Ai Artificial Intelligence Archive

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.

Greg the Bard, who told long-winded stories about how wonderful OpenAI is, is gone. “False assumption baked into the question” is the go-to currently.

Musk’s lawyer, Molo, is saying that first of all, Brockman actually did the layoffs, and second of all, a memo prepared by Ilya Sutskever contained criticism of Brockman as a manager. Shortly after the memo was prepared, Brockman was removed from the board.

Musk’s team is getting another crack at Brockman.

Microsoft is low-key my favorite part of this trial? Their opening statement was just like, an ad for Microsoft products. Almost all questions, including of Brockman, are like, “Did Microsoft play a role in the founding? Did it participate in the creation of a for-profit entity?” (No, obviously.) It is so funny, like they are going to at any moment turn to the jury and say, “Now why are we in this?”

Brockman says he was told he was removed from the board in an eight-minute call, and not given a reason why. He was also told Sam Altman was fired. Shortly after, he quit. “The board’s actions felt wrong to me. Wrongly conceived, wrongly executed.” He thought that he’d start a new AI company with Sam Altman. Several other people quit alongside Brockman and they started planning their new company. Satya Nadella called to ask if something terrible had happened, and Brockman said no. So then being a startup within Microsoft was an option too. But ultimately, as we all know, Brockman went back to OpenAI.

She did not disclose her romantic relationship with Musk to Greg Brockman. She gave birth to twins while still a board member at OpenAI, and found out their father was Elon Musk through “public reporting.” She did, eventually, say the twins were via IVF and her relationship with Musk was “entirely platonic.” She stayed on the board because Sutskever, Altman, and Brockman trusted her — other board members wanted her gone.

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because he said, essentially, he saw no path at OpenAI and was going to work on AGI at Tesla. But during a Q&A period, he said that he wasn’t going to work on safety, and just focus on catching up with DeepMind. That generated a strong, negative reaction.

Every email to Musk starts with glowing compliments, and at times what even reads like groveling. I don’t know if the jury is noticing this, but I certainly am. I wonder how much ass-kissing Musk is accustomed to — probably a lot.

Some more successfully than others. While I’m willing to believe the “steal the charity” line is about booting Musk from the board, the idea that “making the money for us sounds great and all” was about unsuccessful fundraising was somewhat less believable. One thing Brockman is making clear is that Musk was mercurial — not a surprise. “Elon’s engagement depended directly on how likely he thought it was we’d succeed,” he says. By January 31st, 2018, Musk says he thought OpenAI was “on a path of certain failure relative to Google” in an email.