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?”
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.”
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.”
DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis was a constant figure of fear among Musk and other OpenAI higher-ups.
Emails going as far back as 2015 give a glimpse into the foundations of OpenAI and the early tensions at the company.
In November 2015, Sam Altman suggested something Turing-related as the name of the company that would become OpenAI, referencing the famous mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. Musk responded, “Something Turing-related that doesn’t sound too ominous might be good. Want to avoid the Turing Test association though, as that sounds too much like we are replacing humans.”
[DocumentCloud]
