The co-founder of OpenAI said of Musk, "I thought he was going to hit me."

 

OpenAI president Greg Brockman has described a heated 2017 meeting with Elon Musk over the billionaire's early attempt to control the artificial intelligence (AI) company.

Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI and a defendant in Musk's lawsuit attempting to undo its transition to a for-profit business, told a jury in Oakland federal court that when he rejected a proposal for Musk to have more say in the company, Musk's mood abruptly changed.

"I actually thought he was going to hit me," Brockman said, referring to Musk.

The meeting ended shortly thereafter, Brockman said, with Musk announcing that he would start withholding funding from OpenAI, which he had been backing since its start in 2015.

Brockman's testimony comes during the second week of a month-long trial between Musk and OpenAI's chief executive and key founder, Sam Altman. This is part of a bitter feud that has grown over the years since Musk left OpenAI, where he was one of the original co-founders and has watched as the AI company became one of the most valuable tech enterprises in the world after its launch of ChatGPT. Prior to Musk's decision to leave OpenAI, Brockman described his attempts to gain more control over the company, including "buttering up" Brockman and another co-founder, Ilya Sutskever.

OpenAI attorneys displayed text exchanges between Sutskever and Brockman from August 2017 that asked, "Will a model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavourable terms?"

The main point of Brockman's testimony thus far has been that Musk knew that OpenAI will become more of a conventional for-profit company. The corporation began as a non-profit, established a for-profit division to raise billions of dollars for investors, and decided last year to concentrate on its for-profit division.

Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and the mother of four of Musk's children, is anticipated to appear in court after Brockman.

According to Brockman's testimony, Zilis told him she had twins, but he didn't learn that Musk was the father until he read about it in the media.

"She said that it was via IVF and that it was entirely platonic with Elon," according to Brockman, who spoke with Zilis after discovering that Musk was the father of her twins.

In response to a question concerning Zilis's years-long involvement with OpenAI following Musk's departure, Brockman stated, "We trusted her to keep the Elon conflict under control."

While Musk was starting xAI, an AI startup creating a chatbot that directly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Zilis departed the board in March 2023.