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 also said she was concerned about board members who voted for Altman’s ouster being “expelled.” But “more concerning than anything else,” Zilis said, was the idea that to her, the firm hired by OpenAI to investigate did not share what really happened with the public.
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.
As part of a “research partnership,” DeepMind will “work with an offline version of EVE Online running on a local server to test and evaluate models in a controlled setting,” according to a blog post. The two companies will also “explore new gameplay experiences enabled by these technologies.”
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.
