From the start, OpenAI was designed to oppose Google. Musk testified that he was inspired to found it by a conversation with Google\u2019s Larry Page, where Page \u2014 in his telling \u2014 shrugged at the notion<\/a> of AI wiping out humanity. It\u2019s not surprising Musk and Altman\u2019s circle would be wary of its AI team. But court documents and testimony reveal just how much Google and Hassabis specifically struck fear into their hearts.<\/p>\n During Brockman\u2019s testimony this week, he said Musk talked about Hassabis \u201cmany, many times\u201d throughout the early years of OpenAI, calling Musk \u201cvery consistent and fixated\u201d on the man. When he attended an AI-focused dinner with Altman and Musk, Brockman added, the first thing he recalled Musk asking was, \u201cIs Demis Hassabis evil?\u201d<\/p>\n Musk was \u201cfixated\u201d on Hassabis, said Greg Brockman on the stand<\/p>\n A dinner with Demis before OpenAI\u2019s founding was \u201cextremely alarming,\u201d Musk wrote in one email to Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, a fellow OpenAI co-founder. \u201cI feel like they are playing the Super Bowl and we are playing the Puppy Bowl. Unless we want to have our ass handed to us, we need to step up our game dramatically,\u201d he said in 2016.<\/p>\n Hassabis makes one of his first appearances in court documents soon after OpenAI\u2019s founding, as Musk was talking up the new lab\u2019s \u201copen\u201d nature in the press. In January of 2016, Musk forwarded Altman and Sutskever, who was poached from Google, a message<\/a> Hassabis had sent him. The Google head disagreed with Musk and his cofounders \u201cextolling the virtues of open sourcing AI.\u201d Hassabis wrote that it was \u201cactually very dangerous,\u201d adding, \u201cI presume you realise that this is not some sort of panacea that will somehow magically solve the AI problem?\u201d A handful of months later, OpenAI co-founder (and current company president) Greg Brockman told Musk<\/a> that Google\u2019s \u201cpolicy people\u201d wanted to speak to him, for fear OpenAI would \u201cbuild a public narrative that it\u2019s wrong to have any closed-source AI.\u201d Musk was especially interested in who, specifically, called Brockman from Google.<\/p>\n It was the start of years of competition, and the stakes would only rise from there.<\/p>\n About six months later, Musk started to relay his concerns about beating Google DeepMind in the AI race. He wrote<\/a> to his Neuralink associates, \u201cDeepmind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as a non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.\u201d<\/p>\n In September of 2017, Brockman and Sutskever wrote<\/a> to Musk expressing concern about his control over OpenAI, using Google as an example of precisely what not to do. \u201cYou are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like they are playing the Super Bowl and we are playing the Puppy Bowl.\u201d<\/p>\n By the start of 2018, Musk was seemingly in a full-fledged spiral over Google\u2019s AI influence and the need for OpenAI to overtake the tech giant \u2014 and the relative panic had spread to others as well. Musk wrote in a January email exchange<\/a> that OpenAl was \u201con a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance.\u201d He and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy were so concerned that they suggested folding OpenAI into Tesla so it would be better-resourced.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s unclear if a company could \u2018catch up\u2019 to Google scale\u201d without a merger, Karpathy later wrote: \u201cI cannot see anything else that has the potential to reach sustainable Google-scale capital within a decade.\u201d<\/p>\n Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI board member at the time, suggested a direct intervention. Zilis, who now shares four children with Musk, wrote<\/a> a personal plea asking him to \u201cslow down\u201d Hassabis. \u201cThere is a very low probability of a good future if someone doesn\u2019t slow Demis down. Slowing him down is the only nonnegotiable net good action I can see,\u201d Zilis wrote. \u201cI think you know I\u2019m not a malicious person but in this case it feels fundamentally irresponsible to not find a way to slow or alter his path.\u201d Musk responded that they could discuss it that evening over the phone but for the first time seemed dejected about his prospects in his battle against Hassabis, writing, \u201cI doubt I could do so in a meaningful way.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSlowing him down is the only nonnegotiable net good action I can see.\u201d<\/p>\n Zilis continued her personal pleas to Musk to overtake Hassabis, relaying rumors<\/a> from Altman and others. \u201cOn top of the folks that secretly converse on Twitter DM because they don\u2019t trust Demis not to spy on their email and gchat, a part of the inner group also meets in a London coffee shop without cell phones to have in person discussions away from him,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n By November of that year, Musk wrote<\/a> in an email that he had fully \u201clost confidence\u201d that OpenAI could \u201cserve as an effective counterweight\u201d to beat Hassabis and DeepMind, and that he was planning to do so via Tesla instead. \u201cWe have cash flow on the order of billions of dollars per year to build hardware that hopefully has at least a dark horse chance to keep Google honest,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMy probability assessment of OpenAl being relevant to DeepMind\/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%,\u201d Musk wrote<\/a> a few weeks later. \u201cUnfortunately, humanity\u2019s future is in the hands of Demis \u2026 And they are doing a lot more than this.\u201d<\/p>\n Three months later, in March 2019, the last mention of Hassabis in the trial exhibits so far comes from a mysterious message<\/a> sent by Altman to Musk with no further details available.<\/p>\n \u201cHave some mild Demis updates to share,\u201d Altman wrote. 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