Musk didn’t raise any objections, though. And then he sent the infamous message where he rated OpenAI’s chances as zero. Altman appears to be concentrating hard on his testimony but is coming across as being a little bewildered about why he is here at all — but maybe that’s just how his eyebrows look at all times.
Meta says the event will offer “the first glimpse of what’s coming to the next computing platform,” with an “evening keynote” and “developer sessions where we’ll share the latest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI.”
At last year’s event, Meta debuted its smart glasses with a display.
We’re getting testimony about emails and meetings Altman had with Musk to try to walk him through the for-profit. They reviewed documents together at the meeting and then emailed him the term sheet that Musk testified he didn’t read.
It was when Altman met with Musk and Zilis to discuss plans for for-profit meetings. Zilis texted after the meeting to say she was glad they had the meeting to let Musk think about “the investment thing so it won’t irk him later.”
A good vibes meeting means a long conversation of Musk”showing us memes on his phone.”
He learned in 2022 that Musk was the father of her kids, and keeping her on the board was “a close call for me personally because she had sort of told us that Mr Musk was playing a more involved role than originally intended and that they were spending more time together.” On the other hand, Altman says he thinks highly of Zilis “and valued her counsel.”
Musk’s departure from the board had a mixed result on morale. “Mr. Musk is a well known figure and known to be fairly mercurial and people wondered if he was gonna try to take a vengeance out on us or something.”
On the other hand, people were relieved to be rid of him. “I don’t think Mr Musk understood how to run a good research lab.,” Altman said, “He had demotivated some of our most key researchers.”
He “didn’t want to be associated with something he couldn’t control and didn’t think would succeed.” Additionally, Musk wanted to work on AI at Tesla and didn’t want to be conflicted.
“We were kind of running the org on a shoestring” and had “an extremely short runway of cash,” Altman said. OpenAI didn’t meet its fundraising goal of $100 million in 2018, raising only a hair under $50 million. Major donors are Aphorism Foundation (Reid Hoffman), Fidelity Charitable, Gabe Newell, Good Ventures Foundation (Dustin Moskowitz), Amazon Web Services and, hilariously, Alameda Research (FTX / Sam Bankman-Fried).
“The only path - the best path that he saw - was for OpenAI to become part of Tesla,” Altman says. We are now looking at text messages. Musk “remains very open to you joining the Tesla board as part of this,” Musk’s subordinate Sam Teller wrote. And, also, Teller said, “regardless of how these conversations about OpenAI shake out, he is committed to building a stronger AI team within Tesla.” Altman said, “I viewed a vague, like a lightweight threat in there” that Tesla would do it with or without OpenAI.
Altman asked what would happen if Musk died. Musk said, “I haven’t thought about it a ton, but maybe control should pass to my children,” Musk replied. We also see an email where Altman says, “I desperately want to see this work with Elon... but I am worried about control. I don’t think any one person should have control of the world’s first AGI.” He says he’d be open to creative structures - like Musk having control up to a certain milestone.
Someone — Altman doesn’t remember whether it was Musk or his subordinate, Sam Teller, said it — told Altman that Musk had “long since decided” he would only work on companies that he controlled. “Mr. Musk felt very strongly that if we were going to form a for-profit he ended to have total control over it initially and this was because he only trusted himself to make non-obvious decisions that were going to turn out to be correct,” Altman says.
