Elon Musk tried to poach Sam Altman to Tesla before the conflict over OpenAI - FT

Elon Musk in 2018 tried to poach OpenAI's founding team, including Sam Altman, to run a new AI lab inside Tesla and considered making the AI startup a subsidiary of the automaker, the Financial Times wrote, citing court filings between Musk and OpenAI on Wednesday, May 6.

According to documents filed the day before the trial, Musk in 2018 offered Sam Altman, and other executives of the startup OpenAI - Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutzkever - to head a new AI lab inside Tesla. Among the options discussed were appointing Altman to Tesla's board of directors or integrating OpenAI into the company's structure, the FT writes.

These details shed light on one of the key issues in the case, the newspaper notes. Musk claims that OpenAI co-founder Altman "stole" the organization," which was conceived as a non-profit, and turned it into a commercial structure. In response, OpenAI's lawyers claim that the Tesla CEO himself was not against commercialization of the AI company - provided that control would have remained with him.

Correspondence, text messages and witness testimony presented in court on May 6 showed that as early as late 2017, Musk was considering setting up his own AI lab inside Tesla because he had lost confidence in OpenAI's ability to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) - AI comparable to human intelligence in terms of understanding and ability to solve a wide range of tasks.

"OpenAI has little chance of success if I focus on TeslaAI," Musk wrote in a 2017 message to Siobhan Zilis, who has advised OpenAI since 2016 (serving in an advisory role) and served on the company's board of directors from 2020-2023. She is also the mother of Musk's four children, the FT notes. She is listed in the case file as one of the key intermediaries between Musk and the other OpenAI founders during a period central to the legal dispute.

The documents also show that in late 2017, Zilis conceptualized an event where she planned to announce that Tesla was creating a "world-class AI lab" to compete with Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence division and Meta's AI research arm (at the time, Facebook AI Research).

By early 2018, Siobhan Zilis had prepared nine possible scenarios for creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). Most of them were related to Tesla and involved, among other things, bringing in Sam Altman to lead the automaker's AI efforts. Another option involved trying to poach Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis for a similar position at Tesla, court documents show.

OpenAI discussed these scenarios among other ideas at the time - the company's founders were considering the optimal structure that would allow the company to raise enough capital to compete with Google while maintaining its nonprofit mission, the FT points out. In the end, OpenAI's leadership did not support these proposals. In an email in February 2018, Zilis wrote to Musk's then-chief of staff Sam Teller that the startup's founders thought Musk was an "incredible human being" but were concerned that he had "not explored AI/AGI deeply enough."

Musk left OpenAI's board of directors in early 2018, after which the company restructured and moved to a for-profit organization model with a philanthropic arm.

William Savitt, OpenAI's lead attorney in the Musk and Altman case, said Zilis' testimony confirms that Musk was willing to support OpenAI's commercial model on the condition that control of the company remained with him, the FT reports. After the May 6 court hearing, Savitt said Musk was trying to gain control of OpenAI's management and "integrate the company into Tesla." "When neither of those options appeared to be available to him, he simply walked away," the lawyer said.

The case file also includes correspondence from 2020 in which Sam Altman asked Zilis for advice on how to mend his relationship with Musk - two years after the conflict over the future of OpenAI. Zilis supported the idea of renewing the relationship, but warned that Musk might remind him again that OpenAI "should have chosen Tesla," the newspaper reports.

Musk alleges that Sam Altman, OpenAI and partner Microsoft have unjustly enriched themselves by turning the AI startup from a non-profit organization into a for-profit one. He is now demanding $150 billion in compensation, the return of OpenAI to non-profit status and the removal of Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman from management.

The trial comes as OpenAI confronts increasing competition in AI and prepares to go public. In early April, OpenAI completed a record $122 billion funding round at a company-wide valuation of $852 billion. It is expected it could go public as early as this year.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor