Update: I have now cross-referenced every single email for accuracy, cleaned up and clarified the thread structure, and added subject lines and date stamps wherever they were available. I now feel comfortable with people quoting anything in here without checking the original source (unless you are trying to understand the exact thread structure of who was CC'd and when, which was a bit harder to compress into a linear format).
(For anyone curious, the AI transcription and compilation made one single error, which is that it fixed a typo in one of Sam's messages from "We did this is a way" to "We did this in a way". Honestly, my guess is any non-AI effort would have had a substantially higher error rate, which was a small update for me on the reliability of AI for something like this, and also makes the handwringing about whether it is OK post something like this feel kind of dumb. It also accidentally omitted one email with a weird thread structure.)
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1Thanks for not only doing this but noting the accuracy of the unchecked transcript, it's always hard work to build a mental model of how good LLM tools are at what stuff.
I've read leaked emails from people in similar situations before that made a couple things apparent:
- Power talk happens on the phone for paper trail reasons
- There is no meeting where an actual rational discussion of considerations and theories of change happens, everything really is people flying by the seat of their pants even at highest level. Talk of ethics usually just gets you excluded from the power talk.
I concluded this from the lack of any such talk in meeting minutes that are recorded, and the lack of any reference to such considerations in 'previous conversations' or requests to set up such meetings.
There is no meeting where an actual rational discussion of considerations and theories of change happens, everything really is people flying by the seat of their pants even at highest level. Talk of ethics usually just gets you excluded from the power talk.
This seems overstated. E.g. Musk and Altman both read Superintelligence, and they both met Bostrom at least once in 2015. Sam published reflective blog posts on AGI in 2015, and it's clear that the OpenAI founders had lengthy, reflective discussions from the YC Research days onwards.
1I sometimes feel we spend too much time on philosophy and communication in the x-risk community. But thinking through the OpenAI drama suggests that it's crucial.
Now the world is in more and more immediate danger because a couple of smart guys couldn't get their philosophy or their communication right-enough, and didn't spend the time necessary to clarify. Instead Musk followed his combative and entrepreneurial instincts. The result was dramatically heating up the race for AGI, which previously had no real competition to DeepMind.
OpenAI wouldn't have launched without Musk's support, and he gave it because he was afraid of Larry Page being in charge of a successful Google AGI effort.
From Musk's interview with Tucker Carlson (automated transcript, sorry!):
...I mean the the reason open AI exists at all is that um Larry Paige and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in pal Alto and I would talk to him late into the night about uh AI safety and at least my (01:12) perception was that Larry was not taking uh AI safety seriously enough um and um what did he say about it he really seemed to be um one want want sort of digital super intelligence basically digital God if you
1I agree that it sounds somewhat premature to write off Larry Page based on attitudes he had a long time ago, when AGI seemed more abstract and far away, and then not seek/try communication with him again later on. If that were Musk's true and only reason for founding OpenAI, then I agree that this was a communication fuckup.
However, my best guess is that this story about Page was interchangeable with a number of alternative plausible criticisms of his competition on building AGI that Musk would likely have come up with in nearby worlds. People like Musk (and Altman too) tend to have a desire to do the most important thing and the belief that they can do this thing a lot better than anyone else. On that assumption, it's not too surprising that Musk found a reason for having to step in and build AGI himself. In fact, on this view, we should expect to see surprisingly little sincere exploration of "joining someone else's project to improve it" solutions.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad attitude. Sometimes people who think this way are right in the specific situation. It just means that we see the following patterns a lot:
- Ambitious people start their own thing rather than join s
I totally agree. And I also think that all involved are quite serious when they say they care about the outcomes for all of humanity. So I think in this case history turned on a knife edge; Musk would've at least not done this much harm had he and Page had clearer thinking and clearer communication, possibly just by a little bit.
But I do agree that there's some motivated reasoning happening there, too. In support of your point that Musk might find an excuse to do what he emotionally wanted to anyway (become humanity's savior and perhaps emperor for eternity): Musk did also express concern about DeepMind making Hassabis the effective emperor of humanity, which seems much stranger - Hassabis' values appear to be quite standard humanist ones, so you'd think having him in charge of a project with the clear lead would be a best-case scenario for anything other than being in charge yourself. So yes, I do think Musk, Altman, and people like them also have some powerful emotional drives toward doing grand things themselves.
It's a mix of motivations, noble and selfish, conscious and unconscious. That's true of all of us all the time, but it becomes particularly salient and worth analyzing when the future hangs in the balance.
I think you're assuming a sharp line between sincere ethics motivations and self-interest. In my view, that doesn't usually exist. People are prone to believe things that suit their self-interest. That motivated reasoning is the biggest problem with public discourse. People aren't lying, they're just confused. I think Musk definitely and even probably Altman believe they're doing the best thing for humanity - they're just confused and not taking the effort to get un-confused.
I'm really sorry all of that happened to you. Capitalism is a harsh system, and humans are harsh beings when we're competing. And confused beings, even when we're trying not to be harsh. I didn't have time to go through your whole story, but I fully believe you were wronged.
I think most villains are the heroes of their own stories. Some of us are more genuinely altruistic than others - but we're all confused in our own favor to one degree or another.
So reducing confusion while playing to everyone's desire to be a hero is one route to survival.
This NYT article (archive.is link) (reliability and source unknown) corroborates Musk's perspective:
As the discussion stretched into the chilly hours, it grew intense, and some of the more than 30 partyers gathered closer to listen. Mr. Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. Humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines, he said. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.
If that happens, Mr. Musk said, we’re doomed. The machines will destroy humanity.
With a rasp of frustration, Mr. Page insisted his utopia should be pursued. Finally he called Mr. Musk a “specieist,” a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future.
That insult, Mr. Musk said later, was “the last straw.”
And this article from Business Insider also contains this context:
...Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, also wrote about the fight but dated it to 2013 in his recent biography of Musk. Isaacson wrote that Musk said to Page at the time, "Well, yes, I am pro-human, I fucking like humanity, dude."
Musk's birthday bash was not the on
1This is a great question. I think what we can do is spread good logic about AGI risks. That is tricky. Outside of the LW audience, getting the emotional resonance right is more important than being logically correct. And that's a whole different skill.
My impression is that Yudkowsky has harmed public epistemics in his podcast appearances by saying things forcefully and with rather poor spoken communication skills for novice audiences. Leahy is better but may also be making things worse by occasionally losing his cool and coming off as a bit of an asshole. People then associate the whole idea of AI safety with "these guys who talk down to us and seem mean and angry". Then motivated reasoning kicks in and they're oriented to trying to prove them wrong instead of discover the truth.
That doesn't mean logical arguments don't count with normies; they do. But the logic comes into play lots more when you're not counted as dangerous or an enemy by emotional processing.
So just repeating the basic arguments of "something smarter will treat us like we do animals by default" and "surely we all want the things we love now to survive AGI" while also being studiously nice is my best guess at the r...
4
1
1A few quotes that stood out to me:
Greg:
I hope for us to enter the field as a neutral group, looking to collaborate widely and shift the dialog towards being about humanity winning rather than any particular group or company.
Greg and Ilya (to Elon):
The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.
Greg and Ilya (to Altman):
But we haven't been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process, because we don't understand your cost function.
We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it's hard to really understand what's driving it.
Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals? How has your thought process changed over time?
2Also this:
From Altman: [...] Admitted that he lost a lot of trust with Greg and Ilya through this process. Felt their messaging was inconsistent and felt childish at times. [...] Sam was bothered by how much Greg and Ilya keep the whole team in the loop with happenings as the process unfolded. Felt like it distracted the team.
Apparently airing such concerns is "childish" and should only be done behind closed doors, otherwise it "distracts the team", hm.
I thought the part you quoted was quite concerning, also in the context of what comes afterwards:
Hiatus: Sam told Greg and Ilya he needs to step away for 10 days to think. Needs to figure out how much he can trust them and how much he wants to work with them. Said he will come back after that and figure out how much time he wants to spend.
Sure, the email by Sutskever and Brockman gave some nonviolent communication vibes and maybe it isn't "the professional thing" to air one's feelings and perceived mistakes like that, but they seemed genuine in what they wrote and they raised incredibly important concerns that are difficult in nature to bring up. Also, with hindsight especially, it seems like they had valid reasons to be concerned about Altman's power-seeking tendencies!
When someone expresses legitimate-given-the-situation concerns about your alignment and your reaction is to basically gaslight them into thinking they did something wrong for finding it hard to trust you, and then you make it seem like you are the poor victim who needs 10 days off of work to figure out whether you can still trust them, that feels messed up! (It's also a bit hypocritical because the whole "I ne...
I've turned this into a full cast recording with ElevenLabs, with individual voices for all the players:
https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/openai-email-archives-from-musk-v
"Temptations are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come." Or to translate from New Testament into something describing the current situation: you should accept that AI will come, but you shouldn't be the one who hastens its coming.
Yes, this approach sounds very simple and naive. The people in this email exchange rejected it and went for a more sophisticated one: join the arms race and try to steer it. By now we see that these ultra-smart and ultra-rich people made things much worse than if they'd followed the "do no evil" approach. If this doesn't prove the "do no evil" approach, I'm not sure what will.
It seems like Musk in 2018 dramatically underestimated the ability of OpenAI to compete with Google in the medium term.
Yes, it sounds that he put too much stock into Andrej's paper-counting argument, and then even left the board because he didn't want to be associated with a failing company?
1These emails leave me wondering: Greg and Ilya were initially on the same team, did Greg later side with Sam because Ilya betrayed them both, or did Greg and Sam naturally grow closer over time?
Regardless of what happened, Ilya leaving OpenAI was a huge loss - he seemed to genuinely believe in the original mission, unlike Sam and Elon who seemed to be at least partly motivated by personal ambition and ego.
Fixed! That specific response had a very weird thread structure, so makes sense the AI I used got confused. Plausible something else is still missing, though I think I've now read through all the original PDFs and didn't see anything new.
1No one has picked up the true origin of OpenAI yet. If you dig in to it, you will see some revealing declarations and emails. The whole idea for a non-profit open AI organization and the commitment to share the benefits with humanity by the name of Open AI came through theft.
(1) Bloomberg tells part of the story: https://archive.ph/1wEOX
(2) The 100-page lawsuit of Guy Ravine vs Sam Altman and Greg Brockman tells more of the story (link from here): https://guyravine.com/
(3) They also filed a narrower complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.416410/gov.uscourts.cand.416410.103.0.pdf
does anyone have other examples of documents like this, records of communications that shaped the world? it feels somewhat educational, seeing what it looks like when powerful people are doing the things that make them powerful.
Greg Brockman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Altman) - Nov 22, 2015 6:11 PM
In response to this follow up, Elon first mentions that $100M is not enough. And that he is encouraging OpenAI to raise more money on their own and promises to increase the amount they can raise to $1B.
I found this on the OpenAI blog: https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
There is a couple of other messages there. With the vibe that OpenAI team felt a betrayal from Elon.
...We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then to
So there was an explicit emphasis on alignment to the individual (rather than alignment to society, or the aggregate sum of wills). Concerning. The approach of just giving every human an exclusively loyal servant doesn't necessarily lead to good collective outcomes, it can result in coordination problems (example: naive implementations of cognitive privacy that allow sadists to conduct torture simulations without having to compensate the anti-sadist human majority) and it leaves open the possibility for power concentration to immediately return.
Even if you...
I used AI assistance to generate this, which might have introduced errors.
Resulting in a strong downvote and, honestly, outright anger on my part.
Check the original source to make sure it's accurate before you quote it: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69013420/musk-v-altman/ [1]
If other people have to check it before they quote it, why is it OK for you not to check it before you post it?
1I seem to have gotten a "Why?" on this.
The reason is that checking things yourself is a really, really basic, essential standard of discourse[1]. Errors propagate, and the only way to avoid them propagating is not to propagate them.
If this was created using some standard LLM UI, it would have come with some boilerplate "don't use this without checking it" warning[2]. But it was used without checking it... with another "don't use without checking" warning. By whatever logic allows that, the next person should be able to use the material, including quoting or summarizing it, without checking either, so long as they include their own warning. The warnings should be able to keep propagating forever.
... but the real consequences of that are a game of telphone:
- An error can get propagated until somebody forgets the warning, or just plain doesn't feel like including the warning, and then you have false claims of fact circulating with no warning at all. Or the warning deteriorates into "sources claim that", or "there are rumors that", or something equally vague that can't be checked.
- Even if the warning doesn't get lost or removed, tracing back to sources gets harder with each step in the
FWIW, my best guess is the document contains fewer errors than having a human copy-paste things and stitch it together. The errors have a different nature to them, and so it makes sense to flag them, but like, I started out with copy-pasting and OCR, and that did not actually have an overall lower error rate.
OP did the work to collect these emails and put them into a post. When people do work for you, you shouldn't punish them by giving them even more work.
The technology would be owned by the foundation and used “for the good of the world”, and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI.
I think the answer is almost definitely not.
Interesting that the very first thing he discusses is whether AI can be stopped
From a historical perspective this is an excellent treasure cache. Truly when you are the cutting edge of something ideas, relationships, personality, and economics all truly come together to drive history.
A much smaller subset was also published here, but does include documents:
We had originally just wanted space cycles donated
I think this is a mistake, and it should be "spare cycles" instead.
We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, not be concentrated in the hands of the few.
This is so wrong. Kindly and discreetly I must assert: we're overly and unknowingly (or willfully) commodified and as a result incapable of discerning our "free" will from advertising, social, political. Perhaps they didn't know it.
As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, a substantial number of emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman have been released.
I have found reading through these really valuable, and I haven't found an online source that compiles all of them in an easy to read format. So I made one.
I used some AI assistance to generate this originally, and then went meticulously through each email and checked them for differences. I am pretty sure I caught any differences, but I might have missed some very small typographical errors.[1] The original source is: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69013420/musk-v-altman/
Subject: question
Sam Altman to Elon Musk - May 25, 2015 9:10 PM
Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI.
I think the answer is almost definitely not.
If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.
Any thoughts on whether it would be good for YC to start a Manhattan Project for AI? My sense is we could get many of the top ~50 to work on it, and we could structure it so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit but the people working on it get startup-like compensation if it works. Obviously we'd comply with/aggressively support all regulation.
Sam
Elon Musk to Sam Altman - May 25, 2015 11:09 PM
Probably worth a conversation
Sam Altman to Elon Musk - Jun 24, 2015 10:24 AM
The mission would be to create the first general AI and use it for individual empowerment—ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest. More generally, safety should be a first-class requirement.
I think we’d ideally start with a group of 7-10 people, and plan to expand from there. We have a nice extra building in Mountain View they can have.
I think for a governance structure, we should start with 5 people and I’d propose you, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, Dustin Moskovitz, and me. The technology would be owned by the foundation and used “for the good of the world”, and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide. The researchers would have significant financial upside but it would be uncorrelated to what they build, which should eliminate some of the conflict (we’ll pay them a competitive salary and give them YC equity for the upside). We’d have an ongoing conversation about what work should be open-sourced and what shouldn’t. At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board.
Will you be involved somehow in addition to just governance? I think that would be really helpful for getting work pointed in the right direction getting the best people to be part of it. Ideally you’d come by and talk to them about progress once a month or whatever. We generically call people involved in some limited way in YC “part-time partners” (we do that with Peter Thiel for example, though at this point he’s very involved) but we could call it whatever you want. Even if you can’t really spend time on it but can be publicly supportive, that would still probably be really helpful for recruiting.
I think the right plan with the regulation letter is to wait for this to get going and then I can just release it with a message like “now that we are doing this, I’ve been thinking a lot about what sort of constraints the world needs for safefy.” I’m happy to leave you off as a signatory. I also suspect that after it’s out more people will be willing to get behind it.
Sam
Elon Musk to Sam Altman - Jun 24, 2015 11:05 PM
Agree on all
Subject: follow up from call
Greg Brockman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Altman) - Nov 22, 2015 6:11 PM
Hey Elon,
Nice chatting earlier.
As I mentioned on the phone, here's the latest early draft of the blog post: https://quip.com/6YnqA26RJgKr. (Sam, Ilya, and I are thinking about new names; would love any input from you.)
Obviously, there's a lot of other detail to change too, but I'm curious what you think of that kind of messaging. I don't want to pull any punches, and would feel comfortable broadcasting a stronger message if it feels right. I think it's mostly important that our messaging appeals to the research community (or at least the subset we want to hire). I hope for us to enter the field as a neutral group, looking to collaborate widely and shift the dialog towards being about humanity winning rather than any particular group or company. (I think that's the best way to bootstrap ourselves into being a leading research institution.)
I've attached the offer letter template we've been using, with a salary of $175k. Here's the email template I've been sending people:
- gdb
Subject: Draft opening paragraphs
Elon Musk to Sam Altman - Dec 8, 2015 9:29 AM
It is super important to get the opening summary section right. This will be what everyone reads and what the press mostly quotes. The whole point of this release is to attract top talent. Not sure Greg totally gets that.
---- OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company with the goal of advancing digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unencumbered by an obligation to generate financial returns.
The underlying philosophy of our company is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity.
The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right. We hope this is what matters most to the best in the field.
Sam Altman to Elon Musk - Dec 8, 2015 10:34 AM
how is this?
__
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company with the goal of advancing digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unencumbered by an obligation to generate financial returns.
Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact and disseminating AI technology as broadly as possible. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, not be concentrated in the hands of the few.
The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right. We hope this is what matters most to the best in the field.
Subject: just got word...
Sam Altman to Elon Musk - Dec 11, 2015 11:30AM
that deepmind is going to give everyone in openAI massive counteroffers tomorrow to try to kill it.
do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year? i think they're all motivated by the mission here but it would be a good signal to everyone we are going to take care of them over time.
sounds like deepmind is planning to go to war over this, they've been literally cornering people at NIPS.
Elon Musk to Sam Altman - Dec 11, 2015
Has Ilya come back with a solid yes?
If anyone seems at all uncertain, I’m happy to call them personally too. Have told Emma this is my absolute top priority 24/7.
Sam Altman to Elon Musk - Dec 11, 2015 12:15 PM
yes committed committed. just gave his word.
Elon Musk to Sam Altman - Dec 11, 2015 12:32 PM
awesome
Sam Altman to Elon Musk - Dec 11, 2015 12:35 PM
everyone feels great, saying stuff like "bring on the deepmind offers, they unfortunately dont have 'do the right thing' on their side"
news out at 130 pm pst
Subject: The OpenAI Company
Elon Musk to: Ilya Sutskever, Pamela Vagata, Vicki Cheung, Diederik Kingma, Andrej Karpathy, John D. Schulman, Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman, (cc:Sam Altman) - Dec 11, 2015 4:41 PM
Congratulations on a great beginning!
We are outmanned and outgunned by a ridiculous margin by organizations you know well, but we have right on our side and that counts for a lot. I like the odds.
Our most important consideration is recruitment of the best people. The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it. If we are able to attract the most talented people over time and our direction is correctly aligned, then OpenAI will prevail.
To this end, please give a lot of thought to who should join. If I can be helpful with recruitment or anything else, I am at your disposal. I would recommend paying close attention to people who haven't completed their grad or even undergrad, but are obviously brilliant. Better to have them join before they achieve a breakthrough.
Looking forward to working together,
Elon
Subject: compensation framework
Greg Brockman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Altman) - Feb 21, 2016 11:34 AM
Hi all,
We're currently doing our first round of full-time offers post-founding. It's obviously super important to get these right, as the implications are very long-term. I don't yet feel comfortable making decisions here on my own, and would love any guidance.
Here's what we're currently doing:
Founding team: $275k salary + 25bps of YC stock
- Also have option of switching permanently to $125k annual bonus or equivalent in YC or SpaceX stock. I don't know if anyone's taken us up on this.
New offers: $175k annual salary + $125k annual bonus || equivalent in YC or SpaceX stock. Bonus is subject to performance review, where you may get 0% or significantly greater than 100%.
Special cases: gdb + Ilya + Trevor
The plan is to keep a mostly flat salary, and use the bonus multiple as a way to reward strong performers.
Some notes:
- We use a 20% annualized discount for the 8 years until the stock becomes liquid, the $125k bonus equates to 12bps in YC. So the terminal value is more like $750k. This number sounds a lot more impressive, though obviously it's hard to value exactly.
- The founding team was initially offered $175k each. The day after the lab launched, we proactively increased everyone's salary by $100k, telling them that we are financially committed to them as the lab becomes successful, and asking for a personal promise to ignore all counteroffers and trust we'll take care of them.
- We're currently interviewing Ian Goodfellow from Brain, who is one of the top 2 scientists in the field we don't have (the other being Alex Graves, who is a DeepMind loyalist). He's the best person on Brain, so Google will fight for him. We're grandfathering him into the founding team offer.
Some salary datapoints:
- John was offered $250k all-in annualized at DeepMind, thought he could negotiate to $300k easily.
- Wojciech was verbally offered ~$1.25M/year at FAIR (no concrete letter though)
- Andrew Tulloch is getting $800k/year at FB. (A lot is stock which is vesting.)
- Ian Goodfellow is currently getting $165k cash + $600k stock/year at Google.
- Apple is a bit desperate and offering people $550k cash (plus stock, presumably). I don't think anyone good is saying yes.
Two concrete candidates that are on my mind:
- Andrew is very close to saying yes. However, he's concerned about taking such a large paycut.
- Ian has stated he's not primarily concerned with money, but the Bay Area is expensive / wants to make sure he can buy a house. I don't know what will happen if/when Google starts throwing around the numbers they threw at Ilya.
My immediate questions:
1. I expect Andrew will try to negotiate up. Should we stick to his offer, and tell him to only join if he's excited enough to take that kind of paycut (and that others have left more behind)?
2. Ian will be interviewing + (I'm sure) getting an offer on Wednesday. Should we consider his offer final, or be willing to slide depending on what Google offers?
3. Depending on the answers to 1 + 2, I'm wondering if this flat strategy makes sense. If we keep it, I feel we'll have to really sell people on the bonus multiplier. Maybe one option would be using a signing bonus as a lever to get people to sign?
4. Very secondary, but our intern comp is also below market: $9k/mo. (FB offers $9k + free housing, Google offers like $11k/mo all-in.) Comp is much less important to interns than to FT people, since the experience is primary. But I think we may have lost a candidate who was on the edge to this. Given the dollar/hour is so much lower than for FT, should we consider increasing the amount?
I'm happy to chat about this at any time.
- gdb
Elon Musk to Greg Brockman, (cc: Sam Altman) - Feb 22, 2016 12:09 AM
We need to do what it takes to get the top talent. Let's go higher. If, at some point, we need to revisit what existing people are getting paid, that's fine.
Either we get the best people in the world or we will get whipped by Deepmind.
Whatever it takes to bring on ace talent is fine by me.
Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress. If they win, it will be really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy. They are obviously making major progress and well they should, given the talent level over there.
Greg Brockman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Altman) - Feb 22, 2016 12:21 AM
Read you loud and clear. Sounds like a plan. Will plan to continue working with sama on specifics, but let me know if you'd like to be kept in the loop.
- gdb
Subject: wired article
Greg Brockman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Mar 21, 2016 12:53 AM
Hi Elon,
I was interviewed for a Wired article on OpenAI, and the fact checker sent me some questions. Wanted to sync with you on two in particular to make sure they sound reasonable / aligned with what what you'd say:
At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world. In the short term, we believe the best approach is giving away our research. But longer-term, this might not be the best approach: for example, it might be better not to immediately share a potentially dangerous technology. In all cases, we will be giving away all the benefits of all of our research, and want those to accrue to the world rather than any one institution.
We believe that using AI to extend individual human wills is the most promising path to ensuring AI remains beneficial. This is appealing because if there are many agents with about the same capabilities they could keep any one bad actor in check. But I wouldn't claim we have all the answers: instead, we're building an organization that can both seek those answers, and take the best possible action regardless of what the answer turns out to be.
Thanks!
- gdb
Elon Musk to Greg Brockman, (cc: Sam Teller) - Mar 21, 2016 6:53:47 AM
Sounds good
Subject: Re: Maureen Dowd
Sam Teller received this email from Alex Thompson and forwards it to Elon Musk - April 27, 2016 7:25 AM
Hi Sam,
I hope you are having a great day and I apologize for interrupting it with another question. Maureen wanted to see if Mr. Musk had any reaction to some of Mr. Zuckerberg's public comments since their interview. In particular, his labelling of Mr. Musk as "hysterical" for his A.I. fears and lectured those who "fearmonger" about the dangers of A.I.. I have included more details below of Mr. Zuckerberg's comments.
Asked in Germany recently about Musk’s forebodings, Zuckerberg called them “hysterical’’ and praised A.I. breakthroughs, including one system he claims can make cancer diagnoses for skin lesions on a mobile phone with the accuracy of “the best dermatologist.’’
“Unless we really mess something up,’’ he said, the machines will always be subservient, not “superhuman.”
“I think we can build A.I. so it works for us and helps us...Some people fearmonger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems farfetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.’’ Or as he put his philosophy at an April Facebook developers conference: “Choose hope over fear.’’
--
Alex Thompson
The New York Times
Elon Musk to Sam Teller - Apr 27, 2016 12:24 PM
History unequivocally illustrates that a powerful technology is a double-edged sword. It would be foolish to assume that AI, arguably the most powerful of all technologies, only has a single edge.
The recent example of Microsoft's AI chatbot shows how quickly it can turn incredibly negative. The wise course of action is to approach the advent of AI with caution and ensure that its power is widely distributed and not controlled by any one company or person.
That is why we created OpenAI.
Subject: MSFT hosting deal
Sam Altman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 16, 2016 2:37 PM
Here are the MSFT terms. $60MM of compute for $10MM, and input from us on what they deploy in the cloud. LMK if you have any feedback.
Sam
Microsoft/OpenAI Terms[2]
Microsoft and OpenAI: Accelerate the development of deep learning on Azure and CNTK
This non-binding term sheet (“Term Sheet”) between Microsoft Corporation (“Microsoft”) and OpenAI (“OpenAI”) sets forth the terms for a potential business relationship between the parties. This Term Sheet is intended to form a basis of discussion and does not state all matters upon which agreement must be reached before executing a legally binding commercial agreement (“Commercial Agreement”). The existence and terms of this Term Sheet, and all discussions related thereto or to a Commercial Agreement, are Confidential Information as defined and governed by the Non-Disclosure Agreement between the parties dated 17 March, 2016 (“NDA”). Except for the binding nature of the foregoing confidentiality obligations, this Term Sheet is non-binding.
Deal Purpose
OpenAI is focused on deep learning in such a way as to benefit humanity. Microsoft and OpenAI desire to partner to enable the acceleration of deep learning on Microsoft Azure. Towards this goal, Microsoft will provide OpenAI with Azure compute capabilities at a favorable price that would enable OpenAI to continue their mission effectively.
Deal Business Goal
Microsoft
· Accelerate deep learning environment on Azure
· Attract a net new audience of next generation developers
· Joint PR and evangelism of deep learning on Azure
OpenAI
· Deeply discounted GPU compute offering over the deal term (3 years) for use in their nonprofit research: $60m of Compute for $10m
· Joint PR and evangelism of OpenAI on Azure
Parties (Legal entities) Microsoft OpenAI
Proposed Deal Execution Date September 19, 2016
Proposed Deal Commencement Date Same as deal execution date
Legal Authoring Microsoft holds the pen.
Deal Term 3 years
Engineering Terms
- Compute: Microsoft will provide OpenAI GPU core hours of compute at the agreed upon price for OpenAI’s workloads to run in Azure.
- Geographic Location: Geographic location decisions will be at Microsoft discretion depending on capacity and availability. Microsoft will also be responsible for sharing the deployment strategy and timelines with OpenAI.
- SLA: For all Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same availability set, Microsoft guarantee OpenAI will have virtual machine connectivity to at least one instance at least 99.95% of the time. Microsoft will be held accountable to the SLA’s provided on https://azure.microsoft.com/enus/support/legal/sla/virtual-machines/v1_2/
- Evaluation, Evangelization, and Usage of CNTK v2, Azure Batch and HD-Insight: OpenAI will evaluate CNTK v2, Azure Batch, and HDInsight for their research, provide feedback on how Microsoft can improve these products. OpenAI will work with Microsoft to evangelize these products to their research and developer ecosystems, and evangelize Microsoft Azure as their preferred public cloud provider. At their sole discretion, and as it makes sense for their research, OpenAI will adopt these products
- Ramp: Microsoft and OpenAI will work together for creating a ramp plan that balances capacity per clusters. The initial timeline for ramp is a minimum of 30 days that will be augmented by Microsoft’s capacity expansion plans in the coming months.
- Capacity: OpenAI will be given an allocation of capacity in the preview cluster (located in US South Central) for short term requirements and Microsoft will provide quota access to the subsequent K80 GPU clusters that go live in the 4th quarter of 2016 with the intention of more capacity in Q1 2017 (calendar year).
Financial Terms
· Financial Terms: Microsoft will offer $60m worth of List Compute (including GPU) at a deep discount which results in a price of $10m to be paid by OpenAI over the course of the deal. In the event OpenAI consumes less than $10m worth of Azure compute, OpenAI will be responsible for paying the balance between the used amount and $10m at the end of the deal term to Microsoft.
Marketing & PR Terms
Microsoft and OpenAI commit to jointly evangelizing deep learning capabilities on Azure as agreed upon by both parties.
- Ignite: Announce the partnership at Microsoft’s Ignite event with executives (Sam Altman from OpenAI and Satya Nadella from Microsoft) from both parties inaugurating the collaboration
- PR: Microsoft and OpenAI will work together to issue a joint press release about the partnership including any materials such as blog posts and videos.
Elon Musk to Sam Altman, (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 16, 2016 3:10 PM
This actually made me feel nauseous. It sucks and is exactly what I would expect from them.
Let’s just say that we are willing to have Microsoft donate spare computing time to OpenAI and have that be known, but we want do any contract or agree to “evangelize”. They can turn us off at any time and we can leave at any time.
Sam Altman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 16, 2016 3:33 PM
I had the same reaction after reading that section and they've already agreed to drop.
We had originally just wanted space cycles donated but the team wanted more certainty that capacity will be available. But I'll work with MSFT to make sure there are no strings attached
Elon Musk to Sam Altman, (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 16, 2016
We should just do this low key. No certainty either way. No contract.
Sam Altman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 16, 2016 6:45 PM
ok will see how much $ I can get in that direction.
Sam Teller to Elon Musk - Sep 20, 2016 8:05 PM
Microsoft is now willing to do the agreement for a full $50m with “good faith effort at OpenAI's sole discretion” and full mutual termination rights at any time. No evangelizing. No strings attached. No looking like lame Microsoft marketing pawns. Ok to move ahead?
Elon Musk to Sam Teller - Sep 21, 2016 12:09 AM
Fine by me if they don't use this in active messaging. Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch.
Subject: biweekly update
Ilya Sutskever to Elon Musk, Greg Brockman - Jul 20, 2017 1:56 PM
- The robot hand can now solve a Rubik's cube in simulation:
- 1v1 bot is no longer exploitable
- Athletic competitive robots:
- Released an adversarial example that fools a camera from all angles simultaneously:
- DeepMind's directly used one of our algorithms to produce their parkour results:
- Coming up:
Subject: OpenAI notes
Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Aug 28, 2017 12:01 AM
Elon,
As I'd mentioned, Greg had asked to talk through a few things this weekend. Ilya ended up joining, and they pretty much just shared all of what they are still trying to think through. This is the distillation of that random walk of a conversation... came down to 7 unanswered questions with their commentary below. Please note that I'm not advocating for any of this, just structuring and sharing the information I heard.
1. Short-term control structure?
-Is the requirement for absolute control? They wonder if there is a scenario where there could be some sort of creative overrule provision if literally everyone else disagreed on direction (not just the three of them, but perhaps a broader board)?
2. Duration of control and transition?
-*The* non-negotiable seems to be an ironclad agreement to not have any one person have absolute control of AGI if it's created. Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period.
3. Time spent?
-How much time does Elon want to spend on this, and how much time can he actually afford to spend on this? In what timeframe? Is this an hour a week, ten hours a week, something in between?
4. What to do with time spent?
-They don't really know how he prefers to spend time at his other companies and how he'd want to spend his time on this. Greg and Ilya are confident they could build out SW / ML side of things pretty well. They are not confident on the hardware front. They seemed hopeful Elon could spend some time on that since that's where they are weak, but did want his help in all domains he was interested in.
5. Ratio of time spent to amount of control?
-They are cool with less time / less control, more time / more control, but not less time / more control. Their fear is that there won't be enough time to discuss relevant contextual information to make correct decisions if too little time is spent.
6. Equity split?
-Greg still instinctually anchored on equal split. I personally disagree with him on that instinct and he asked for and was receptive to hearing other things he could use to recalibrate his mental model.
-Greg noted that Ilya in some ways has contributed millions by leaving his earning potential on the table at Google.
-One concern they had was the proposed employee pool was too small.
7. Capitalization strategy?
-Their instinct is to raise much more than $100M out of the gate. They are of the opinion that the datacenter they need alone would cost that so they feel more comfortable raising more.
Takeaways:
Unsure if any of this is amenable but just from listening to all of the data points they threw out, the following would satisfy their current sticky points:
-Spending 5-10 hours a week with near full control, or spend less time and have less control.
-Having a creative short-term override just for extreme scenarios that was not just Greg / Sam / Ilya.
-An ironclad 2-3yr minority control agreement, regardless of the fates of Greg / Sam / Ilya.
-$200M-$1B initial raise.
-Greg and Ilya's stakes end up higher than 1/10 of Elon's but not significantly (this remains the most ambiguous).
-Increasing employee pool.
Elon Musk to Shivon Zilis, (cc: Sam Teller) - Aug 28, 2017 12:08 AM
This is very annoying. Please encourage them to go start a company. I've had enough.
Subject: Honest Thoughts
Ilya Sutskever to Elon Musk, Sam Altman, (cc: Greg Brockman, Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis) - Sep 20, 2017 2:08 PM
Elon, Sam,
This process has been the highest stakes conversation that Greg and I have ever participated in, and if the project succeeds, it'll turn out to have been the highest stakes conversation the world has seen. It's also been a deeply personal conversation for all of us.
Yesterday while we were considering making our final commitment given the non-solicit agreement, we realized we'd made a mistake. We have several important concerns that we haven't raised with either of you. We didn't raise them because we were afraid to: we were afraid of harming the relationship, having you think less of us, or losing you as partners.
There is some chance that our concerns will prove to be unresolvable. We really hope it's not the case, but we know we will fail for sure if we don't all discuss them now. And we have hope that we can work through them and all continue working together.
Elon:
We really want to work with you. We believe that if we join forces, our chance of success in the mission is the greatest. Our upside is the highest. There is no doubt about that. Our desire to work with you is so great that we are happy to give up on the equity, personal control, make ourselves easily firable — whatever it takes to work with you.
But we realized that we were careless in our thinking about the implications of control for the world. Because it seemed so hubristic, we have not been seriously considering the implications of success.
The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. 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.
As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge, even though you also stated that you hate being CEO and would much rather not be CEO.
Thus, we are concerned that as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI, you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary. We disagree with your statement that our ability to leave is our greatest power, because once the company is actually on track to AGI, the company will be much more important than any individual.
The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.
We have a few smaller concerns, but we think it's useful to mention it here:
In the event we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong sense is that it'll be done through Tesla. But why do it this way if we could also do it from within OpenAI? Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission. So the overall result may not end up being optimal for OpenAI.
We believe that OpenAI the non-profit was successful because both you and Sam were in it. Sam acted as a genuine counterbalance to you, which has been extremely fruitful. Greg and I, at least so far, are much worse at being a counterbalance to you. We feel this is evidenced even by this negotiation, where we were ready to sweep the long-term AGI control questions under the rug while Sam stood his ground.
Sam:
When Greg and I are stuck, you've always had an answer that turned out to be deep and correct. You've been thinking about the ways forward on this problem extremely deeply and thoroughly. Greg and I understand technical execution, but we don't know how structure decisions will play out over the next month, year, or five years.
But we haven't been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process, because we don't understand your cost function.
We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it's hard to really understand what's driving it.
Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals? How has your thought process changed over time?
Greg and Ilya:
We had a fair share of our own failings during this negotiation, and we'll list some of them here (Elon and Sam, I'm sure you'll have plenty to add...):
During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions. This is why we didn't push on the control — we thought that our equity is good enough, so why worry? But this attitude is wrong, just like the attitude of AI experts who don't think that AI safety is an issue because they don't really believe that they'll build AGI.
We did not speak our full truth during the negotiation. We have our excuses, but it was damaging to the process, and we may lose both Sam and Elon as a result.
There's enough baggage here that we think it's very important for us to meet and talk it out. Our collaboration will not succeed if we don't. Can all four of us meet today? If all of us say the truth, and resolve the issues, the company that we'll create will be much more likely to withstand the very strong forces it'll experience.
- Greg & Ilya
Elon Musk to Ilya Sutskever (cc: Sam Altman; Greg Brockman; Sam Teller; Shivon Zilis) - Sep 20, 2017 2:17PM
Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay or I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. Discussions are over
Elon Musk to Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman (cc: Greg Brockman, Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis) - Sep 20, 2017 3:08PM
To be clear, this is not an ultimatum to accept what was discussed before. That is no longer on the table.
Sam Altman to Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever (cc: Greg Brockman, Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis) - Sep 21, 2017 9:17 AM
i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!
Subject: Non-profit
Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 22, 2017 9:50 AM
Hi Elon,
Quick FYI that Greg and Ilya said they would like to continue with the non-profit structure. They know they would need to provide a guarantee that they won't go off doing something else to make it work.
Haven't spoken to Altman yet but he asked to talk this afternoon so will report anything I hear back.
If anything I can do to help let me know.
Elon Musk to Shivon Zilis (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 22, 2017 10:01 AM
Ok
Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Sep 22, 2017 5:54 PM
From Altman:
Structure: Great with keeping non-profit and continuing to support it.
Trust: Admitted that he lost a lot of trust with Greg and Ilya through this process. Felt their messaging was inconsistent and felt childish at times.
Hiatus: Sam told Greg and Ilya he needs to step away for 10 days to think. Needs to figure out how much he can trust them and how much he wants to work with them. Said he will come back after that and figure out how much time he wants to spend.
Fundraising: Greg and Ilya have the belief that 100's of millions can be achieved with donations if there is a definitive effort. Sam thinks there is a definite path to 10's of millions but TBD on more. He did mention that Holden was irked by the move to for-profit and potentially offered more substantial amount of money if OpenAI stayed a non-profit, but hasn't firmly committed. Sam threw out a $100M figure for this if it were to happen.
Communications: Sam was bothered by how much Greg and Ilya keep the whole team in the loop with happenings as the process unfolded. Felt like it distracted the team. On the other hand, apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he is happy about this at least since he just wants the team to be heads down again.
Shivon
Subject: ICO
Sam Altman to Elon Musk (cc: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis) - Jan 21, 2018 5:08 PM
Elon—
Heads up, spoke to some of the safety team and there were a lot of concerns about the ICO and possible unintended effects in the future.
Planning to talk to the whole team tomorrow and invite input. Going to emphasize the need to keep this confidential, but I think it's really important we get buy-in and give people the chance to weigh in early.
Sam
Elon Musk to Sam Altman (cc: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis) - Jan 21, 2018 5:56 PM
Absolutely
Subject: Top AI institutions today
Andrej Karpathy to Elon Musk, (cc: Shivon Zilis) - Jan 31, 2018 1:20 PM
The ICLR conference (which is the top deep learning - specific conference (NIPS is larger, but more diffuse)) released their decisions for accepted/rejected papers, and someone made some nice plots that show where the current deep learning / AI research happens at. It's an imperfect measure because not every company might prioritize paper publications, but it's indicative.
Here's a plot that shows the total number of papers (broken down by oral/poster/workshop/rejected) from any institution:
Long story short, Google is dominating with 83 paper submissions. The academic institutions (Berkeley / Stanford / CMU / MIT) are next, in 20-30 ranges each.
Just thought it was an interesting snapshot of where all the action is today. The full data is here: http://webia.lip6.fr/~pajot/dataviz.html
-Andrej
Elon Musk to Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, (cc: Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis, fw: Andrej Karpathy) - Jan 31, 2018 2:02 PM
OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance.
I have considered the ICO approach and will not support it. In my opinion, that would simply result in a massive loss of credibility for OpenAI and everyone associated with the ICO. If something seems too good to be true, it is. This was, in my opinion, an unwise diversion.
The only paths I can think of are a major expansion of OpenAI and a major expansion of Tesla AI. Perhaps both simultaneously. The former would require a major increase in funds donated and highly credible people joining our board. The current board situation is very weak.
I will set up a time for us to talk tomorrow. To be clear, I have a lot of respect for your abilities and accomplishments, but I am not happy with how things have been managed. That is why I have had trouble engaging with OpenAI in recent months. Either we fix things and my engagement increases a lot or we don’t and I will drop to near zero and publicly reduce my association. I will not be in a situation where the perception of my influence and time doesn’t match the reality.
Elon Musk to Andrej Karpathy - Jan 31, 2018 2:07 PM
fyi
What do you think makes sense? Happy to talk by phone if that’s better.
Andrej Karpathy to Elon Musk - Jan 31, 2018 11:54 PM
Working at the cutting edge of AI is unfortunately expensive. For example, DeepMind's operating expenses in 2016 were at around $250M USD (does not include compute). With their growing team today it might be ~0.5B/yr. But then Alphabet in 2016 reported ~20B net income so it's still fairly cheap even if DeepMind had no revenue of its own. In addition to DeepMind, Google also has Google Brain, Research, and Cloud. And TensorFlow, TPUs, and they own about a third of all research (in fact, they hold their own AI conferences).
I also strongly suspect that compute horsepower will be necessary (and possibly even sufficient) to reach AGI. If historical trends are any indication, progress in AI is primarily driven by systems - compute, data, infrastructure. The core algorithms we use today have remained largely unchanged from the ~90s. Not only that, but any algorithmic advances published in a paper somewhere can be almost immediately re-implemented and incorporated. Conversely, algorithmic advances alone are inert without the scale to also make them scary.
It seems to me that OpenAI today is burning cash and that the funding model cannot reach the scale to seriously compete with Google (an 800B company). If you can't seriously compete but continue to do research in open, you might in fact be making things worse and helping them out "for free", because any advances are fairly easy for them to copy and immediately incorporate, at scale.
A for-profit pivot might create a more sustainable revenue stream over time and would, with the current team, likely bring in a lot of investment. However, building out a product from scratch would steal focus from AI research, it would take a long time and it's unclear if a company could "catch up" to Google scale, and the investors might exert too much pressure in the wrong directions.
The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow. I believe attachments to other large suspects (e.g. Apple? Amazon?) would fail due to an incompatible company DNA. Using a rocket analogy, Tesla already built the "first stage" of the rocket with the whole supply chain of Model 3 and its onboard computer and a persistent internet connection. The "second stage" would be a full self driving solution based on large-scale neural network training, which OpenAI expertise could significantly help accelerate. With a functioning full self-driving solution in ~2-3 years we could sell a lot of cars/trucks. If we do this really well, the transportation industry is large enough that we could increase Tesla's market cap to high O(~100K), and use that revenue to fund the AI work at the appropriate scale.
I cannot see anything else that has the potential to reach sustainable Google-scale capital within a decade.
-Andrej
Elon Musk to Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman - Feb 1, 2018 3:52 AM
[Forwarded previous message from Andrej]
Andrej is exactly right. We may wish it otherwise, but, in my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero.
Subject: AI updates
Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Mar 25, 2018 11:03AM
OpenAI
Fundraising:
-No longer doing the ICO / “instrument to purchase compute in advance” type structure. Altman is thinking through an instrument where the 4-5 large corporates who are interested can invest with a return capped at 50x if OpenAI does get to some semblance of money-making AGI. They apparently seem willing just for access reasons. He wants to discuss with you in more detail.
Formal Board Resignation:
-You're still technically on the board so need to send a quick one liner to Sam Altman saying something like “With this email I hereby resign as a director of OpenAI, effective Feb 20th 2018”.
Future Board:
-Altman said he is cool with me joining then having to step off if I become conflicted, but is concerned that others would consider it a burned bridge if I had to step off. I think best bet is not to join for now and be an ambiguous advisor but let me know if you feel differently. They have Adam D’Angelo as the potential fifth to take your place, which seems great?
TeslaAI
Andrej has three candidates in pipeline, may have 1-2 come in to meet you on Tuesday. He will send you a briefing note about them. Also, he’s working on starter language for a potential release that will be ready to discuss Tuesday. It will follow the “full-stack AI lab” angle we talked about but, if that doesn’t feel right, please course correct... is tricky messaging.
Cerebras
Chip should be available in August for them to test, and they plan to let others have remote access in September. The Cerebras guy also mentioned that a lot of their recent customer interest has been from companies upset about the Nvidia change in terms of service (the one that forces companies away from consumer grade GPUs to enterprise Pascals / Voltas). Scott Gray and Ilya continue to spend a bunch of time with them
Subject: The OpenAI Charter
Sam Altman to Elon Musk, (cc: Shivon Zilis) - Apr 2, 2018 1:54 PM
We are planning to release this next week--any thoughts?
The OpenAI Charter
OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically-valuable creative work — benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. To that end, we commit to the following principles:
Broadly Distributed Benefits
Long-Term Safety
Technical Leadership
Cooperative Orientation
Elon Musk to Sam Altman - Apr 2, 2018 2:45PM
Sounds fine
Subject: AI updates (continuation)
Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller) - Apr 23, 2018 1:49 AM (continued from thread with same subject above)
Updated info per a conversation with Altman. You’re tentatively set to speak with him on Tuesday.
Financing:
-He confirmed again that they are definitely not doing an ICO but rather equity that has a fixed maximum return.
-Would be a rather unique subsidiary structure for the raise which he wants to walk you through.
-Wants to move within 4-6 week on first round (probably largely Reid money, potentially some corporates).
Tech:
Says Dota 5v5 looking better than anticipated.
-The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before.
-Thinks they are on track to beat Montezuma’s Revenge shortly.
Time allocation:
-I’ve reallocated most of the hours I used to spend with OpenAI to Neuralink and Tesla. This naturally happened with you stepping off the board and related factors — but if you’d prefer I pull more hours back to OpenAI oversight please let me know.
-Sam and Greg asked if I’d be on their informal advisory board (just Gabe Newell so far), which seems fine and better than the formal board given potential conflicts? If that doesn’t feel right let me know what you’d prefer.
Subject: OpenAI
Sam Altman to Elon Musk, (cc: Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis) - Mar 6, 2019 3:13PM
Elon—
Here is a draft post we are planning for Monday. Anything to add/edit?
TL;DR:
Speaking of the last point, we are now discussing a multi-billion dollar investment which I would like to get your advice on when you have time. Happy to come see you some time you are in the bay area.
Sam
Draft post[3]
We've created OpenAI LP, a new "capped-profit" company that allows us to rapidly increase our investments in compute and talent while including checks and balances to actualize our mission.
Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, primarily by attempting to build safe AGI and share the benefits with the world.
Due to the exponential growth of compute investments in the field, we’ve needed to scale much faster than we’d planned when starting OpenAI. We expect to need to raise many billions of dollars in upcoming years for large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.
We haven’t been able to raise that much money as a nonprofit, and though we considered becoming a for-profit, we were afraid that doing so would mean giving up our mission.
Instead, we created a new company, OpenAI LP, as a hybrid for-profit and nonprofit — which we are calling a "capped-profit" company.
The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and employees can get a fixed return if we succeed at our mission, which allows us to raise investment capital and attract employees with startup-like equity. But any returns beyond that amount — and if we are successful, we expect to generate orders of magnitude more value than we’d owe to people who invest in or work at OpenAI LP — are owned by the original OpenAI Nonprofit entity.
Going forward (in this post and elsewhere), “OpenAI” refers to OpenAI LP (which now employs most of our staff), and the original entity is referred to as “OpenAI Nonprofit”.
The mission comes first
We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission — ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI — over generating returns for investors.
To minimize conflicts of interest with the mission, OpenAI LP’s primary fiduciary obligation is to advance the aims of the OpenAI Charter, and the company is controlled by OpenAI Nonprofit’s board. All investors and employees sign agreements that OpenAI LP’s obligation to the Charter always comes first, even at the expense of some or all of their financial stake.
Our employee and investor paperwork starts like this. The general partner refers to OpenAI Nonprofit (whose official name is “OpenAI Inc”); limited partners refers to investors and employees.
Only a minority of board members can hold financial stakes in the partnership. Furthermore, only board members without such stakes are allowed to vote on decisions where the interests of limited partners and the nonprofit’s mission may conflict — including any decisions about making payouts to investors and employees.
Corporate structure
Another provision from our paperwork specifies that the nonprofit retains control. (The paperwork uses OpenAI LP’s official name “OpenAI, L.P.”.)
As mentioned above, economic returns for investors and employees are capped (with the cap negotiated in advance on a per-limited partner basis). Any excess returns are owned by the nonprofit. Our goal is to ensure that most of the value we create if successful is returned to the world, so we think this is an important first step. Returns for our first round of investors are capped to 100x their investment, and we expect this multiple to be lower for future rounds.
What OpenAI does
Our day-to-day work remains the same. Today, we believe we can build the most value by focusing exclusively on developing new AI technologies, not commercial products. Our structure gives us flexibility for how to make money in the long term, but we hope to figure that out only once we’ve created safe AGI (though we’re open to non-distracting revenue sources such as licensing in the interim).
OpenAI LP currently employs around 100 people organized into three main areas: capabilities (advancing what AI systems can do), safety (ensuring those systems are aligned with human values), and policy (ensuring appropriate governance for such systems). OpenAI Nonprofit governs OpenAI LP, runs educational programs such as Scholars and Fellows, and hosts policy initiatives. OpenAI LP is continuing (at increased pace and scale) the development roadmap started at OpenAI Nonprofit, which has yielded breakthroughs in reinforcement learning, robotics, and language.
Safety
We are concerned about AGI’s potential to cause rapid change, whether through machines pursuing goals misspecified by their operator, malicious humans subverting deployed systems, or an out-of-control economy that grows without resulting in improvements to human lives. As described in our Charter, we are willing to merge with a value-aligned organization (even if it means reduced or zero payouts to investors) to avoid a competitive race which would make it hard to prioritize safety.
Who’s involved
OpenAI Nonprofit’s board consists of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & CTO), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Holden Karnofsky, Reid Hoffman, Sue Yoon, and Tasha McCauley.
Elon Musk left the board of OpenAI Nonprofit in February 2018 and is not involved with OpenAI LP.
Our investors include Reid Hoffman and Khosla Ventures.
We are traveling a hard and uncertain path, but we have designed our structure to help us positively affect the world should we succeed in creating AGI. If you’d like to help us make this mission a reality, we’re hiring :)!
Subject: Bloomberg: AI Research Group Co-Founded by Elon Musk Starts For-Profit Arm
Elon Musk to Sam Altman - Mar 11, 2019 3:04PM
Please be explicit that I have no financial interest in the for-profit arm of OpenAI
AI Research Group Co-Founded by Elon Musk Starts For-Profit Arm
Bloomberg
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research group co-founded by Elon Musk and several other prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, is starting a for-profit arm that will allow it to raise more money. Read the full story
Shared from Apple News
Sam Altman to Elon Musk - Mar 11, 2019 3:11PM
on it
My first pass with AI had exactly one typographical error I could find, where it corrected a typo by Sam Altman saying "We did this in a way" instead of the original "We did this is a way"
Edited to add collapsible section, original was just a large text block
Edited to add collapsible section