In August 2017 Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever gathered at Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed “haunted mansion,” a 47-acre, $23 million estate in Hillsborough south of San Francisco, to discuss the future of OpenAI. Actress Amber Heard, Musk’s girlfriend at the time, gave the group whiskey and then fled with a friend, Brockman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, who testified in federal court during the trial in the case Musk v. Altman on Tuesday.
Before the meeting, Musk gave Brockman and Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist, novel Tesla Model 3 cars. “I felt like he was comforting us,” Brockman said on the stand. “He wanted us to feel indebted to him in some way.” Sutskever tried to return the favor on this occasion. An amateur artist gave Musk a painting of Tesla. Musk and the other co-founders wanted to create a for-profit arm to entice investors to give them billions of dollars to pay for the calculations. But Musk also wanted control of the company, and Sutskever and Brockman objected to giving Tesla’s CEO what they said would be a “dictatorship” over the future of artificial intelligence development. They proposed joint control.
After several minutes of deliberation, Musk rejected their offer. “He stood up and ran around the table,” Brockman recalled. “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me.” According to Brockman’s testimony, Musk grabbed the painting and said he would cut off the nonprofit’s funding until Brockman and Sutskever left, at which point he left the room. But that night, Musk’s so-called chief of staff, Shivon Zilis, called Brockman and Suckever “to say it wasn’t over,” Brockman testified. “There were discussions about the future that included us.”
The story of heated negotiations came to delicate as Brockman concluded his testimony Tuesday. For OpenAI, the events at the residence are representative of repeated instances of Musk’s erratic behavior, which they believe undermine his arguments about the company. Musk claims that his approximately $38 million donation to OpenAI was used by Brockman and others on the way to creating the $852 billion for-profit venture now known for services such as ChatGPT and Codex. Brockman, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI deny any wrongdoing, and jury is in Musk v. Altman could begin considering the advisory decision as early as next week.
After Tuesday’s testimony, William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI, told reporters that in 2017, Brockman learned how complex it can be to meet your heroes. Brockman admired and respected Musk’s business sense, but his desire to take control was absolute and disturbing, Savitt said. Marc Toberoff, Musk’s lawyer, told reporters that the real concern was Brockman’s motivations for sharing control as his desire for wealth had come under scrutiny in court the day before.
For his part, Brockman offered a different story on Tuesday to highlight why he believed Musk was not up to the task of controlling the artificial intelligence company. Brockman recalled how then-OpenAI researcher Alec Radford showed Musk an early version of an AI chatbot that didn’t generate responses he liked. Musk “kept saying this system was so stupid that a kid using the Internet could do it better,” Brockman said. Radford “was completely crushed” and “demoralized” to the point that he almost completely gave up on artificial intelligence research, Brockman said. Brockman and Sutskever “spent a lot of time” rebuilding his confidence. Musk’s inability to see the potential in the early technology that eventually became the basis for ChatGPT, according to Brockman, made him unsuitable to control OpenAI. “You had to dream a little bit,” Brockman said. And Musk has not shown that he can.
Fights in the boardroom
Brockman said Tuesday that he, Sutskever and Altman were considering removing Musk from the board of the nonprofit OpenAI as negotiations with him for its for-profit sister company dragged on for months. They met again over whiskey at Musk’s estate to discuss alternative financing options. There was agreement on what not to do, but little on what should be done instead. However, Brockman and Sutskever decided that removing Musk was “wrong,” Brockman testified. According to an email he wrote in early 2018, Musk ultimately left on his own, concluding that OpenAI was on a path to “certain failure.”
Zilis, then an advisor to OpenAI and Musk, kept him updated on the AI venture’s developments in the coming years. “She was kind of Elon’s second-in-command,” Brockman said, calling her a “friend” he first met in 2012 or 2013.