Musk's launch-day note to the founding team
- From:
- Elon Musk
- Date:
- December 11, 2015 (Sent 4:41 PM)
- To:
- Ilya Sutskever, Pamela Vagata, Vicki Cheung, Diederik Kingma, Andrej Karpathy, John D. Schulman, Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman (cc: Sam Altman)
- Subject:
- The OpenAI Company
Congratulations on a great beginning!
We are outmanned and outgunned by a ridiculous margin by organizations you know well, but we have right on our side and that counts for a lot. I like the odds.
Our most important consideration is recruitment of the best people. The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it. If we are able to attract the most talented people over time and our direction is correctly aligned, then OpenAI will prevail.
To this end, please give a lot of thought to who should join. If I can be helpful with recruitment or anything else, I am at your disposal. I would recommend paying close attention to people who haven't completed their grad or even undergrad, but are obviously brilliant. Better to have them join before they achieve a breakthrough.
Looking forward to working together,
Elon