The chaos that followed Sam Altman’s firing was one of the biggest business stories of 2023.
Ilya Sutskever, one of the board members who voted to fire Altman, wasn’t checking the play-by-play that followed his decision online, he testified on Monday.
“Did you pretty much avoid the internet over the weekend?” Sutskever was asked at the trial for Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI on Monday.
“Yes,” Sutskever answered.
Sutskever is one of the most important early employees at OpenAI. Musk and Altman, who co-founded the artificial intelligence organization, wooed him from Google, where he gave up a $6 million salary. At OpenAI, he saw the chance to create transformative AI technology that could benefit all of humanity. Musk, in his lawsuit, accuses Altman of betraying that promise by effectively turning OpenAI into a for-profit entity through a partnership with Microsoft.
In his witness testimony Monday, Sutskever said long-simmering problems with Altman’s leadership led him to vote with other board members to remove him.
Sutskever had authored a memo making the case for Altman’s removal based on what he saw as a consistent pattern of lying and pitting other OpenAI executives against each other, as he told Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo in his testimony.
Because he was not looking at the internet, Sutskever missed an offer Microsoft sent that Sunday to hire every OpenAI employee, he testified. In the same time period, 95% of OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to quit if Altman was not reinstated as CEO.
Those events led Sutskever to change tack and support Altman’s return to OpenAI.
“I felt that, had I not done this, the company would be destroyed,” Sutskever said in his testimony Monday.
Sutskever quit OpenAI soon after Altman’s return to the company and now runs a company called Safe Superintelligence Inc.
He still owns shares in OpenAI. He testified they could be worth as much as $7 billion.
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