THE ROLE MODELS
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The record

Sources

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims. The Role Models is produced by Will Sigmon Media with AI-generated voices (ElevenLabs). Quoted emails, posts and filings are read verbatim and attributed; where the parties disagree, both accounts are given, and a company's post written during a lawsuit is treated as advocacy by one side. Sources for each episode are listed in its show notes.

Trailer: Season One, OpenAI

(see show notes)

The Inkling

  • The founding emails and texts (Altman's May 25, 2015 "question" email and Musk's reply; the June 24 governance email; Musk's $1B, naming, and launch-day emails; the December 11 NIPS texts): the published founding-email archive, from court exhibits and OpenAI's March 2024 blog post.
  • "Introducing OpenAI" (December 11, 2015), openai.com; TechCrunch and New York Times launch coverage (December 11, 2015), including the founders' "not yet ready" on funding details.
  • OpenAI, Inc. certificate of incorporation, Delaware, December 8, 2015 (filed in Musk's court documents).
  • AlexNet: Krizhevsky, Sutskever, Hinton, "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks," NIPS 2012; ILSVRC 2012 results (15.3% vs 26.2% top-5 error).
  • DNNresearch acquisition and Hinton's Google+ post: University of Toronto announcement, March 12, 2013. The ~$44M price is reported, not disclosed.
  • Google Brain "cat" network: Le et al., "Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning," ICML 2012.
  • DeepMind: founding mission statement; Google's January 2014 acquisition (reported $400M–$650M) and the ethics-board condition, per contemporaneous reporting.
  • Musk on DeepMind ("keep an eye on what's going on"): CNBC interview, June 2014 (via Entrepreneur, August 2014).
  • Musk's "extreme mental stress" email: press coverage of Musk's amended complaint, Case 3:24-cv-04722 (August 2024).
  • Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, July 3, 2014).
  • Musk's tweets, early August 2014 (sources date them August 2 or 3).
  • "Summoning the demon": MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium, October 24, 2014 (TechCrunch, October 26, 2014).
  • Future of Life Institute $10M donation (January 2015) and the autonomous-weapons open letter (July 2015).
  • Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023), chapter 40: the "speciesist" account, the $1.9M Sutskever offer, and Page's reaction, all as Musk tells them.
  • Sam Altman, "Machine intelligence, part 1 and part 2", blog.samaltman.com, February 2015 (the acknowledgments name Dario Amodei and others).
  • The Rosewood dinner: Greg Brockman's 2026 trial testimony (WSJ coverage) and Musk's deposition (Doc 391-1, January 2026), where he recalled a July dinner "vaguely."
  • John Schulman: UC Berkeley News interview, April 2023.
  • Greg Brockman on leaving Stripe: VentureBeat interview, 2018.
  • MIT Technology Review, "The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI's bid to save the world" (February 2020), for background.

The One-Billion-Dollar Handshake

  • The founding emails (Musk's Dec 11, 2015 team email; the Jan 2, 2016 "Should AI Be Open?" thread and Sutskever's reply; Musk's Feb 19 and Feb 22, 2016 emails; Brockman's Feb 21 "compensation framework"; the Mar 21 Wired fact-check exchange): Musk v. Altman court exhibits and OpenAI's blog releases, compiled in OpenAI Email Archives (LessWrong).
  • Cade Metz, "Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free," Wired, April 27, 2016: Zaremba, the counteroffers and the delayed launch, the Bengio list, the Napa day, the whiteboards, Brockman, Sutskever and Bostrom quotes.
  • Steven Levy, "How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers From Taking Over," Backchannel, December 11, 2015 (republished on Wired).
  • The New York Times, launch coverage, December 11, 2015: Musk's and Altman's quotes, funding "year by year."
  • "Introducing OpenAI," openai.com, December 11, 2015: the $1 billion commitment and named funders.
  • Scott Alexander, "Should AI Be Open?" Slate Star Codex, December 17, 2015.
  • SpaceX's first orbital-booster landing (Falcon 9 Flight 20, December 21, 2015): Wikipedia.
  • Brockman's 21st Street apartment as OpenAI's first office: SF Standard, April 21, 2026.
  • AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol, Seoul, March 2016 (Move 37 in Game 2; 4–1): DeepMind, Wikipedia.
  • Cade Metz, "A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit," The New York Times, April 19, 2018: the 2016 Form 990 salaries and Sutskever's quote.
  • Mark Harris, "Elon Musk used to say he put $100M in OpenAI, but now it's $50M: Here are the receipts," TechCrunch, May 17, 2023: $133.2M in total donations, ~$15M traceable to Musk, the Musk Foundation → YC.org → OpenAI route, YC Research's $0.
  • "OpenAI and Elon Musk," openai.com, March 5, 2024: "less than $45M from Elon."
  • Musk v. Altman, amended complaint, Case 3:24-cv-04722 (N.D. Cal., August 5, 2024): "over $44 million."
  • OpenAI's 2016 Form 990 (about $11M spent, ~52 people, $7M salaries and benefits), via the New York Times.

The Nonprofit Paradox

  • The 2016–2017 emails and messages (Musk's April 2016 NYT statement; the September 2016 "MSFT hosting deal" thread and Sam Teller's follow-up; Sutskever's June 12 and July 20, 2017 bi-weekly updates and his July 12, 2017 "The business of building AGI"; Musk's June 13 and July 21 replies; Brockman's July 13 iMessage and July 21 three-step path; Musk's August 11, 2017 "triggering event" email): Musk v. Altman court exhibits and OpenAI's blog releases, compiled in OpenAI Email Archives (LessWrong).
  • OpenAI Gym public beta, April 27, 2016: openai.com.
  • Cade Metz, "Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free," Wired, April 27, 2016: Yann LeCun's quote.
  • Amodei, Olah, Steinhardt, Christiano, Schulman, Mané, "Concrete Problems in AI Safety," arXiv:1606.06565, June 2016.
  • Universe, December 5, 2016: openai.com.
  • OpenAI's 2016 and 2017 tax filings (Abbeel's $425,000; ~52 people and ~$11M in 2016; $7.9M on cloud computing in 2017), via the New York Times, TechCrunch and Reuters; TechCrunch, May 17, 2023.
  • DeepMind's 2016 UK accounts (about 400 employees, $138M total costs), as reported at the time.
  • "OpenAI and Elon Musk," openai.com, March 5, 2024: "In early 2017, we came to the realization…"
  • Dario Amodei and Danny Hernandez, "AI and Compute," openai.com, May 2018: the 3.5-month doubling and 300,000x since 2012.
  • The International 2017 1v1 showmatch (KeyArena, Seattle, August 11, 2017): OpenAI's Dota 2 post; contemporaneous coverage in Inverse, MCV and The Flying Courier. Jakub Pachocki's quote: TechCrunch, August 2017.
  • Musk's tweets, August 12, 2017 ("first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports"; "Vastly more risk than North Korea").
  • Andrej Karpathy joins Tesla as Director of AI, June 2017.
  • OpenAI Five beats OG, April 13, 2019: openai.com.
  • Tay, Microsoft's Twitter chatbot, March 2016.

The Divorce

  • Musk v. Altman, N.D. Cal. No. 3:24-cv-04722: email exhibits (e.g. Dkt. 351-44, Exhibit 41, "Re: Honest Thoughts").
  • OpenAI, "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit" (Dec 13, 2024), which reproduces the emails, and "OpenAI and Elon Musk" (Mar 5, 2024): advocacy by one party to a lawsuit, attributed every time.
  • OpenAI, "OpenAI Supporters" (Feb 20, 2018).
  • Elon Musk's complaint and public statements, including his February 2019 post on Twitter as reported by the Associated Press.
  • Dario Amodei and Danny Hernandez, "AI and Compute" (OpenAI, May 16, 2018).

The Bet

  • OpenAI, "OpenAI LP" (Mar 11, 2019; Brockman, Sutskever).
  • OpenAI, "Better language models and their implications" (Feb 14, 2019) and its May 2019 interim update.
  • OpenAI, "Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI…" (Jul 22, 2019; Brockman).
  • OpenAI, "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit" (Dec 13, 2024): advocacy by a litigant, attributed every time.
  • The Guardian, Feb 14, 2019 (Alex Hern), for the headline and Jack Clark's quotes.
  • Microsoft/OpenAI joint release, Jul 22, 2019, for Nadella's quote.

The Escalator

  • OpenAI, "GPT-2: 1.5B release" (Nov 5, 2019).
  • Brown et al., "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," arXiv 2005.14165 (May 28, 2020).
  • OpenAI, "OpenAI API" (Jun 11, 2020; Brockman, Murati, Welinder).
  • Microsoft, Kevin Scott, "Microsoft teams up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3 language model" (Sep 22, 2020).
  • OpenAI, "Organizational update from OpenAI" (Dec 29, 2020).
  • The Guardian, Feb 14, 2019 (Clark).
  • Jared Kaplan et al., "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models," arXiv 2001.08361 (Jan 23, 2020).
  • Sam Altman, post on Twitter (Jul 19, 2020), as also quoted by MIT Technology Review (Jul 20, 2020).
  • The Guardian, "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?" (Sep 8, 2020), including its editor's note.