More from All of the updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s battle over OpenAI
Brockman is discussing an intense period of negotiations between him, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, and Musk. Musk wanted unilateral control. He also wanted a lot of equity because “he needed the money for Mars, he needed $80 billion to create a city there,” Brockman says. During the negotiations, Musk stopped his quarterly donations.
between Altman, Musk, Brockman, and Sutskever in August 2017. It was the first proposal for a for-profit. Musk rejected this. “At the end of the meeting he said, ‘You guys are great but I could start another AI company tomorrow. One tweet is all it takes,” Brockman said.
He started keeping it in 2010. He describes it as stream-of-thought, jotted notes, and disorganized thoughts that sometimes contradicted each other. “It’s very painful” to see the journal in this case, Brockman says. These were “very deeply personal writings that were never meant for the world to see but there’s nothing there I’m ashamed of.”
Brockman said that focusing on the game was his idea, in a project worked on by several people, later explaining that DeepMind was working on something similar with a different game but “had nothing” yet, contributing to their decision not to open-source the technology.
The most notable part of the project, however, is how its development led to understanding that increasing the scale of their compute could rapidly advance the AI capabilities. “…the first Dota bot Jakub Pachocki trained was on 16 CPU cores … every week they had 2x the CPU cores, and the AI got 2x better. There was no limit. We kept increasing the scale, thinking this would peter out, but it never did,” said Brockman.
Musk told Brockman he tried to get Gates to donate four times, and Gates didn’t so much as come by the office. One wonders whether Musk’s persistent shit-talking of Gates had anything to do with Gates’ reluctance.
I love a sidebar. We have static. There’s some evidence OpenAI is trying to introduce that Musk’s team apparently doesn’t want, about Brockman’s investment in Cerebras.
Five to 10 people were laid off after Musk demanded a list of people with their contributions by their names. It had a “significantly negative” impact on morale and made recruiting more difficult.
Elon Musk requested that they come help. “It was pretty clear this was not something we could say no to,” Brockman says. Brockman claims this was something he worried about when it came to joining OpenAI.
So over the course of several months, the OpenAI group worked on self-driving. One of those engineers, Andrej Karpathy, permanently joined Tesla afterward. “I have an apology and a confession,” Musk said. “I made an offer to Andrej to run autopilot and he accepted.”
We have some matters to take care of before we get the jury back.
DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis was a constant figure of fear among Musk and other OpenAI higher-ups.
No detail was too small to argue over for Greg Brockman.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
“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.
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.”
Curious to see what they can recover from this testimony.
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.
Cerebras, Stripe, CoreWeave, and Helion all appear on his financial disclosures. All four have deals with OpenAI. I see where this is going — probably a preview of what to expect with Altman.
It happened. Kind of a nothingburger, as Brockman said that the deal was “not really my focus area.” We are now back in his disclosures. OpenAI did a December 2025 deal with Cerebras, for $10 billion of chips — and Brockman had an investment. The deal increased Cerebras’ valuation to $23 billion. “Your equity in Cerebras became more valuable because of the transaction OpenAI did?” Brockman admits that’s possible.
But Brockman is back on the stand, and boy, morning has not been good to him. We are now moving on to Microsoft.
You may recall from Musk’s testimony that OpenAI has used purple boxes to highlight things. We see another purple box in OpenAI LLC’s announcement it exists. Molo asks if this is something OpenAI generally uses in its paperwork to highlight important things. Brockman says no. We go back and forth on this for a while, because Brockman thinks Molo’s statement is overly broad.
Brockman is worth $30 billion. Molo has been asking, over and over, why Brockman hasn’t donated the $29 billion to OpenAI’s charity since he’d be good at $1 billion. Brockman has been making weird non-answers. He sounds nervous and not especially convincing.