She quotes a tweet of his saying that he believes Musk was doing his best for humanity. He asks when that was. She says, January 2025. He says, well he’s done some things that undermined my confidence since then.
There’s a brief redirect, and then Achiam steps down. No trophy for the jury. :(
“Are you aware that OpenAI employees are better-compensated than any other employees in startup history?” lol lady, why would he know that. Anyway, he’s got millions of dollars in OpenAI shares, and he’s also sold some for more than $10 million.
In Musk’s testimony, he claimed he might have said something friendly like “don’t be a jackass” but denied he’d called anyone a jackass. Achiam’s testimony obviously contradicts that. Achiam received a trophy from Dario Amodei at the next meeting in commemoration of Achiam standing up to Musk: “Never stop being a jackass for safety.” The trophy is not introduced, sadly for me.
“It sounded like he wanted to race toward AGI.” That sounded unsafe to Achiam. “He was proposing to do something that seemed, based on our understanding at the time, obviously unsafe and reckless,” Achiam said. “We had a pretty tense exchange, and he snapped and called me a jackass.” There were 50 or 60 people at that meeting.
He had a notable interaction with Musk, though, during the all-hands when Musk was departing the organization in Feb. 2018. Musk explained that he was leaving because he had a new conflict of interest with Tesla, which would be hiring from the same pool of researchers — and indicated a general lack of confidence in OpenAI’s path
His job was safety research then. He is now the “chief futurist” at OpenAI, where he tries to think about side-effects of AI (such as social impacts, economic impacts, and consequences for national and international security). “It is my best attempt to have us fulfill the mission of OpenAI,” he says. The idea is to ensure AGI benefits everyone, he says. It’s “one of the highest and noblest callings we could possibly have.”
He is establishing his background right now. You will be just shocked to hear that he’s into science fiction. This is the witness we may see the jackass trophy for. I am on the edge of my seat.
Microsoft had an approval right on some transactions. It did not have the majority of the board. That’s even though they contributed more than 90 percent of OpenAI’s initial investments. Also, all LPs had major decision rights, Wetter testifies. So this is less control than Musk wanted for more money.
“We did not talk to Elon Musk during out due diligence process,” Wetter notes. He’s not a party to OpenAI’s agreements with Microsoft. A lot of the direct was “Are there any agreements with Elon Musk here? Are there any there?”