OpenAI’s tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

A lawsuit by the world’s wealthiest man against one of the fastest growing companies of all time is necessarily interesting stuff. But while the allegations are yet to be proven, the case has already exposed a batch of emails between Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others during OpenAI’s early days. Here are a few of the more interesting snippets we found while perusing their correspondence.

Bear in mind that these emails were exposed as part of an attempt to prove OpenAI is somehow breaking antitrust law (a frankly implausible allegation). Musk is also revealing to some extent his feeling of betrayal when OpenAI abandoned its original vision of being a nonprofit with the Tesla CEO as its leader.

Perhaps the most interesting single email is former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever explaining the team’s qualms with Musk as leader of the company:

The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI [artificial general intelligence]. You stated that you don’t want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you’ve shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you.

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