Ilya Sutskever stands by his role in Sam Altman’s ouster from OpenAI: ‘I didn’t want to ruin it’

Elon Musk The trial against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its final phase on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI chief Brett Taylor.

Sutskever caught the spotlight, revealing an ownership stake in OpenAI’s $850 billion for-profit arm, which is currently worth about $7 billion. This makes him one of the largest known individual contributors to OpenAI. Earlier in the trial, OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, admitted for the first time that he owned about $30 billion worth of OpenAI stock.

Brockman was one of the original founders of the research lab, and Sutskever joined soon after, rejecting Google’s $6 million annual compensation offer. Brockman said he and Sutskever “joined at the hip,” until Sutskever helped lead the brief ouster of Sam Altman as OpenAI’s CEO in 2023. Sutskever helped gather evidence to show Altman’s alleged history of deception, and even helped draft a memo to the board. Although they tried to repair the relationship, Sutskever has since parted ways with Brockman and Altman, OpenAI’s attorney said Monday.

Sutskever, who arrived at the courtroom wearing a shirt and slacks and was the first male witness to testify without a suit jacket, appeared depressed that he was no longer involved with OpenAI. (He left and formed a rival AI lab in 2024.) “I felt a great deal of ownership of OpenAI,” he said at one point Monday. “I felt like I was putting my life into it, and I simply cared about it, and I didn’t want to ruin it.”

Sutskever’s testimony reinforced Musk’s claim that Altman is not the right person to lead an AI lab that could create artificial general intelligence. Additionally, Sutskever mentioned how the hyperalignment team he helped lead, which focused on the safety of future models, was doing the most important work on OpenAI “in the long term.” The team disbanded in May 2024, shortly after Sutskever left the company.

But Sutskever also added to OpenAI’s defense that Musk never negotiated any special promises when funding the OpenAI nonprofit. Musk’s claim that such obligations existed and that Altman and Brockman violated them by pursuing a for-profit arm is the core of his claims in the lawsuit. Sutskever said OpenAI needed “a lot of dollars” to build a computer the size of a human brain, and while seeking donations had some “reasonable success,” becoming a for-profit organization was the agreed upon way forward.

“I would describe it as the difference between an ant and a cat,” Sutskever said in response to a question from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers about how more computing has helped OpenAI advance AI. “If there was no funding, there would be no mainframe.”

In the end, Sutskever, a prominent AI scientist who paints in his spare time, testified for nearly an hour, barely making eye contact with anyone during his time on the witness stand.

Musk’s legal team has unsuccessfully sought to have Sutskever treated as a hostile witness because of his financial stake in OpenAI. But Gonzalez-Rogers agreed to give lawyers for both Musk and OpenAI additional latitude in their questioning of Sutskever because of what she called his “unique position” in the case.

The point

Much of Monday’s testimony centered around the well-publicized events of Altman’s ouster and reinstatement as CEO in November 2023. Nadella described Sutskever and the other board members who fired Altman as “amateur town” and reiterated that he “never had any clarity” about the lack of candor that led to their decision. Nadella also admitted during his testimony that he and his colleagues discussed 14 potential board members who would join OpenAI if Altman returned, including at least two who the Microsoft group objected to and one who joined later. Nadella described Microsoft’s input as suggestions.

Sutskever said he supports firing Altman because “an environment in which executives don’t have the right information” is not “conducive to reaching any significant goal.” But he criticized his colleagues on the board for rushing the process, lacking experience and accepting “legal advice that was not very good”.

Bet Microsoft

In his lawsuit, Musk accused Microsoft of helping turn OpenAI into a money-making machine beyond what Musk intended. Microsoft first supported OpenAI with discounted cloud computing, but could no longer afford to do so “once the bill started to rise,” Nadella testified. A for-profit arm in which Microsoft could invest, in exchange for a potential financial return, was more acceptable.

But as the years went by and the bills continued to rise, Microsoft wanted more from the partnership. Microsoft “will lose 4 billion next year!!!” Nadella exclaimed in a 2022 email to aides about the OpenAI partnership. He called for a new agreement that would ensure Microsoft would also get “technical expertise” in artificial intelligence from the startup, which he continued to spell as “Open AI.”