All the evidence unveiled so far in Musk v. Altman

The Musk v. Altman trial is underway, and that means exhibits, or the evidence to be presented in court, are being revealed piece by piece. So far, email exchanges, photos, and corporate documents are circulating from the earliest days of OpenAI — and from before the AI lab even had a name. Some high-level takeaways: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave OpenAI an in-demand supercomputer, Musk largely drafted OpenAI’s mission and heavily influenced its early structure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared to want to lean heavily on Y Combinator for early support for OpenAI, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever worried about Musk’s level of control over the company, and Musk highlighted the importance of a nonprofit with a mission of broadly beneficial AI.

All the evidence unveiled so far in Musk v. Altman

Emails going as far back as 2015 give a glimpse into the foundations of OpenAI and the early tensions at the company.

Musk’s buzzy lawsuit, which began its jury trial on Monday in a federal courtroom in California, names Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI investor Microsoft as defendants. It accuses them of breaching the company’s charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment, but ultimately, Musk’s lawsuit boils down to whether or not OpenAI deviated from its founding mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence — an often vaguely-defined term that denotes AI systems that equal or surpass human intelligence — benefits all of humanity. It’s the latest in a yearslong string of legal actions against OpenAI and its executives by Musk, who co-founded the AI lab alongside Altman and Brockman and was an early investor.

The lawsuit discovery process had already unearthed a lot of eyebrow-raising communications between AI industry executives, from emails between Altman and Sutskever to entries from Brockman’s own diary. Even texts between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Musk were made public. But that was all before the jury trial started — now, there’s even more set to be revealed.

Key Exhibits and Takeaways

June 2015: An email exchange between Altman and Musk shows Altman laying out a five-part plan for an AI lab. He suggested a governance board including himself, Musk, Bill Gates, and others. Altman noted that the technology would be owned by a foundation and used "for the good of the world."

October 2015: Altman suggested a $100 million commitment from Musk. Musk responded by emphasizing the criticality of governance, stating he didn't want to fund something that went in the "wrong direction."

November 2015: Musk suggested the name "Freemind" for the lab to contrast with DeepMind. He also offered massive amounts of Tesla sensor data for the lab's use and expressed his commitment to the project as a way to mitigate existential threats from AI.

December 2015: Musk and Altman drafted the opening paragraphs of OpenAI’s mission and press release, focusing on attracting top talent to the new venture.