Two days before the blockbuster trial pitting Elon Musk against the artificial intelligence company OpenAI began, Mr. Musk sent a text message to Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, asking if he was interested in settling the case.
When Mr. Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, Mr. Musk responded with a text attacking Mr. Brockman and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so be it,” he wrote, according to a document submitted at trial.
As the second week of the trial began Monday in a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif., it was unclear whether the public standing of Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman had changed at all. But Mr. Brockman spent most of the day on the witness stand defending his credibility against suggestions that his AI work was driven by greed.
Steven Molo, Mr. Musk’s chief lawyer, showed evidence that while Mr. Brockman never invested money in OpenAI, he now owns a stake worth about $30 billion.
“Do you believe that OpenAI has maintained the moral high ground by allowing you to have a stake of nearly $30 billion?” Mr. Molo asked.
The question of OpenAI’s motivation for building AI is central to Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against the company. They claim that Mr. Altman and others violated OpenAI’s founding agreement by putting commercial profit over its earlier promise to build safe AI for the good of humanity.
It is seeking $150 billion in damages and an injunction to remove Mr. Altman from OpenAI’s board. He also wants an order to untangle the for-profit company structure the company adopted last year.
Mr. Musk helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit organization in 2015, along with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and a group of AI researchers. They promised to share their technology freely with the rest of the world. But Mr Musk left the organization after less than three years following a power struggle. He later founded his own artificial intelligence startup xAI.
OpenAI’s legal team argued that Mr. Musk’s suit amounted to “sour grapes.”
Mr. Brockman calmly answered Mr. Mol’s questions, saying that OpenAI had not deviated from its original promise and that it was not primarily driven by money. “Solving the mission has always been my primary motivation,” he said in a blue suit with his hair cut short as always. “It remains so today.”
Mr. Molo showed an email Mr. Brockman sent to then-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in 2015 when he and others were working on what would become OpenAI. In an email, Mr. Brockman said he would donate $100,000 to the new organization. But he didn’t stop at the gift.
“Did you think it was morally bankrupt to say you were going to donate $100,000 and then not do it?” Mr. Molo asked. “No,” replied Mr. Brockman.
As Mr. Brockman testified, Mr. Altman listened intently, sitting behind OpenAI’s legal team. Just behind him, Mr. Brockman’s wife, Anna Brockman, sat on the edge of her seat, looking up at the bleachers.
Mr. Molo repeatedly quoted from a journal that Mr. Brockman kept in 2017 and 2018, when OpenAI’s co-founders realized that the nonprofit could not raise the huge amount of money it needed. They debated whether they should affiliate the lab with a for-profit company.
As Mr. Brockman and others began arguing with Mr. Musk over the future of the lab, he wrote: “This is the only chance to get out of Elon. Is he the ‘famous leader’ I would choose? We really have a chance to make this happen. What will get me to $1 billion financially?”
Mr. Molo repeatedly asked Mr. Brockman if this meant he was primarily interested in financial gain. Mr. Brockman said no, adding that he was trying to decide whether to continue building OpenAI with Mr. Musk or take it in a new direction.
“There was a fork in the road,” he said. “Do we accept Elon’s terms?”
Under questioning from Sarah Eddy, one of OpenAI’s lawyers, Mr Brockman said he had never misled Mr Musk about his intentions with OpenAI. He also said that when Mr. Musk left OpenAI, he told Mr. Brockman that he intended to create a new effort to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI, essentially a machine that can do everything a human brain can do.
Mr. Musk said that there has to be a serious competitor to Google in the AGI race, and that OpenAI won’t be able to do it. So he intended to build that competitor in Tesla, Mr. Brockman said.
“If you know, has Tesla ever been unprofitable?” asked Mrs. Eddy. “No,” said Mr. Brockman. He was due to return to the witness stand on Tuesday.
Before Mr. Brockman testified, the nine-person jury heard from Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in artificial intelligence security. Dr. Russell said the danger may emerge as commercial companies race to build AGI
“Whichever company develops AGI first will have a significant advantage, which would then increase compared to other companies,” said Dr. Russell. “This company – or a small handful of companies – can control most of the economic activity on the planet, and governments would become subservient to these companies.”
Mr Musk’s case was dealt a blow on Friday when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the case, struck down parts of the testimony of Jared Birchall, who runs Mr Musk’s family office. While being questioned by Mr. Musk’s legal team on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Birchall discussed last year’s $97.4 billion offer by Mr. Musk and others to buy OpenAI’s assets.
He said he was concerned that Mr. Altman was inappropriately taking away value from the nonprofit OpenAI when he and others created a new for-profit company in anticipation of a public offering. He accused Mr. Altman of “sitting on both sides of the negotiations” as those plans were made.
But Judge Gonzalez Rogers ordered that Mr. Birchall’s discussion of the offer be stricken from his testimony because he had no personal knowledge of Mr. Altman’s involvement in the negotiations.
Mr. Birchall acknowledged that he arranged the $97.4 billion offer with Marc Toberoff, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
