Musk: OpenAI's chance of being relevant 'is 0%. Not 1%'

From:: Elon Musk
Date:: December 26, 2018
To:: Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman; cc Sam Altman, Shivon Zilis
Subject:: I feel I should reiterate

My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise. Even raising several hundred million won't be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it. Unfortunately, humanity's future is in the hands of Demis. https://nyti.ms/2Rjetd3?smid=nytcore-ios-share And they are doing a lot more than this. OpenAI reminds me of Bezos and Blue Origin. They are hopelessly behind SpaceX and getting worse, but the ego of Bezos has him insanely thinking that they are not! I really hope I'm wrong. Elon

About this email

Ten months after leaving the board, Musk tells OpenAI's leaders that without a dramatic change in execution and resources its probability of being relevant to DeepMind/Google is zero, that it needs billions per year immediately, that humanity's future is in the hands of Demis Hassabis, and compares OpenAI to Bezos's Blue Origin.

Notes

Sent Dec 26, 2018 12:07 PM (quoted in the 2026 trial exhibit chain as 'Wed, 26 Dec 2018 at 20:07'). OpenAI's 2024 blog posts and the LessWrong archive redact the name and the sentence after the link; the unredacted text here is from the Musk v. Altman trial exhibit as transcribed by Internal Tech Emails (May 2026). That exhibit also contains a reply from Sam Altman dated Dec 30, 2018 2:04 PM, whose text is behind the newsletter's paywall and could not be retrieved.

Where it came from

Published by recipient; attribution confirmed.

OpenAI, executive & internal. Tags: google, deepmind, funding, billions, blue-origin, demis-hassabis

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