Week 3 of the Musk v. Altman trial started off big.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified about the company’s investment in OpenAI, initially $1 billion, of which Nadella said he was proud to be the first company to back OpenAI. Nadella also testified about the “chaos” ensuing the attempted firing of Sam Altman and Nadella’s response. Nadella also said that Elon Musk never expressed misgivings with Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI.
But the star witness of the day was former co-founder of OpenAI Ilya Sutskever..In memorable testimony, Sutskever provided compelling explanations for OpenAI’s overall mission and why it needed more funding to achieve it.
Sutskever said he made no promise to Musk that OpenAI would remain a nonprofit: “I made no such promise. The mission of OpenAI is larger than its nonprofit or non-profit structure.”
Sutskever also revealed that he had been collecting negative information about CEO Sam Altman for a year at the request of the board of directors (for the later termination attempt), and that OpenAI made a brief overture to Anthropic during the period of Altman’s brief termination for possible acquisition or absorption by Anthropic. Wow.
Sutskever also revealed his worth from OpenAI shares is $7 billion, and the Google had offered to pay him $6 million a year to work for DeepMind, which he declined to work with OpenAI at its inception.