Elizabeth Lopatto
Jury is sent out for the day.
Just before they left, Jared Birchall’s testimony regarding the funding of the bid to buy OpenAI — the subject of last week’s drama — was struck.
Elizabeth Lopatto
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Elizabeth Lopatto
We are hearing about the early days of OpenAI.
In Brockman’s telling, Altman was around a lot more often than Musk. The gee-whiz energy here is off the charts, including a pre-launch story about the group being stuck in traffic for an hour and a half and not noticing because they were having such a good time.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Early worries about Musk came from Ilya Sutskever.
From Sutskever’s texts to Brockman:
Elon might spend half a day a week with us
I imagined how it will be and I worry that our work environment can become very stressful
And since he’ll be bankrolling it, itll be hard to stop it
Elizabeth Lopatto
Brockman is describing his bromance with Altman.
When Brockman was leaving Stripe, he told Altman “I’m thinking about doing an AI thing” and Altman said, “I’m also thinking about doing an AI thing” and “then we kept in touch.” They went to a dinner in Menlo Park — Musk arrived an hour late — to talk about AGI, then Brockman caught a ride home with Altman.
Elizabeth Lopatto
“I do all the things.”
Asked what he does as president of OpenAI, that’s how Brockman responded. God I hate hearing millennial slang in the courtroom. Sooo I did a thing… for $30 billion.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Brockman says we are 80 percent of the way to AGI.
“We very much have these AI models that are smart and capable but they’re not fully connected to the world,” Brockman says. “We as society are still figuring out how do we integrate these.” This is lol and also lmao.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Open AI’s direct examination of Brockman is pretty sedate so far… aside from Tesla.
When Musk left OpenAI he told Brockman that he was going to start an AGI competitor within Tesla. “The most important thing was that there was going to be a counterweight to Google/Deepmind,” Brockman said. Musk said there was “no hope — zero percent chance” at OpenAI. Musk also told Brockman that the work on AGI at Tesla would be secret because “the shareholders wouldn’t like it.”
Elizabeth Lopatto
OpenAI’s lawyers are now getting their shot at Brockman.
Curious to see what they can recover from this testimony.
Elizabeth Lopatto
For real, I think nerds should not testify in court.
Look, correcting lawyers on whether they’ve dropped an article and saying things like “all those words are accurate so far” probably plays in a lot of places but this nitpicking doesn’t really cover you in glory in a courtroom. I get it! I am also obnoxious! But this kind of quibbling doesn’t help Brockman recover from the journal entries that make him look unreliable.