Elon Musk's fixation on Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis dominated early OpenAI strategy, court testimony reveals

During the Musk v. Altman trial, testimony from OpenAI president Greg Brockman showed that Musk talked about Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, "many, many times" in OpenAI's early years, with Musk asking at one point whether Hassabis was "evil."

Musk compared OpenAI's position to Google DeepMind's in a 2016 email as "playing the Puppy Bowl" while Google was "playing the Super Bowl," and by January 2018 wrote that OpenAI was "on a path of certain failure relative to Google" and needed "immediate and dramatic action."

By November 2018, Musk stated he had "lost confidence" that OpenAI could "serve as an effective counterweight" to Hassabis and DeepMind, writing his "probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%."

Hassabis, who founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, reportedly for between $400-650 million, has led Google's AlphaFold research, Google Gemini, and the for-profit DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs.