Elon Musk The trial against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its decisive phase on Monday, following testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and current OpenAI CEO Bret Taylor.
Sutskever gained attention by revealing an $850 billion ownership stake in for-profit OpenAI, which is now worth about $7 billion. This makes him one of OpenAI’s largest known individual shareholders. At the start of the trial, OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman admitted for the first time that he owned approximately $30 billion worth of OpenAI stock.
Brockman was one of the founders of the research lab, and Suckman joined him shortly thereafter, turning down Google’s offer of $6 million a year in salary. Brockman said he and Sutskever were “joined at the hip” until Sutskever helped to briefly oust Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO in 2023. Sutskever helped gather evidence pointing to Altman’s alleged history of fraud and even helped draft a memo to the board. Although they tried to mend relations, Sutskever has since been estranged from Brockman and Altman, an OpenAI lawyer said Monday.
Sutskever, who arrived in the courtroom in a shirt and pants, the first male witness to testify without a jacket, appeared depressed that he was no longer associated with OpenAI. (He left and founded a rival AI lab in 2024). “I felt like I was part owner of OpenAI,” he said at one point on Monday. “I felt like I put my whole life into it, I just cared about it and didn’t want it to be ruined.”
Suckever’s testimony supported Musk’s contention that Altman is not the right person to lead an artificial intelligence lab that could create artificial general intelligence. Additionally, Sutskever mentioned how the super-alignment team he helped lead, which focused on future model security, was doing the most crucial work at OpenAI “for the long haul.” The team was disbanded in May 2024, shortly after Sutskever left the company.
But Sutskever also added in OpenAI’s defense that Musk never negotiated any special promises when funding the OpenAI nonprofit. Musk’s claims that such obligations existed and that Altman and Brockman violated them in pursuing a lucrative for-profit venture form the basis of his claims in the lawsuit. Sutskever said OpenAI needed “a lot of dollars” to build a computer as massive as a human brain, and while it was “reasonably successful” in soliciting donations, the consensus was that it was set up as a for-profit organization.
“I would describe it as the difference between an ant and a cat,” Sutskever said in response to a question from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers about how more computation helped elevate OpenAI. “If there is no funding, there is no big computer.”
Ultimately, Sutskever, a prominent artificial intelligence scientist who paints in his spare time, testified for about an hour, making almost no eye contact with anyone during the hearing.
Musk’s legal team tried unsuccessfully to treat Sutskever as a hostile witness because of his financial holdings in OpenAI. However, Gonzalez Rogers agreed to give lawyers for both Musk and OpenAI additional leeway in questioning Sutskever because of what she called his “unique position” on the matter.
Blip
Much of Monday’s testimony focused on much-discussed events such as Altman’s ouster and reinstatement as CEO in November 2023. Nadella described Sutskever and other board members firing Altman as a “town of amateurs” and repeated that he “never got clarity” about the lack of candor that led to their decision. During his testimony, Nadella also admitted that he had discussed the issue with his colleagues 14 potential board members who would have joined OpenAI had Altman returned, including at least two who were vetoed by the Microsoft group and one who joined later. Nadella described Microsoft’s input as suggestions.
Sutskever said he supports firing Altman because “an environment where executives don’t have the right information” is “not conducive to achieving any great goal.” However, he criticized his board colleagues for rushing the process, lacking experience and accepting “not very good legal advice.”
Microsoft plant
In his lawsuit, Musk accused Microsoft of helping turn OpenAI into a money-making machine beyond Musk’s intentions. Nadella testified that Microsoft initially supported OpenAI by offering cheaper cloud computing, but could no longer afford it “when bills started mounting.” A for-profit division in which Microsoft could invest in exchange for a potential financial return was more acceptable.
But as the years passed and the bills mounted, Microsoft wanted more from the partnership. Microsoft “will lose 4 billion next year!!!” “Nadella exclaimed in e-mail in 2022 to his lieutenants about the OpenAI partnership. He called for a recent deal to ensure that Microsoft also receives artificial intelligence “know-how” from the startup, which he still wrote as “Open AI.”