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A lawsuit by the earthly concern ’s wealthy man against one of the fastest growing companies of all time isnecessarily interesting stuff . But while the allegations are yet to be proven , the case has already debunk a batch of emails between Elon Musk , Sam Altman , and others during OpenAI ’s early days . Here are a few of the more interesting snippets we found while perusing their correspondence .
Bear in mind that these electronic mail were exposed as part of an attempt to evidence OpenAI is somehow breaking antimonopoly law ( a frankly implausible allegation ) . Musk is also divulge to some extent his flavor of treason when OpenAI abandoned its original vision of being a nonprofit with the Tesla CEO as its leader .
They do not severalise the whole fib , but they are still interesting in their own right hand .
Perhaps the most interesting single electronic mail is former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever explicate the team ’s squeamishness with Musk as leader of the fellowship :
The current construction provides you with a path where you terminate up with one-sided absolute mastery over the AGI [ artificial oecumenical intelligence ] . You put forward that you do n’t want to control the final AGI , but during this negotiation , you ’ve shown to us that absolute restraint is extremely important to you .
As an lesson , you said that you require to be chief executive officer of the fresh troupe so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge , even though you also stated that you detest being CEO and would much rather not be chief executive officer .
Thus , we are concerned that as the company makes real progress towards AGI , you will take to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary .
The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship . You are concerned that Demis [ Hassabis , at Google - owned DeepMind ] could create an AGI despotism . So do we . So it is a speculative idea to create a body structure where you could become a dictator if you choose to , especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility .
This is n’t exclusively about corporate ascendance ; Sutskever is worried about an experiential AI scourge being created with only one person in the elbow room .
Sutskever also voice worries about Altman , using word of honor much like the board would later use while criminate him of not being “ systematically heart-to-heart ” :
We have n’t been able to fully trust your judgement throughout this process , because we do n’t realize your toll function .
We do n’t understand why the CEO title is so of import to you . Your stated reason have commute , and it ’s concentrated to really understand what ’s driving it .
Is AGI really your primary motivating ? How does it link up to your political finish ?
Given the way things have wreak out and Altman ’s guidance of the company toward a much more traditional enterprise SaaS position , it seems like his goal was more commercial enterprise than philosophy .
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One interesting tidbit is that as early as 2017,OpenAI was gravely consider buying chipmaker Cerebras , or somehow merging with it , potentially using Tesla ’s resources somehow . As Sutskever puts it :
In the outcome we decide to buy Cerebras , my strong sense is that it ’ll be done through Tesla .
They ended up not blend in through with it , though the reason why is not in these electronic mail .
This , by the direction , was back when Musk was angle to have OpenAI be just one of his many properties , and the leader were open to that theory . As OpenAI Colorado - laminitis Andrej Karpathy wrote :
The most promising option I can recall of , as I observe earlier , would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its hard currency cow . [ … ] If we do this really well , the transportation industry is large enough that we could increase Tesla ’s market cap to high O(~100 K ) , and expend that tax income to fund the AI body of work at the appropriate scale .
Again , this did n’t chance for a plenty of reason that seem clear in hindsight . Tesla ’s market cap did in fact growth , but the self - labor side of things — which Karpathy aimed to accelerate after when he took a job at Tesla — prove harder than expected , and has not yet contribute meaningfully to Tesla ’s revenue .
As far as making money , Microsoft was in the mixture from as early as 2016 , offering OpenAI $ 60 million worth of compute on Azure in central for , among other things , the company “ evangelizing ” one another . No one seemed into this sort of corporate back - scraping , and Musk write that it made him “ nauseous . ”
They ultimately ended up paying far more but with no duty on either side . “ Would be worth way more than $ 50 M not to seem like Microsoft ’s marketing bitch , ” spell Musk .
Lastly , a small-scale nugget mentioned by display board member Shivon Zilis ( who would after become female parent to three of Musk ’s tyke ): Valve founder Gabe Newell was , in add-on to being a donator to the project in the former Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , on Altman and Greg Brockman ’s “ intimate advisory board . ” It ’s indecipherable what role he had or has in the day - to - 24-hour interval there . I ’ve demand Newell for gossip .
