A few months before Elon Musk left the OpenAI board in February 2018, he tried to recruit Sam Altman to join Tesla’s “world-class artificial intelligence lab.” According to him, Musk even went as far as to offer the OpenAI CEO a seat on Tesla’s board emails and testimony given in federal court Wednesday during the trial Musk v. Altman test. The emails were shown to the jury during the hearing of Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI adviser and board member who is also the mother of Musk’s four children.
Musk’s central claim in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman effectively stole the nonprofit, using Musk’s $38 million investment to create a private company now worth more than $800 billion. On Wednesday, Musk’s lawyers showed a video testimony of OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner to express concerns about Altman alleged story fraud.
OpenAI’s legal team has responded to Musk’s claims by questioning his true motives, arguing that the Tesla CEO has had “sour grapes” since he failed to take control of OpenAI in 2017. He has since founded a competing, for-profit artificial intelligence lab. OpenAI’s lawyers used Zilis’ hearing on Wednesday to present evidence of Musk’s alleged plans to take down OpenAI and tried to suggest that Zilis was privy to those plans. On this matter, one of Zilis’ most essential roles at OpenAI was as a liaison between Musk and Altman.
IN text from February 2018 presented as evidence, Zilis – then an advisor to OpenAI and also an executive at Neuralink and Tesla – asked Altman: “Have you considered a Tesla B Corp subsidiary?”
“There were documents showing that Mr. Musk at several points considered and proposed Sam Altman joining the board,” OpenAI lawyer William Savitt said outside the courthouse on Wednesday. “This was part of Mr. Musk’s efforts to corrupt OpenAI and have it absorbed by Tesla… he tried to get Altman to abandon his mission and become part of Tesla.”
IN e-mail Tesla vice president of communications Sarah O’Brien in November 2017. Zilis shared a draft FAQ page about an event Tesla planned to host at the NeurIPS AI conference. “The purpose of this event is to inform you that Tesla is building a world-leading artificial intelligence laboratory(?) that will compete with companies such as Google / DeepMind and Facebook AI Research,” we read in the draft FAQ. The document goes on to say: “One of Tesla’s main problems is that when people think of Elon and artificial intelligence, they think of OpenAI.”
Another part of the FAQ marked “Who?” names several Tesla executives who would run the unit, including Musk and Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher. Altman’s name is next to Musk’s, with two question marks next to it.
The FAQ is marked with notes, including that Altman may be a moderator for the NeurIPS event, which “could be a feature forcing Sam to get involved with TeslaAI.” Another note says that “Tesla’s AI strategy has not yet been defined and some of it may be deeply proprietary.”
On Wednesday, Zilis testified that Altman never joined Tesla and that the artificial intelligence lab and the NeurIPS launch event never came to fruition. She also testified that Musk contacted Karpathy about recruiting him to Tesla. Savitt told reporters that Zilis’ testimony in the Karpathy case “directly contradicts what Mr. Musk told the jury just a few days ago.” At the beginning of the trial, Musk testified that Karpathy left OpenAI of his own accord.