the Musk v. Altman trial exhibits. The 36-page agreement defines artificial general intelligence as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

The new “productivity agent” connects with Adobe’s image and audio generative AI models and powers conversational document editing features in Acrobat, alongside unlocking new sharing capabilities in PDF Spaces. This is just the latest example of Adobe’s commitment to slap AI agents into all of its apps.

OpenAI may have pledged to cut back on “side quests,” but making its own phone doesn’t count. Right?

Data center sales are now “the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth,” according to CEO Lisa Su. AI agents are increasing demands for CPUs, and AMD and Intel’s x86 industry group recently announced a new instruction set, AI Compute Extensions (ACE), to help close the performance gap with GPUs.

The agent is dubbed “Hatch” internally, The Information reports. Meta is also apparently working on an agentic shopping tool for Instagram that it wants to launch before Q4.

As reported by The Salt Lake Tribune, the planned hyperscale data center in Box Elder County, when fully completed, is expected to use 9 gigawatts of power — more than double the 4 gigawatts of power used by the state right now. The project is backed in part by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary.

Wu is still identifying documents. Two jurors have some real thousand-yard stares going on.

We are now looking at assorted legal documents with him. We have determined the board has approved the agreement of 2018, which is the initial formation of the for-profit OpenAI LP. OpenAI Inc. contributed assets and in result got the limited partner interest and “residual interest.” This seems to be mostly about reading stuff into the record.

Molo asked a very narrow question about texts or emails about removing Musk from the board. Then he accused Brockman of making up the explanation after the fact because of the trial. OpenAI’s lawyer pulled out two sentences from the same entry: “real decision is fire Elon” and “We seem converged on the ‘fire Elon’ route.” Pretty good from OpenAI’s lawyers, and very annoying / misleading from Molo.

For instance, yesterday, Brockman gave a long spiel about the setup of OpenAI that only tangentially involved Musk. Altman and Sutskever were portrayed as being in the middle of things. Molo effectively said that and then pointed out that Musk’s money was key. Brockman objected both to the summary, and to the idea that Musk’s money was key. Come on, dude. We aren’t idiots.

It’s not clear to me why Musk’s ultimatum matters? Musk says he won’t continue funding until he gets a firm commitment. Brockman testified he never made that firm commitment, and Musk didn’t resume his quarterly payments. There were clear continuing negotiations about how to raise money, including whether Tesla should get control of OpenAI and whether there should be an ICO after this email. What are we doing? I am at this point genuinely lost.

We have been talking about whether or not Greg Brockman made an initial investment into the for-profit. If we all agree that the for-profit has a different investment base than the nonprofit, I don’t get what the conflict here is? The nonprofit is effectively an investor in the for-profit, though the investment was in kind. The nonprofit still exists. Right now I am trying to figure out whether I find Brockman or Musk more reliable, and I think the answer is, it’s going to depend on who is most supported by other witnesses and documents.

The problem is that the chronology of Brockman’s negotiations with Musk is now working against him. We have multiple emails and texts with Musk proposing that he be in charge, followed by Musk withholding funding unless Brockman and Ilya Sutskever did what he wanted. Brockman might be motivated by profit — I certainly think so! — but Musk’s actions are what they are: high-pressure negotiating tactics that failed. It seems to me that Musk’s lack of involvement with OpenAI’s for-profit is self-inflicted.

“Did you practice them?” Molo is really not into the various ways that Brockman is objecting to the wording of his questions. I’m not sure how sympathetic the jury is to either of them. They seem pretty stone-faced.

Brockman is being really squishy about this — I mean, he did say that he thought Musk was going to hit him at one point. Molo is I think trying to make the point that Musk was being “hardheaded” in negotiations. He’s also saying that Brockman wasn’t familiar with corporate governance. And he is, notably, raising his voice at Brockman.