Elon Musk tried to hire Open AI founders to start AI unit inside Tesla - Ars Technica

Overview

Elon Musk tried to hire Open AI founders to start AI unit inside Tesla

Musk was “prepared to do the for-profit, provided he would get control.”

Details

Elon Musk tried to hire Open AI’s founding team, including Sam Altman, to lead a new AI lab within Tesla in 2018, as the AI start-up’s leaders grappled over who should control the company and its direction.

Musk, a co-founder of the AI group, proposed bringing Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever to his carmaker, appointing Altman to the board or making Open AI a Tesla subsidiary, according to evidence in a high-stakes trial between the billionaire and the Chat GPT maker on Wednesday.

The disclosures shed light on a crucial issue in the case, in which Musk has claimed that Altman “stole a charity” by converting the company into a for-profit. Open AI’s lawyers have argued the Tesla chief executive was happy to commercialize the lab, provided that he remained in charge.

Emails, texts, and testimony on Wednesday showed that by late 2017 Musk had lost confidence in the non-profit Open AI’s ability to build artificial general intelligence, a powerful form of AI—and was exploring building his own AI lab within Tesla.

“There is little chance of Open AI being a successful force if I focus on Tesla AI,” Musk wrote in a message at the time to Shivon Zilis, who testified in court on Wednesday.

Zilis, an Open AI adviser from 2016 and board member from 2020 until 2023, is the mother of four of Musk’s children and was an important interlocutor between the billionaire and the AI lab’s other founders during the six-month period on which much of the case hinges.

In late 2017, Zilis sketched out plans for an event to “share that Tesla is building a world-leading AI lab (?) which will rival the likes of Google / Deep Mind and Facebook AI Research.”

By early 2018, she laid out nine possible scenarios for achieving AGI. The bulk of those centered on Tesla and included bringing Altman in to run AI at the carmaker. Another proposal was to poach Deep Mind founder Demis Hassabis for the same role.

These were among the options explored by Open AI’s founders as they weighed the best structure to enable the company to raise enough capital to take on Google while retaining its non-profit mission.

Ultimately, Open AI’s executives were not persuaded by Musk’s proposals. Zilis told Musk’s then-chief of staff Sam Teller in a February 2018 email: “They all think Elon is an incredible human being but that he really hasn’t done his homework AI/AGI and that really concerns them about working with him.”

Musk left Open AI’s board in early 2018, and Open AI went on to restructure as a for-profit entity with a charitable arm.

The world’s richest man is suing the company in a case that could alter the fate of Open AI, which has grown to be an $852 billion behemoth with aspirations for a public listing as early as this year.

Musk claims Altman, Brockman, and Open AI unjustly enriched themselves by converting the start-up into a for-profit company.

William Savitt, Open AI’s lead attorney in the case, said he believed Zilis’ testimony showed Musk was “prepared to do the for-profit, provided he would get control.”

Speaking after Wednesday’s court hearing, Savitt said Musk sought to control governance and “fold Open AI into Tesla… when neither option was available to him he picked up his marbles and went home.”

Brockman, Open AI’s president, on Tuesday told the jury in Oakland that Musk was seeking “unilateral control over AGI,” which he and other founders could not accept.

Zilis, a technology expert who has also worked as an executive at Tesla and Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink, told the court on Wednesday that her “allegiance [is] to the best outcome of AI for humanity.”

She and Musk first had a romantic relationship roughly a decade ago and decided to have children via IVF in 2020. “I… really wanted to be a mum. [Musk] was encouraging everyone around him to have children… he said if that was ever interesting he’d be able to make a donation,” she said.

In 2020, two years after the pair had fought over the direction of Open AI, Altman texted Zilis to ask advice on approaching Musk. She was encouraging, but warned him: “the only thing I wonder is if he’ll pull the ‘you should have gone with Tesla’ card on you.”

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Key Takeaways

• Elon Musk tried to hire Open AI founders to start AI unit inside Tesla

• Musk was “prepared to do the for-profit, provided he would get control

• Elon Musk tried to hire Open AI’s founding team, including Sam Altman, to lead a new AI lab within Tesla in 2018, as the AI start-up’s leaders grappled over who should control the company and its direction

• Musk, a co-founder of the AI group, proposed bringing Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever to his carmaker, appointing Altman to the board or making Open AI a Tesla subsidiary, according to evidence in a high-stakes trial between the billionaire and the Chat GPT maker on Wednesday

• The disclosures shed light on a crucial issue in the case, in which Musk has claimed that Altman “stole a charity” by converting the company into a for-profit