The legal fight between OpenAI co-founders Elon Musk and Sam Altman has seen much internal documentation from the firm’s earliest years released to the public. One minor revelation has been the serious involvement of Gabe Newell from the start, who gave the company over $20 million and was the sole member of its “informal advisory board” in 2018: he later personally emailed Musk to try and get Hideo Kojima a tour of SpaceX.
An email chain from 2018 has now been released, which is between Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and Shivon Zilis. On January 31, 2018, Brockman replies directly to Musk about OpenAI’s future and, under a section titled “fundraising”, said “Ilya and I are able to convince reputable people that AGI can really happen in the next <=10 years” and “there’s *very* large appetite for investments from those people.”
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- Reid Hoffman
- Gabe Newell
- Adam d’Angelo
- Jed McCaleb
- Herb Allen
- Terah Lyons
Musk replies on February 1, 2018, writing “Reid, Gabe and Adam are two thumbs up from me. Don’t know the others well enough yet.” He goes on to insist that OpenAI must “pull significant numbers of key people from Google/Deepmind” or otherwise “assume failure.” Then comes an extraordinary broadside at Jeff Bezos and his space exploration company Blue Origin.
“It feels like [OpenAI is] similar to Blue Origin,” writes Musk. “Bezos is still clueless as to how hopelessly far behind he is and constantly rationalizes his position, overestimating his ability and dramatically underestimating SpaceX year after year.
“We lost an excellent engineer to BO last year (first one in several years) and were very concerned. That guy recently returned to SpaceX and told everyone how hopeless they were. Now zero people are even taking BO recruiting calls. Doesn’t matter what they offer.”
Musk’s disdain for Bezos is a minor theme of these documents (at one point he describes the Amazon founder as a “tool”) but to return to Newell, the above exchange comes before an email sent on April 23, 2018, which reveals Newell’s donation of $20,008,279 and that the Valve co-founder was offering informal advice and guidance.
In that email Shivon Zilis writes to Musk: “Sam [Altman] and Greg [Brockman] asked if I’d be on their informal advisory board (just Gabe Newell so far) which seems fine and better than the formal board given potential conflicts? If that doesn’t feel right let me know what you’d prefer.”
To be clear, Gabe Newell’s involvement with OpenAI has been public since 2018: there were just no solid details before the release of these documents. Newell doesn’t seem as involved in OpenAI these days, and now seems to spend most of his time on his $500 million superyacht. Musk’s clearly always been something of a Valve fan though: to the extent he considered calling OpenAI ‘Freeman’ because of the bonkers rationale that the Half-Life protagonist represented “what we are essentially trying to achieve.”
