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. In March 2024 and December 2024 OpenAI also released blogposts with additional emails.

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.^[1]

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 re...

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