Hello and welcome to Sync #494!

As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, several emails from the early years of OpenAI have been made public. We will take a look into those emails, and what they reveal about the early days of OpenAI and the growing distrust among its founders.

In other news, Anthropic and xAI raised billions of dollars while a Chinese lab released its reasoning model to challenge OpenAI o1, and Gemini gets memory. Elsewhere in AI, DeepMind releases an AI model to correct errors in quantum computing, a Swiss church installs AI Jesus and how can a small AI control much more capable AI and make sure it does not misbehave.

Over in robotics, we have a fluffy robot from Japan aimed at replacing living pets, how easy it is to jailbreak LLM-powered robots and a South Korean robot dog completes a full marathon.

We’ll wrap up this week’s issue of Sync with a behind-the-scenes tour of the workshop where Wing designs and builds its delivery drones.

Enjoy!

OpenAI's turbulent early years

The last two years were quite eventful for OpenAI. Thanks to the massive success of ChatGPT, OpenAI went from a relatively small company to one of the biggest startups in the world, attracting worldwide attention and billions of dollars in funding, propelling its valuation to $157 billion and triggering the AI revolution we are in today.

However, such massive growth never comes easily. Every organisation experiencing significant growth must evolve and transform itself into a new organisation that can deal with new challenges. In the case of OpenAI, some of those growing pains were made publically visible.

Probably the best known of these growing pains occurred a year ago when a group of OpenAI board members briefly removed Sam Altman from his role as CEO. Altman eventually returned to OpenAI, and from then on, we have seen a steady stream of key people leaving the company. Most notable of them were Ilya Sutskever, one of the founders of OpenAI and its long-time chief scientist, and Mira Murati, who served as CTO and briefly as CEO.

As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, several emails from the early years of OpenAI have been made public, revealing the tension within OpenAI has been there since the very beginning of the company. These emails cover the period from 2015, when the idea of an “open” AI lab was first proposed, to 2019, when OpenAI transitioned from a non-profit to a for-profit company. They also complement an earlier batch of communications between Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever, released earlier this year by OpenAI.

The emails can be found on the Musk v. Altman court case page. There is also a compilation of all emails on LessWrong which is much easier to read. While reading those emails, it is worth keeping in mind that Musk’s legal team released them so they will be skewed towards portraying him as the one who was betrayed by OpenAI when the company abandoned its original vision of being a non-profit AI research lab.

The early years of OpenAI

Before we dive into the emails and what they tell us about OpenAI, let’s remind ourselves what the world looked like when OpenAI was founded.

It is 2015—the height of the deep learning revolution. A year earlier, Google had acquired DeepMind, a London-based AI research company making breakthrough after breakthrough in AI and advancing steadily in deep learning and reinforcement learning research. With the acquisition of DeepMind, Google was poised to lead the charge in AI research. It had the best talent working in its labs, backed by Google’s vast resources—be it computing power, data, or finances. If anyone were to create AGI, there was a big chance it would happen at Google.

That vision of the future, in which AGI has been created and owned by Google, was something Sam Altman did not want to happen. As he wrote in an email to Elon Musk in May 2015:

If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.

With the information we have so far, that email is the first time an idea for a non-profit AI lab bringing the best minds in the industry to create advanced AI to benefit all of humanity was proposed. Initially, that company was to be attached to YCombinator and was provisionally named YC AI before eventually being renamed to OpenAI.

Later emails describe how the new company was planning to attract top talent in AI. That’s where Altman mentions that, apparently, DeepMind was trying to “kill” OpenAI by offering massive counteroffers to those who joined the new company.

Distrust between OpenAI founders

One thing that comes out from reading those emails is the tension between the founders of OpenAI—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. The best example of those tensions is an email titled “Honest Thoughts,” written by Ilya Sutskever and sent to both Elon Musk and Sam Altman in September 2017. Sutskever’s thoughts were indeed honest. In the email, he openly questioned the motives of both Musk and Altman and their intentions for OpenAI.

Addressing Musk, Sutskever expressed concerns about the possibility of Musk taking control of OpenAI and transforming the AI lab into one of his companies. Sutskever noted that such a scenario would go against the very principles upon which OpenAI was founded.

The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.

Elon did not take that email very well, saying “This is the final straw,” and threatening to leave the company and withdraw his funding, which he officially did six months later.

In the same message, Sutskever also raises concerns about Altman and openly asks what he wants from OpenAI:

We haven't been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process, because we don't understand your cost function.

Following this, Sutskever questions further:

We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it's hard to really understand what's driving it.

Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals? How has your thought process changed over time?

We can see in these questions the seeds of mistrust that will grow over time and eventually culminate in Sutskever leading a group of OpenAI board members to remove Sam Altman from the company in November 2023 over Altman not being “consistently candid.”

Another example of rifts forming between OpenAI founders can be found during the discussions about the future of the company as a non-profit, where Sam Altman is reported to have “lost a lot of trust with Greg and Ilya through this process.”

The question of funding and a potential merger with Tesla

Another of the topics raised in those emails was the question of funding. Running a cutting-edge AI research lab and hiring top AI talent is expensive. The situation was made worse by the fact that OpenAI was going against Google which could easily outspent OpenAI. In 2017, OpenAI spent $7.9 million—equivalent to a quarter of its functional expenses—on cloud computing alone. By contrast, DeepMind's total expenses in the same year were $442 million.

The emails reveal discussions about ways to raise additional funds to sustain OpenAI. One idea proposed was an ICO, which emerged in 2018 during one of crypto’s many bubbles. However, the idea was quickly abandoned.

The biggest problem in securing more funding was the non-profit nature of OpenAI. The option that OpenAI eventually took was to become in 2019 a "capped" for-profit, with the profit being capped at 100 times any investment. But there was another option on the table—to bring OpenAI under Tesla.

This option was suggested by Andrej Karpathy in an email titled “Top AI Institutions Today,” dated January 2018. At the time, Karpathy was no longer working at OpenAI and was serving as Tesla’s Director of Artificial Intelligence, reporting directly to Elon Musk. In the email, Karpathy provided an analysis of the AI industry in 2018 and correctly highlighted the massive cost of developing world-class AI. He criticised a for-profit approach, arguing that it would require creating a product, which would divert the focus from AI research. In Karpathy’s view, the only viable path for OpenAI to succeed was to become part of Tesla, with Tesla serving as OpenAI’s “cash cow.”

Elon then forwarded Karpathy’s analysis to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, adding that:

in my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero

However, Altman, Sutskever and Brockman did not want to become Tesla’s equivalent of DeepMind. Sutskever pointed out in that “Honest Thoughts” email that OpenAI being part of Tesla would conflict with the company’s founding principles. If that were to happen, OpenAI would be answerable to Tesla’s shareholders and obligated to maximize their investments.

A similar distrust of Tesla’s involvement in OpenAI is evident when OpenAI considered the idea of acquiring Cerebras, a startup designing AI chips. In the same “Honest Thoughts” email, Sutskever asserted that the acquisition would most likely be carried out through Tesla and questioned Tesla’s potential involvement, portraying it as another example of Elon Musk attempting to exert greater control over OpenAI.

Broken foundations

The released emails end in March 2019, on the same day OpenAI announced the transition from a non-profit to a capped for-profit company. The final communication is between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, with Musk requesting that it be made clear he has no financial interest in OpenAI's for-profit arm.

A few months later, OpenAI partnered with Microsoft, which invested $1 billion into the AI lab and the long-term partnership between these companies began. In the years that followed, OpenAI shifted its focus to researching transformer models and developing the GPT family of large language models. This journey ultimately culminated in the launch of a small project called ChatGPT—and the rest is history.

OpenAI was founded with the mission of building AGI to benefit all of humanity. However, behind this grand mission lies a story of egos, personalities and different visions of what this mission is really about. After reading those emails, a picture of broken foundations emerges, and the story of clashing visions within the company is still unfolding.

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🦾 More than a human

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🧠 Artificial Intelligence

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A Chinese lab has released a ‘reasoning’ AI model to rival OpenAI’s o1

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🤖 Robotics

Can a fluffy robot really replace a cat or dog? My weird, emotional week with an AI pet

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🧬 Biotechnology

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💡Tangents

▶️ Adam Savage Explores Wing’s Drone Engineering Workshop (26:22)

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