- Elon Musk’s emails, revealed in court documents, describe OpenAI’s talent wars in its early days.
- OpenAI increased salaries to compete with Google DeepMind’s counteroffers and attract top talent.
- “Either we get the best people in the world or we will get whipped by Deepmind,” Musk wrote.
Elon Musk’s email exchanges, newly revealed in his lawsuit against OpenAI’s cofounders, have become a window into the company’s early days and describe the talent wars that have ultimately come to shape it.
Musk, who cofounded OpenAI with 10 others, including Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, left the company in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla.
Since his departure, though, he’s become critical of OpenAI, accusing it of veering from its original mission to develop AI in a way that safely benefits humanity.
In August, he filed a lawsuit against Altman and Brockman, saying he was “deceived” into founding the company under false pretenses. Musk’s lawyers argue it was “all hot-air philanthropy—the hook for Altman’s long con.”
However, the recently released emails show that Musk, Altman, and Brockman were initially aligned on the company’s mission and were intent on doing whatever it took to recruit the industry’s top talent.
According to one email Brockman sent to Musk and Altman in November 2015, OpenAI originally planned to offer founding members a base salary of $175,000.
Its rival, Google DeepMind, however, had plans of its own.
“Just got word…that deepmind is going to give everyone in openAI massive counteroffers tomorrow to try to kill it,” Altman wrote to the others on December 11, 2015.
He asked if the others would object to increasing everyone’s compensation by $100,000 to $200,000 a year.
“Sounds like deepmind is planning to go to war over this, they’ve been literally cornering people at NIPS,” he wrote, referring to an annual machine learning conference.
Musk urged the group to do whatever it took to attract talent. “Either we get the best people in the world or we will get whipped by Deepmind,” he wrote.
Brockman responded: “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,” he said, referring to Altman’s nickname.
OpenAI has always been recognized as a hub for the world’s top AI talent. The company’s nonprofit status and lofty mission to benefit humanity attracted much of that talent.
But, like Musk, some longtime OpenAI employees have since begun to question the company’s commitment to that mission. Several key executives have left in the last year, some of them citing concerns about safety.
In his public announcement that he was leaving, Jan Leike, who headed OpenAI’s superalignment team, said the company had strayed from its mission. Other top executives have been more reticent about their reasons for leaving.
In his emails during OpenAI’s first days, Musk outlined the company’s original mission:
“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,” Musk wrote to the others in December 2015.
Almost a decade later, OpenAI is shedding its nonprofit status and is now valued at over $150 billion.
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