Hayden Field

He may be laying it on thick, but he did get a big laugh.

He reminded the jury that Musk isn’t in the courtroom while Altman and Brockman are. (Musk posted yesterday that he was en route to Beijing on Air Force One.) “They are here because they care a lot about this,” Savitt said. “Mr. Musk isn’t here. Mr. Musk came to this court for exactly one witness — Elon Musk — and he hasn’t been seen since. Now he’s in parts unknown.”

“He claims to have heard things high atop a windy hill where no one else can hear,” Savitt told the jury. (Strange phrasing, but after the bridge metaphor from Molo, I wouldn’t expect anything less.) He also says Musk has “unclean hands” due to his “unconscionable conduct” related to the claims he’s bringing. “Only after OpenAI succeeded, against Musk’s prediction, only then did he start threatening litigation,” Savitt said.

He said that by his calculations, people said things like “I don’t remember” and “I don’t recall” between 150 and 200 times during this trial so far — using this to bolster his argument that Musk had waited too long to bring his claims.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the judge presiding over Musk v. Altman, had told Musk when he left the stand that he was not excused from the trial and that he was still under “recall status,” meaning he should stay nearby and ready to testify. But he’s currently in Beijing…

He said that “for a large nonprofit organization, having for-profit affiliates is very much the norm.” When asked, he also said that oftentimes, the for-profit affiliate of a nonprofit is “quite large compared to the nonprofit,” and he gave the Mozilla Corporation (which owns the Firefox web browser) and the Mozilla Foundation as an example. Hemel also testified that he’s getting paid $1,750 an hour to be here.

He said Musk was concerned about Google DeepMind and CEO Demis Hassabis and “expressed a lot of concerns about what would happen if DeepMind got to AGI first.” Achiam said he shared his concern that trying to “race” towards the technology was a “fairly unsafe proposition … He was proposing to do something that seemed … obviously unsafe and reckless.”

That’s according to Josh Achiam, currently the company’s chief futurist, who joined in 2017. He said Sutskever’s impassioned speeches would typically be about the science-fiction-esque future that was approaching.

He said Brockman and Sutskever were the “main leaders,” and that Brockman was the “engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work.” Achiam called Sutskever a “scientific visionary” who articulated what the future would be like, such as football fields of silicon chips making large-scale calculations.

He said when he joined, OpenAI was a team of about 50 people, and that it essentially felt like “an extension of a graduate student lab in a university” — a “collegiate, academic, super intellectual” environment — with most employees being either current PhD students or recent graduates. He said he appreciated that there wasn’t a “publish or perish” type of culture at the time.