More from All of the updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s battle over OpenAI

She says the starting point was Sutskever reaching out to have a conversation where he expressed serious concerns about Altman. It was a “pattern of behavior” that included issues with “honesty and candor” that led to the firing, not any one action. Toner has already laid out some of this in a 2024 podcast, and it’s similar to Murati’s testimony.

She wasn’t surprised she hadn’t been told, though, because “I was used to the board not being very informed about things.” She says that “caused me to believe that [Altman] was not motivated to help the board perform the oversight role.”

That means there’s no clear-cut way to test for safety. People are just throwing things together to see what happens. She refers to OpenAI’s safety board’s methods as becoming “somewhat less slapdash” over time.

This should be about an hour. YGR has told the jury that if she sees them falling asleep, she’s going stop the video and have them stand and stretch.

Every time a MSFT lawyer gets up to question a witness in Musk v. Altman, it’s “And Microsoft wasn’t there?” with an occasional addition of “And Satya Nadella wasn’t there either?” This gets funnier every time it happens.

She is asked about texting Musk about the Microsoft deal with OpenAI — that the structure was not maximum profit and Microsoft was not in control. She looks at the evidence, and says she sees it there but... “it’s not in my neurons, it’s not in my brain, but I see it.” Okay.

Zilis said she now recalled certain messages that she had said she didn’t recall in her deposition, saying that at this point she’d reviewed documents numerous times. Eddy said, “Your long-lost memories have since been recovered.”

Three were Tesla AI. One was OpenAI as a B-corp subsidiary of Tesla. One was Altman as anchor for TeslaAI. But my favorite? “Find a way to get Demis. Seriously…. Demis really does fanboy hard and I don’t think he’s immoral… just amoral. If he hung around E perhaps it would force him to think about humanity more.” Hassabis is really haunting these guys.

as part of his push to increase Tesla’s AI presence. “Those who want to work on large scale AI research don’t currently think of Tesla, and Elon wants to change that by announcing his intention to create a world-class AI lab,” Zilis wrote in 2017.

We are seeing more details about Zilis advocating for Musk’s plan to wrap OpenAI into Tesla. “Tesla solves the funding issue immediately… Tesla at least has option to bury,” reads one email from Zilis. “They haven’t internalized the advantages to burying this in Tesla for stealth advantage,” reads another.

They didn’t want Musk — or anyone — to have control over OpenAI. “You and I can argue that’s stupid all we want but they are holding firm on it,” Zilis says in an email to Jared Birchall in September 2017.

That’s what I’ve learned from his emails. Me too, Sam!

A separate ideation email to Altman lays out certain options for changes to OpenAI’s structure, including one option of rolling all of OpenAI into a B-corp, or a for-profit company with a public mission, and another option of having both an OpenAI C-corp and a nonprofit.

Zilis’ answers on the stand are often slightly different from the ones she gave in her deposition. We’ve now had two videos played in the courtroom. She’s also being represented by Musk’s lawyers.

The message, according to exhibits read aloud in court proceedings, said, “I just wanted to say I hope you are [OK]. I have no idea what’s going on but … I care about you as a person first and foremost. Sending all of my positive vibes your way.”

Altman and Brockman were both investors in the nuclear energy company, and since the company didn’t have an official product yet, she said that OpenAI potentially entering into a deal with Helion “felt super out of left field … How is it the case that we want to place [a] major bet on a speculative technology?”

under better light, Zilis’ top is green and not gray.

She said she and the “entire board had voiced extreme concern about that whole massive thing happening without any semblance of board communication.” That was the first concern she raised internally about Altman, she said.

Shivon Zilis recalled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying of OpenAI at the time that Microsoft was “below them, above them, around them.” Zilis said this denoted complete control, calling it “terrifying because [it] was just not the thing that we had been fighting so hard for.”

She said he goes into “maniac mode” and had trouble thinking of a more quantifiable amount of hours. She added, as an answer to a follow-up question, that their time spent together was a brief break from “the insanity … that is his entire work life.”

She is wearing a black cardigan and black pants with a gray shirt. She is saying that after graduating from Yale, she took a job at IBM, then joined Bloomberg Ventures, and launched Bloomberg Beta, where she focused on AI investments. “I was 13 years old and I read a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil,” and that opened a new world for her. “I read it 10–15 times.”

Sam Altman wasn’t making decisions quickly enough and dragging things out, or not making decisions on controversial things at all, Murati says. He told people what they wanted to hear. “Those are the big themes.”

Satya Nadella met with the OpenAI board. And Murati told Microsoft’s Kevin Scott about Ilya Sutskever signing a petition to reinstate Altman. Murati also wanted Altman back. “The board had not followed a process that could be trusted and it wasn’t transparent with regard to firing Sam.”

It is specifically about how OpenAI and Microsoft worked together. She says that when GPT models were developed, there was no sense they would be commercializable. She also says that Altman undermined her in her ability to do her job, and pitted executives at OpenAI against each other.