OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk has caused “huge damage” to the culture of AI startups. During testimony as part of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said that Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers based on their achievements and “take a chainsaw through a bunch.”
Altman acknowledged that the Tesla CEO was known for this management style, but that it was incompatible with his startup. “I don’t think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab,” Altman testified when asked by his attorney William Savitt about the impact of Musk’s departure from OpenAI on morale. “For a research lab where people need psychological safety and a long time to pursue an idea, there’s this idea that you have to constantly show your results, and if they’re not good enough in a short period of time, you’ll be fired. It doesn’t really work for the kind of research we’ve done successfully.”
Altman said that Musk’s departure was “in some ways a morale booster”, as staff members realized they “didn’t have to work this way anymore.” Musk’s lawsuit claims that OpenAI abandoned its core mission of benefiting humanity, and that Altman and Brockman defrauded him into providing funding for the startup.
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