Musk’s main claim in the suit is that Altman and OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman effectively stole a nonprofit, using the $38 million Musk invested to create a private company worth more than $800 billion today. On Wednesday, Musk’s lawyers showed video statements from former OpenAI CTO Mira Muratti and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner to express concern over Altman’s alleged history of deception.
OpenAI’s legal team has responded to Musk’s claims by questioning his true intentions, arguing that the Tesla CEO has “sour grapes” since he failed to take control of OpenAI in 2017. He has since started a rival, for-profit AI lab. OpenAI’s lawyers used cross-examination of Zilis on Wednesday to bring up evidence about Musk’s alleged plans to destroy OpenAI and tried to suggest that Zilis was aware of those plans. As this case relates, one of Zilis’s most important roles at OpenAI was to act as a mediator between Musk and Altman.
In a February 2018 text submitted as evidence, Zilis — who was an OpenAI consultant at the time, as well as a Neuralink and Tesla executive — asked Altman, “Have you thought about Tesla’s B Corp subsidiary?”
“There is documentary evidence that, at multiple points, Mr. Musk considered seeking to add Sam Altman to the board and offered that option,” OpenAI attorney William Savitt said outside the courthouse on Wednesday. “This was part of Mr. Musk’s effort to corrupt OpenAI and absorb it into Tesla… He was trying to induce Altman to leave the mission and become part of Tesla.”
In an email to Sarah O’Brien, Tesla’s vice president of communications, from November 2017, Zilis shared a draft of an FAQ page about an event Tesla was planning to host at the NeuroIPS AI conference. “The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world leading AI lab (?) that will rival Google/DeepMind and Facebook AI research,” the drafted FAQ reads. “A key issue for Tesla is that when people think of Elon and AI, they think of OpenAI,” the document continues.
Another section of the FAQ titled “Who?” The list of several Tesla executives who were planned to lead the unit included Musk and former OpenAI researcher Andrzej Karpathy. Altman’s name is listed next to Musk’s with two question marks.
The FAQ is marked with notes that also include that Altman may be the moderator for the NeuroIPS event, which “could be the act of forcing Sam to commit to TeslaAI.” Another note reads that Tesla AI’s “strategy has not yet been defined and some of it may be deeply proprietary.”
Zilis testified Wednesday that Altman never joined Tesla, and that the AI Lab and Neurips launch events never came to fruition. He also testified that Musk had contacted Karpathy about recruiting him to Tesla. Savitt told reporters that Zilis’ testimony on Karpathy “contradicts what Mr. Musk told the jury a few days ago.” Earlier in the trial, Musk testified that Carpathy left OpenAI of his own free will.
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