Adi Robertson

“To be clear I would have created a nonprofit open-source foundation with or without Sam Altman or [OpenAI cofounder] Greg Brockman, but at the time I was glad they were doing so with me,” he says. The name came about “as the result of discussions with Greg, Sam, and Ilya [Sutskever]. We bounced around a few different names, the one I thought made sense was OpenAI because the ‘open’ in OpenAI represents open source.” (A lack of open-source releases, of course, is one of Musk’s bones to pick with OpenAI.)

Musk says Altman, then at Y Combinator, was “not well known at that time” — but he agreed with Musk on AI safety, which was very important. He reiterates that, by contrast, Larry Page called Musk a “species-ist” for being concerned about humans being wiped out by AI. “OpenAI exists because Larry Page called me a species-ist,” he says.

Musk continues to talk about the dangers of AI, saying he warned President Barack Obama in a meeting years before it was a serious concern. “There is no agreement to limit AI and so there is currently an AI acceleration that’s happening very quickly with a number of companies primarily in the US and with China,” he says. Back in 2015, he recalls, “I had many dinners with many people talking about AI safety” — one of those people was Sam Altman.

He tells the jury that OpenAI exists because of conversations he had with Larry Page of Google, who Musk says did not care sufficiently about the dangers of AI. Musk decided “we’ve got to have some counterpoint to Google,” which at the time was leading in AI research. But Musk says he thought about the technology earlier than that, in the ’90s, when he believed it could “solve all the diseases and make everyone prosperous, or it could kill us all.”

After noting that computers and chatbots have gotten “to the point where they feel almost human,” Musk brings up artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “AGI is when the AI becomes as smart as any human — arguably smarter than any human, and I think we are getting close to that point. My guess is that AI will be probably as smart as any human as soon as next year,” he says.

“The incorporation docs had been filed but there were no employees or IP at that time, so it depends on people’s perspective, but essentially there were five cofounders of the company and I was one of them,” he says. It’s actually, of course, a matter of legal agreement — here’s a little more background.

We’re getting into Musk’s later companies — SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and others. Musk says that “there have to be reasons to be excited and inspired by the future” and plays up his difficulties establishing SpaceX, saying that “anyone who was good wouldn’t join us because I was just some internet guy.”

Musk is offering some familiar background about his start in the tech industry, from Zip2 to what would become PayPal. “I believe you shouldn’t ask other people to invest unless you’re going to put your own money in,” he says. He’s not really turning on the charm here — the delivery’s fairly flat.