Sam Altman has told a California jury that Elon Musk wanted OpenAI control so badly he floated handing it to his kids.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said Musk repeatedly made “hair-raising” demands for control of the outfit, as the AI lab’s legal punch-up with the world’s richest man got nastier.
Altman told a jury in Oakland, California, on Tuesday that he feared Musk would seek “vengeance” after they fell out over OpenAI’s direction.
OpenAI has argued that Musk had no problem turning the start-up into a for-profit business, provided he ran the show. It says his claim that Altman sold out the non-profit mission is part of a long campaign of payback.
Musk’s lawsuit could decide the fate of the $852 billion AI lab. The billionaire wants to reverse OpenAI’s conversion into a for-profit outfit and is seeking more than $100 billion in damages.
Tuesday’s testimony focused on the power struggle between Musk and Altman. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said Musk pushed for control from the 2015 creation until he quit the board in 2018.
Musk lawyer Steven Molo suggested Altman had a “fixation” with being chief executive. He pointed to a 2017 email from OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman raising worries about the company’s direction.
“We don’t understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed and it’s really hard to understand what’s driving it. Is [artificial general intelligence] truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals?” they wrote.
Altman said Musk once asked for 90 per cent of OpenAI’s equity, then trimmed the demand while still insisting on control. Another option discussed was folding the lab into his electric-car maker Tesla.
Altman described “one particularly hair-raising moment when my co-founders asked ‘what happens if you Musk die?’ Musk said: ‘I hadn’t thought about it tonnes but maybe control would pass to my children.’”
Altman said, “Elon said he would only work on companies that he totally controlled. I was extremely uncomfortable with it. Part of the reason that we started OpenAI was that we didn’t think AGI should be under the control of one person, no matter how good their intentions are.”
Although Musk said he would give up some power over time, “he was unwilling to commit in writing that he would not have long-term control.”
Altman, who ran start-up incubator Y Combinator, said he had seen plenty of founders refuse to give up power when things were going well. He cited rocket maker SpaceX as one example, pointing to the super-voting shares Musk is reportedly seeking before its planned initial public offering this year.
Sutskever told the Oakland court on Monday that Musk pushed for control because he thought his other businesses suffered when he loosened his grip.
Altman said he was “annoyed” when he found out Musk was starting a rival AI effort at Tesla and trying to poach OpenAI staff. A concern was that Musk is “known to be mercurial. People wondered if he would take a vengeance out on us or something,” Altman said.
He said his feelings were “mixed” about Musk’s departure because “he didn’t understand how to run a good research lab and demotivated our key researchers.”
Altman said Musk had asked Brockman and Sutskever to list researchers and their achievements, then rank them so they could “take a chainsaw through the list”. Morale, unsurprisingly, took a kicking.
Musk quitting in 2018 “was a morale boost in some ways. People thought we’re not going to have to work this way any more,” Altman said.
Molo probed Altman on his trustworthiness and conflicts of interest.
Altman has personal stakes worth about $2 billion in firms doing business with OpenAI. They include social media outfit Reddit, nuclear energy start-up Helion and chipmaker Cerebras, which is on course to raise roughly $5 billion in an IPO this week.
Molo cited testimony from former OpenAI executives and board members who claimed Altman misled or lied to them.
Altman replied: “I believe I’m a truthful person… I am sure there is some time in my life when I have not.”
