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In August 2017, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever gathered at Elon Musk\u2019s self-described \u201chaunted mansion,\u201d a 47-acre, $23 million estate in Hillsborough, south of San Francisco, to discuss the future of OpenAI. Actor Amber Heard, Musk\u2019s then-girlfriend, had served the group whiskey and then dashed off with a friend, Brockman, OpenAI\u2019s cofounder and president, testified in federal court during the trial for Musk v. Altman<\/em> on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Ahead of the meeting, Musk gifted Brockman and Sutskever, OpenAI\u2019s cofounder and former chief scientist, new Tesla Model 3 cars. \u201cIt felt like he was buttering us up,\u201d Brockman said on the stand. \u201cHe wanted us to feel indebted to him in some way.\u201d Sutskever tried to reciprocate for the occasion. The amateur artist presented Musk with a painting of a Tesla. Musk and the other cofounders wanted to establish a for-profit arm to entice investors to give them billions of dollars to pay for compute. But Musk also wanted control of the company, and Sutskever and Brockman objected to granting the Tesla CEO what they believed would be a \u201cdictatorship\u201d over the future of AI development. They proposed having shared control.<\/p>\n After several minutes of deliberation, Musk rejected their offer. \u201cHe stood up and stormed around the table,\u201d Brockman recalled. \u201cI actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me.\u201d Musk grabbed the painting, said he would cut off his funding of the nonprofit until Brockman and Sutskever quit, and left the room, according to Brockman\u2019s testimony. But that night, Musk\u2019s so-called chief of staff Shivon Zilis called Brockman and Sutskever \u201cto say it\u2019s not over,\u201d Brockman testified. \u201cThere were discussions of futures that included us.\u201d<\/p>\n The story of the heated negotiations emerged as Brockman wrapped up his testimony on Tuesday. To OpenAI, the events at the mansion are representative of repeated instances of erratic behavior by Musk that they believe undermine his arguments about the company. Musk contends his roughly $38 million in donations to OpenAI were abused by Brockman and others on the path to creating the $852 billion for-profit venture now known for services such as ChatGPT and Codex. Brockman, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and OpenAI deny any wrongdoing, and the jury in Musk v. Altman<\/em> could begin deliberating on an advisory ruling as soon as next week.<\/p>\n After Tuesday\u2019s testimony, William Savitt, an attorney for OpenAI, told reporters that what Brockman had learned in 2017 was how tough it can be to meet one\u2019s heroes. Brockman admired and respected Musk\u2019s business acumen, but his desire for control was absolute and concerning, Savitt said. Marc Toberoff, an attorney for Musk, told reporters that the true concern was Brockman\u2019s motivations for sharing control, with his desire for wealth having faced scrutiny in court a day earlier.<\/p>\n For his part, Brockman offered another story on Tuesday to underscore why he thought Musk was not up to the task of controlling an AI company. Brockman recalled then-OpenAI researcher Alec Radford showing Musk an early version of an AI chatbot that didn\u2019t generate responses that he liked. Musk \u201ckept saying this system is so stupid, that a kid on the internet could do better,\u201d Brockman said. Radford \u201cwas absolutely crushed\u201d and \u201cdemoralized\u201d to the point that he almost quit the AI research field altogether, Brockman said. Brockman and Sutskever \u201cspent a lot of time\u201d rebuilding his confidence. Musk\u2019s inability to see the potential in the early technology\u2014which eventually became the basis for ChatGPT\u2014made him unfit to control OpenAI, in Brockman\u2019s view. \u201cYou needed to dream a little bit,\u201d Brockman said. And Musk hadn\u2019t shown that he could.<\/p>\n Brockman said Tuesday that he, Sutskever, and Altman considered voting Musk off the OpenAI nonprofit board as negotiations with him about a for-profit sibling company dragged on for months. They would meet again over whiskey at Musk\u2019s mansion to discuss alternative funding options. There was agreement over what not to do, but little on what to do instead. But Brockman and Sutskever decided removing Musk felt \u201cwrong,\u201d Brockman testified. Eventually, Musk left on his own after deeming OpenAI was on a path of \u201ccertain failure,\u201d according to an email he wrote in early 2018.<\/p>\n Zilis, then an adviser to both OpenAI and Musk, kept him informed about developments at the AI venture in the years to come. \u201cShe was proxy Elon in some ways,\u201d Brockman said, referring to her as \u201ca friend\u201d who he had first met in 2012 or 2013.<\/p>\n But she eventually faced her own reckoning. Zilis joined OpenAI\u2019s board in 2020 and gave birth to Musk\u2019s twins in 2021. She told Brockman about the children. But he learned that Musk was the father only later through news articles. When Brockman confronted her, \u201cshe said it was via IVF and it was entirely platonic with Elon,\u201d he testified. Several board members wanted to remove Zilis from the board, but Brockman said that he and Sutskever convinced them to let her stay because she helped manage Musk\u2019s frustrations with OpenAI. \u201cWe actually had a board vote,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Zilis left the OpenAI board in 2023 after Musk launched the rival lab xAI.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t the only board member conflict OpenAI faced. Brockman said he supported the removal, or at least partial recusal, of Quora CEO Adam D\u2019Angelo from the board after the knowledge-sharing platform launched a chatbot in February 2023 that competed with OpenAI\u2019s recently released ChatGPT. D\u2019Angelo remains on the board today. Brockman also supported the removal of AI safety researcher Helen Toner from the board, he said, without specifying a reason. She resigned from her role in 2023 after she helped fire Altman in a move that backfired and quickly led to his reinstatement. D\u2019Angelo and Toner didn't immediately respond to WIRED\u2019s requests for comment on the testimony.<\/p>\n How the boardroom drama played out from Musk\u2019s side will likely get fresh airing on Wednesday. Zilis is expected to take the witness stand to advance his case. Musk\u2019s attorneys had asked her testimony not be livestreamed out of security concerns for her and the four children that she now shares with Musk. But US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found there was no \u201cspecific compelling concern\u201d that justifies \u201ccutting off the transmission.\u201d<\/p>\n This is an edition of<\/em> Maxwell Zeff\u2019s<\/em><\/a> Model Behavior newsletter<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. Read previous newsletters<\/em> here.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story In August 2017, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever gathered at Elon Musk\u2019s self-described \u201chaunted mansion,\u201d a 47-acre, $23 million estate in Hillsborough, south of San Francisco, to discuss the future of OpenAI. Actor Amber Heard, Musk\u2019s then-girlfriend, had served the group whiskey and then dashed off with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50040,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-50039","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Boardroom Fights<\/h2>\n