Musk v Altman: Testimony from OpenAI's Tragic Billionaire-Believer
Ilya Sutskever helped start the deep learning revolution, co-founded OpenAI, and walked away worth $7 billion. He’s still trying to finish what he started. Today he took the stand.
In 2012, a graduate student at the University of Toronto named Ilya Sutskever co-authored a paper that most working AI researchers now treat the way physicists treat the discovery of the electron. The paper described a neural network called AlexNet, and when it entered an annual image-recognition competition that year, it didn’t just win — it won by a margin so wide that the field’s prevailing assumptions about how machine intelligence worked essentially collapsed overnight. Geoffrey Hinton, who supervised the work and is now considered a founding father of AI, would summarize Sutskever’s contribution this way: “Ilya thought we should do it, Alex made it work, and I got the Nobel Prize.”
That’s the kind of scientist Ilya Sutskever is. The one who sees it first. The one everyone seems to want to be.
Google hired him immediately after AlexNet. Then, in 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman set out to recruit him away for their weird AI nonprofit. Musk later said the fight for Sutskever was one of the hardest recruiting battles he’d ever fought — a protracted back-and-forth with Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis on one side and Musk on the other. Sutskever went back and forth, agreed to leave, changed his mind, agreed again. Eventually he walked away from a reported $6 million annual salary at Google to become a co-founder and chief scientist at a nonprofit research lab that would pay him $1.9 million and offer no equity. He said later he chose OpenAI for altruistic reasons. Nobody who knew him seemed surprised.
For the next nine years, Sutskever was the technical engine of everything OpenAI built — including ChatGPT, the product that turned a research nonprofit into a $300 billion company. Musk, who is now suing to destroy that company, described Sutskever in a CNBC interview as the “linchpin” of OpenAI’s success. And on Monday he took the stand in Oakland.
The trial now underway in Oakland has introduced the public to a specific cast of characters from the origin story of commercial AI, and they click into a series of Silicon Valley types. Musk is a maximalist who funded OpenAI to counter Google’s dominance in AI, demanded majority control when the nonprofit structure inconvenienced him, and is now suing the organization he left rather than accept that it exists without him. Altman is a builder of institutions — restless, commercially acute, and effective in the way that people who are comfortable with contradiction tend to be effective. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO — the person most responsible for what generative AI actually feels like to use — is the pragmatic builder who found herself swerving to do whatever would save the company. She provided Sutskever the screenshots he used to justify firing Altman — and then, in real time as interim CEO, helped Altman engineer his own reinstatement. These are people possessed of the typical forms of ambition: competitive, acquisitive, institutional.
Sutskever is something different, and even his adversaries in this trial seem to feel it.
