GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
The Musk v. Altman trial is underway, and that means exhibits, or the evidence to be presented in court, are being revealed piece by piece. So far, email exchanges, photos, and corporate documents are circulating from the earliest days of OpenAI — and from before the AI lab even had a name. Some high-level takeaways: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave OpenAI an in-demand supercomputer, Musk largely drafted OpenAI’s mission and heavily influenced its early structure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared to want to lean heavily on Y Combinator for early support for OpenAI, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever worried about Musk’s level of control over the company, and Musk highlighted the importance of a nonprofit with a mission of broadly beneficial AI.
Musk’s buzzy lawsuit, which began its jury trial on Monday in a federal courtroom in California, names Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI investor Microsoft as defendants. It accuses them of breaching the company’s charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment, but ultimately, Musk’s lawsuit boils down to whether or not OpenAI deviated from its founding mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence — an often vaguely-defined term that denotes AI systems that equal or surpass human intelligence — benefits all of humanity. It’s the latest in a yearslong string of legal actions against OpenAI and its executives by Musk, who co-founded the AI lab alongside Altman and Brockman and was an early investor. (Musk also owns xAI, an AI lab that directly competes with OpenAI, and is owned by parent company SpaceX.)
Former OpenAI employees and people close to both companies have been watching this particular lawsuit with a close eye, since the outcome of a jury trial could have affected how OpenAI runs its business and controls its quickly-advancing technology. Plus, OpenAI and SpaceX are both reportedly racing to go public this year, so they’re more in the public eye than ever.
The lawsuit discovery process had already unearthed a lot of eyebrow-raising communications between AI industry executives, from emails between Altman and Sutskever to entries from Brockman’s own diary. Even texts between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Musk were made public. But that was all before the jury trial started — now, there’s even more set to be revealed.
Here’s an exhaustive list of all the exhibits that have been made public so far and the biggest takeaways from each one. Admittedly, not every item is necessarily interesting, so we’ve flagged the most important ones with an asterisk The Verge will keep updating the list as more are added.
A June 2015 email exchange between Altman and Musk. Altman lays out a five-part plan, involving an AI lab with a mission to “create the first general AI and use it for individual empowerment—ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest. More generally, safety should be a first-class requirement.”
He suggests that they start with seven to 10 people and expand from there, using an extra Y Combinator building located in Mountain View. Governance-wise, Altman names five people to start, proposing himself, Musk, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, and Dustin Moskovitz. “The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world’, and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide,” Altman writes. He adds that the researchers working at the lab would have “significant financial upside … uncorrelated to what they build, which should eliminate some of the conflict,” and suggests paying them a “competitive salary” and awarding them equity in Y Combinator. He also says they should get someone to “run the team” but that that person “probably shouldn’t be on the governance board.”
Altman goes on to ask Musk whether he’ll be involved in the AI lab in addition to governance, potentially coming by once a month to talk about progress or at least being publicly supportive to help with recruiting. As a model, he names Peter Thiel’s “part-time partner” involvement at Y Combinator.
Finally, Altman mentions a “regulation letter,” seeming to imply that the AI lab was going to write a letter calling for AI regulation. He says he’s happy to leave Musk off as a public signatory.
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