Musk’s primary claim in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI head Greg Brockman effectively stole a nonprofit, using $38 million invested by Musk to create a private company worth more than $800 billion today. On Wednesday, Musk’s lawyers showed video testimonies of Mira Moratti, a former CTO at OpenAI, and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, to raise concerns about Altman’s alleged history of deception.
OpenAI’s legal team responded to Musk’s claims by questioning his true motives, arguing that the Tesla CEO has had “sour grapes” since he failed to take control of OpenAI in 2017. He has since started a competing for-profit AI lab. OpenAI’s lawyers used cross-examination of Zilis on Wednesday to present evidence about Musk’s alleged plans to sabotage OpenAI, and tried to suggest that Zilis was privy to those plans. In relation to this case, one of Zilis’ most important roles at OpenAI was to act as a conduit between Musk and Altman.
In a February 2018 text message submitted into evidence, Zellis – who was then an advisor to OpenAI, as well as an executive at Neuralink and Tesla – asked Altman: “Have you thought about Tesla’s B Corp?”
“There was documented evidence that Mr. Musk was at several points considering joining Sam Altman on the board and offered that option,” William Savitt, an attorney for OpenAI, said outside the courtroom on Wednesday. “It was part of Mr. Musk’s efforts to subvert OpenAI and absorb it into Tesla… He was trying to convince Altman to abandon the mission and be part of Tesla.”
In an email to Tesla’s vice president of communications, Sarah O’Brien, from November 2017, Zilis shared a draft of an FAQ page about an event Tesla was planning to hold at the NeurIPS AI conference. “The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world-leading AI (?) lab that will rival the likes of Google/DeepMind and Facebook AI Research,” the drafted FAQ reads. “One of the key issues facing Tesla is that when people think of Elon and AI, they think of OpenAI,” the document continues.
Another part of the FAQ is titled “Who?” It lists several Tesla executives slated to lead the unit, including Musk and Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher. The name “Altman” is listed next to the name “Musk” with two question marks next to it.
The FAQ is tagged with notes including that Altman could be a moderator of the NeurIPS event, which “may serve as a job that forces Sam to commit to TeslaAI.” Another note notes that “Tesla’s AI strategy has not yet been determined, and some may be proprietary.”
Zillis testified Wednesday that Altman never ended up joining Tesla, and that the AI lab and NeurIPS launch event never came to fruition. It also testified that Musk approached Karpathy about recruiting him to Tesla. Savitt told reporters that Zillis’ testimony about Karpathy “directly contradicts what Mr. Musk told the jury just a few days ago.” Earlier in this trial, Musk testified that Karpathy left OpenAI of his own volition.
