The notes referenced in the trial were written between 2015, when OpenAI was founded, and 2023. Brockman and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were briefly ousted As leaders of the OpenAI board on alleged security issues.
Musk hopes his diary portrays Brockman as a money-hungry executive who was initially disinterested in OpenAI’s mission.
To dispel this characterization of OpenAI’s early-day thinking, Brockman’s difficult task is to convince the court that it instead shows the opposite: to demonstrate the careful thinking of perhaps the person most committed to OpenAI’s mission.
Brockman has been compared to a “bank robber”.
Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, spent the first day of Brockman’s testimony isolating the passages and demanding that Brockman respond to the apparent greed revealed by the journal entries.
For example, Brockman produced a journal in 2017, around the same time that Musk issued an ultimatum: Either Musk would have full control over the commercial arm of OpenAI, or OpenAI would remain a non-profit organization.
In this entry, Brockman appears greedy, writing that “we thought we might as well just do whatever we could to make a profit. To us, making money sounds great and everything.”
And Brockman, of course, made a lot of money after OpenAI spun off its commercial arm in 2018, and today his stake is worth about $30 billion. More than ten times, NBC News informedMolo asked Brockman to justify his stake, but also pointed to a journal entry in which the OpenAI president also said $1 billion was all he wanted for a career goal.
“Financially, what will get me to $1 billion?” Brockman wrote in 2017 that he was considering whether Musk would be the “glorious leader” he wanted to lead OpenAI, or if he would support Altman.
In a controversial moment, Molo asked whether Brockman would consider returning $29 billion for his nonprofit arm. But Brockman said no, noting that he bought the stake long before ChatGPT’s release, increasing OpenAI’s value. He also emphasized that he helped develop the best-funded non-profit organization in the world. according to InformationMolo then likened Brockman to a “bank robber,” downplaying the theft of just $1 million because there was more money left in the bank.
