“I truly thought he was going to physically attack me.” Musk was angry that no one wanted to agree for him to have majority equity. As he was storming out of the meeting, Musk asked Brockman and Sutskever when they planned to leave OpenAI. They were confused. Then Musk said, “I will withhold funding until you decide what you are going to do.” He then stopped his promised quarterly donations to OpenAI.
Brockman is discussing an intense period of negotiations between him, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, and Musk. Musk wanted unilateral control. He also wanted a lot of equity because “he needed the money for Mars, he needed $80 billion to create a city there,” Brockman says. During the negotiations, Musk stopped his quarterly donations.
between Altman, Musk, Brockman, and Sutskever in August 2017. It was the first proposal for a for-profit. Musk rejected this. “At the end of the meeting he said, ‘You guys are great but I could start another AI company tomorrow. One tweet is all it takes,” Brockman said.
He started keeping it in 2010. He describes it as stream-of-thought, jotted notes, and disorganized thoughts that sometimes contradicted each other. “It’s very painful” to see the journal in this case, Brockman says. These were “very deeply personal writings that were never meant for the world to see but there’s nothing there I’m ashamed of.”
Musk told Brockman he tried to get Gates to donate four times, and Gates didn’t so much as come by the office. One wonders whether Musk’s persistent shit-talking of Gates had anything to do with Gates’ reluctance.
I love a sidebar. We have static. There’s some evidence OpenAI is trying to introduce that Musk’s team apparently doesn’t want, about Brockman’s investment in Cerebras.
Five to 10 people were laid off after Musk demanded a list of people with their contributions by their names. It had a “significantly negative” impact on morale and made recruiting more difficult.
Elon Musk requested that they come help. “It was pretty clear this was not something we could say no to,” Brockman says. Brockman claims this was something he worried about when it came to joining OpenAI.
So over the course of several months, the OpenAI group worked on self-driving. One of those engineers, Andrej Karpathy, permanently joined Tesla afterward. “I have an apology and a confession,” Musk said. “I made an offer to Andrej to run autopilot and he accepted.”
We have some matters to take care of before we get the jury back.
No detail was too small to argue over for Greg Brockman.