Musk mentioned ‘old friend’ Larry Page at trial with OpenAI

TechCrunch said that a highlight in billionaire Elon Musk’s testimony at the OpenAI trial on April 28 was about his old friend Larry Page.

In 2015, when Page was still CEO of Google, Musk mentioned the prospect of AI wiping out humanity in a conversation. However, Page dismissed him, even calling him a “speciesist” for being too supportive of humans.

“I think having a counterweight to Google is very important. At that time, Google didn’t seem to care about AI safety,” Musk said about the reason he co-founded OpenAI during a period when he had many other business projects, such as SpaceX and Tesla.

Theo Business Insiderto convince the jury that he really cares about AI safety, Musk said he personally met former US president Barack Obama in 2015. Instead of asking for incentives for the company, he spent an hour warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, a technology that he said at that time “no one really used”.

During about two hours of testimony, Musk affirmed that he always “supports humans” if humans and AI conflict, and shared more about the early stages of his career and the imbalance between work and life.

The billionaire said he had to make “extremely great and extremely difficult efforts” to recruit artificial intelligence researcher Ilya Sutskever from Google to work for OpenAI. It took him 4-5 days of back and forth to convince Sutskever as Page tried to retain talent. Musk called this the “most important” researcher contributing to OpenAI’s existence, and shared: “Larry Page refused to talk to me again.” Sutskever left OpenAI to found his own AI lab in 2024.

Google and Page’s family office have not yet responded.

Musk and Page used to be very close. Fortune said that more than 10 years ago, their relationship was so good that Musk often stayed at Page’s house in Palo Alto. Page also told host Charlie Rose that he would rather give money to Musk than to charity.

Elon Musk is the first witness in the civil lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, its co-founder and current CEO. He sued OpenAI in 2024, then withdrew the lawsuit and continued to sue, accusing his former company, Altman, and Microsoft – the original investor in OpenAI – of betraying the original non-profit mission. He wants this startup to return to the old model, dismissing Altman and Brockman from management positions and the board of directors.

The lawsuit is expected to have witnesses from a series of names such as Musk, Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. In addition, Shivon Zilis, a former board member of OpenAI who has four children with Musk, will also participate. The lawsuit is considered to be of great importance, capable of reshaping the field of artificial intelligence.