Musk Sought to Hire OpenAI Founders for Tesla AI Lab in 2018

Elon Musk attempted to recruit OpenAI's founding team—including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever—to lead a new AI lab within Tesla in 2018, according to evidence presented in a trial between Musk and OpenAI. Musk proposed making OpenAI a Tesla subsidiary or appointing Altman to Tesla's board. The disclosures, including emails and testimony from Shivon Zilis, reveal that by late 2017 Musk had lost faith in OpenAI's non-profit structure to achieve artificial general intelligence and explored building his own AI lab at Tesla. Zilis sketched plans for an event announcing Tesla's world-leading AI lab to rival Google/DeepMind and Facebook AI Research. By early 2018, she outlined nine scenarios for achieving AGI, most centered on Tesla, including hiring Altman to run AI at the carmaker or poaching DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis. The trial centers on Musk's claim that Altman "stole a charity" by converting OpenAI to for-profit; OpenAI's lawyers argue Musk was willing to commercialize the lab if he remained in control.