Law

He said Brockman and Sutskever were the “main leaders,” and that Brockman was the “engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work.” Achiam called Sutskever a “scientific visionary” who articulated what the future would be like, such as football fields of silicon chips making large-scale calculations.

He said when he joined, OpenAI was a team of about 50 people, and that it essentially felt like “an extension of a graduate student lab in a university” — a “collegiate, academic, super intellectual” environment — with most employees being either current PhD students or recent graduates. He said he appreciated that there wasn’t a “publish or perish” type of culture at the time.

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?”

We have just gone through the terms of a very boring document. I will spare you. That’s the top line.

He lead corporate development at Microsoft, where he’s worked for almost 20 years. We saw this deposition earlier as part of Musk’s case. He did a bunch of the work on the 2021 and 2023 OpenAI deals. I believe he is here to talk about Microsoft’s due diligence and also to put the deal in context — “we’ve done over 100 transactions including acquisitions and investments,” in aggregate value of $100 billion.

He also doesn’t remember a bunch of things Musk’s lawyer is asking about. I fully believe him on this — feels like Scott’s only real interest is the tech. He was so happy talking about Azure and he is very lost talking about partnership agreements.

She seems confused by a CTO not knowing what revenue had been generated. Scott noted he was not the chief revenue officer. He seemed amused.

He has testified that the company liked the idea of partnering with OpenAI in part because it would show how to build out Azure for AI frontier research. It’s pleasantly boring.

He said he sometimes used strong language at work, but might have said something like, “Don’t be a jackass.” So in addition to being hilarious, the trophy also makes him look like a liar.

There is a trophy that OpenAI has brought in, that’s half of a donkey — the back half — and says, “Never stop being a jackass.” It’s a commemoration OpenAI employees bought for another employee that Musk called a jackass on the way out on his last day. Musk’s team does not want the trophy in evidence.

Kolter laid out OpenAI’s different safety groups: the safety systems team, which works on guardrails and evaluations; the preparedness team, which deals with OpenAI’s preparedness framework; the alignment team, which helps train models on ways that “align with human values”; the model policy team, which develops the model spec; and other teams focusing on investigations. When speaking about the controversial dissolution of OpenAI’s superalignment team and AGI readiness team, he said some of that research is being done by other teams.

Dr. Jeremy “Zico” Kolter said that so far, there have been two times when the committee “formally requested a delay of models.”

Anyway, he’s a member of the nonprofit board of the OpenAI foundation, but not the for-profit. He’s a safety expert.

He’s a Carnegie Mellon prof who focuses on safety and security.

Altman said — and evidence in the direct showed — that Altman had made sure Musk knew about Microsoft. “I would often have to remind Musk of things, but this one I assumed we had talked about enough times that he would remember,” Altman says. Of Musk’s attitude toward OpenAI, he says, “we were kind of left for dead.”

And that Musk hasn’t sued any of them. Softbank’s investment is bigger — so is Nvidia’s and so is Amazon’s. That’s all from Microsoft.

In response, Altman texted, “I agree this feels bad — we offered you equity when we established the cap profit, which you didn’t want at the time but we are still very happy to do any time you like.” Molo tries to ask if this is a bribe — if Altman is trying to say that if Musk lets him get away with stealing from a charity, he’ll split the loot. Savitt objects, YGR sustains.

Granted we’d all be dead as a result because who can keep up with this but... Drink every time:

Molo says, isn’t he saying you stole a charity? Altman looks confused. “No?”

It’s funny that he’s on the team alleging money overrode ethics, because, well, I guess it takes one to know one? Throughout the case, we’ve seen a number of own goals from the Musk team. This morning, when the Musk team was requesting to ask questions about safety concerns with AI, YGR snapped, “What else do you think you want to do? Because you do not want to be held in contempt I guarantee you.” She’s tough with lawyers as a general rule, but woof.

“I have no current plans to do so,” Altman replied, adding, “I’ve never thought about it before.”

Y’all I am so sick of this. We are literally litigating a week in 2023.

Molo is asking about a series of terms on the Microsoft deal that were developed post 2020. None of them are on the 2018 term sheet because they hadn’t been negotiated yet. Fascinating stuff from Molo — is this really the best use of his time?

While Musk was ready to get into a fight over anything and everything, Altman has rather mildly answered every insulting question Molo has asked him. Molo has just accused Altman of lying on his direct examination about Musk trying to tuck OpenAI into Tesla. In his deposition, Altman says he’s not sure one way or the other about that and then asks to scroll to the top of the deposition for context. Molo says no. A juror smiles. I expect I know what we’re going to see on the redirect.

OpenAI’s lawyers have objected to the question, which is about the New Yorker article which “basically calls you dishonest,” Molo says. YGR would like us to move on from all the people who have called Altman a liar. It’s been more than 10 minutes of this. I think everyone got the point.

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.

We’re getting testimony about emails and meetings Altman had with Musk to try to walk him through the for-profit. They reviewed documents together at the meeting and then emailed him the term sheet that Musk testified he didn’t read.

It was when Altman met with Musk and Zilis to discuss plans for for-profit meetings. Zilis texted after the meeting to say she was glad they had the meeting to let Musk think about “the investment thing so it won’t irk him later.”
A good vibes meeting means a long conversation of Musk”showing us memes on his phone.”