This week, proceedings in an Oakland federal courtroom turned attention to a key moment in artificial intelligence’s organizational history. At the center is a 2017 meeting between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s leadership, now under scrutiny in the trial over Musk’s lawsuit against the company he helped launch. Testifying this week at the trial, an OpenAI co-founder said that he feared Musk might strike him during that meeting.
OpenAI co-founder on Elon Musk: ‘I thought he was going to hit me’
An OpenAI co-founder told jurors that he feared Elon Musk was about to become physical during a tense 2017 meeting over the company’s future.
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman testified that Elon Musk’s mood abruptly shifted after he rejected a plan to give Musk more say in the company. Brockman is a defendant in a tech mogul’s lawsuit over the company’s move to for-profit.
As reported by the BBC, Brockman’s key claim is that Musk was informed of OpenAI’s planned shift toward a for-profit model. The company launched as a non-profit, created a for-profit subsidiary to secure billions in investor funding, and last year made the for-profit division its primary focus.
“I actually thought he was going to hit me,” he revealed, referring to Musk.
According to Greg Brockman, the meeting wrapped up quickly when Musk announced he would withhold further funding from OpenAI, a company he had backed since 2015.
Brockman further said that the Neuralink co-founder tried to consolidate control of OpenAI before exiting the company. He testified that Musk’s tactics included “buttering up” both him and co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
In court, OpenAI’s attorneys displayed a text exchange from August 2017 between Sutskever and Brockman. One read, “Will a model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavourable terms?”
The testimony arrived in the second week of a month-long proceeding between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief executive.
The dispute traces back to Musk’s departure from OpenAI, where he was an initial co-founder. In the years since, the company has become one of the world’s most valuable tech firms following the launch of ChatGPT.
Originally reported by Sibanee Gogoi on Mandatory.
