Sam Altman is responding to being repeatedly called a liar, both in this trial and elsewhere. We’re just hearing a list of people who have called Altman a liar or a schemer, including the Anthropic cofounders, Dario and Daniela Amodei. Altman just seems confused.
“I believe I am an honest and trustworthy businessperson,” Altman says. We are now hearing about Ilya Sutskever’s testimony that he thought Altman was dishonest, and Mira Mirati’s as well. Altman is responding to this with confusion, seems hurt, and is speaking very softly.
He also says it’s the most meaningful thing in his life besides his family. It’s “awesome and fulfilling,” Altman said. He also testifies he is still enthusiastic about the nonprofit structure because it’s now one of the largest nonprofits in the world. “Mr Musk did try to kill it, at least twice.” We are now about to witness the cross.
He says he never received any money from OpenAI’s startup fund. “I temporarily held the gp position because as the only person on the executive team without OpenAI equity, if anyone else had that… it would’ve caused adverse tax consequences.” He says he’s recused from any related-party transactions and let the boards of the relevant companies decide what to do. This is followed by some PR talk about the OpenAI foundation’s Alzheimer’s work. Okay.
He was tempted to go to Microsoft to work on pure research effort, and he felt very angry. “I’m sure I could have made a ton of money and had a much easier life at Microsoft but I cared about the mission and the people,” he said. So he returned. As for the board, he says “I feel badly for the misunderstandings” with the board.
People started quitting OpenAI. Altman went to Brockman’s house and wanted to figure out a way to stabilize OpenAI. He had calls with board members about coming back to OpenAI. “Although I was still very angry” and thought he’d have to “clean up a mess I didn’t make,” he said he was willing to come back under other conditions.
All the board would tell him was that he wasn’t consistently candid and they weren’t going to get into why. Altman was completely shocked, he says. He also told them that their plan to announce it via a blog post would throw things into chaos. “If this is the decision, this is a terrible way to execute it,” Altman said he told them. The board told him it was too late to stop it.
2023 was “the beginning of the inflection.” ChatGPT had been introduced, and “it became clear to us we would need a lot more compute.” They needed it for both research and for the models being used by the public. Around then, Shivon Zilis resigned from the OpenAI board. Shortly after that, Musk announced xAI, and Altman says there were”a lot of efforts to recruit our employees” and “negative tactics from Mr. Musk toward us.” Musk’s lawyers don’t like this but over their objections, Altman “started to hear rumblings” about litigation.
...and it’s a little catty. (I live!) At one point, Altman says that Zilis told him Musk had “front-runner-itis” — but there’s an objection that stops Altman from telling the rest of this story. Altman looks slightly disappointed. We then hear that Zilis advised Altman on how to engage Musk so that Musk wouldn’t “bash us on Twitter.”
Musk didn’t raise any objections, though. And then he sent the infamous message where he rated OpenAI’s chances as zero. Altman appears to be concentrating hard on his testimony but is coming across as being a little bewildered about why he is here at all — but maybe that’s just how his eyebrows look at all times.