Elon Musk believes he should move forward with Tesla or xAI.
When you help remove a CEO who reappears five days later with the backing of investors and staff, how can that not be strange? Ilya Sutskever, the Chief Scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, is currently in this situation, and Elon Musk believes he should move forward with Tesla or xAI.
A brief but dramatic corporate drama began last month when Sutskever and other OpenAI board members fired CEO Sam Altman for unspecified reasons. Microsoft and other investors helped OpenAI quickly bring Altman back and start thinking about changing the composition of its board
“I have no ill will towards him,” Altman wrote in a statement regarding his return. We hope that our collaboration will continue even though Ilya is leaving the board.”
But according to a Business Insider story from Friday, Sutskever is currently “invisible” at OpenAI and is in hot water. In response to an ex-user’s post suggesting Sutskever join Tesla and sharing the article, Musk wrote, “Or xAI.”
In an attempt to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Musk launched xAI in March and declared the launch of his AI chatbot, Grok, last month. Musk might be more involved with OpenAI now if AI history had turned out differently. At Google, Musk persuaded Sutskever to join OpenAI in 2015 by helping to establish and fund the company.
As Elon Musk put it in the Lex Fridman Podcast, “It was one of the hardest recruiting battles I’ve ever fought.” He brought up a pivotal point in his friendship with Larry Page, the co-founder of Google.
In 2018, during difficult circumstances, Elon Musk, a board member of OpenAI, left the company following a power struggle. OpenAI quickly outgrew its funding and processing capacity, changed to a capped-profit business model, and started taking sizable investments from Microsoft.
The alliance is currently being investigated by UK antitrust authorities. Musk expressed his displeasure with the partnership in a tweet earlier this year: “OpenAI was once an open-source (which is why I called it ‘open’) AI company working on a non-profit model in opposition to Google, but it is now closed source, for-profit, and effectively controlled by Microsoft.” Not what I had planned.
“Given the risks and power of advanced AI, the public should be informed why the board felt it needed to take such a drastic action,” Musk wrote following the board’s removal of Altman last month. While Elon Musk acknowledges the potential risks associated with AI, he also sees its benefits.
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Academic Helen Toner, who served on the board of OpenAI before leaving before Altman was fired, stated in a recent Wall Street Journal interview that Altman’s firing “was not about AI safety, it was about a lack of confidence.” She also stated on Medium that she felt deeply regretful for her involvement in the board’s decisions after Sutskever withdrew after Altman’s return.
But Elon Musk clarified Sutskever’s role in Altman’s dismissal in an interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit. “I think we should be concerned about it because I think Ilya genuinely has a strong moral compass,” he stated. “He worries a lot about doing the right thing. And I believe that the world ought to know why Ilya was so adamant about firing Sam.”
Sutskever’s departure from Tesla or xAI would be a major development in the AI talent wars. In 2015, Elon Musk stated on the Lex Fridman Podcast that hiring Sutskever “was key to the success of OpenAI.”
