OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

Another part also says: "After Musk announced he was resigning from OpenAI in February 2018, Musk gave a departing speech at an all-hands meeting, Brockman testified. In front of about 40 OpenAI employees, Musk said that he was leaving because the only viable path that he saw forward was for OpenAI to merge with Tesla. However, the other leaders did not think so, Musk said, choosing a different path that Musk would never choose. According to Brockman, the speech was meant to lower morale at OpenAI, as workers understood that Musk was leaving to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI) at Tesla because he no longer had confidence in OpenAI."

Still his goals was to merge with Tesla... Ain't this also steal a charity?

Doing fractional Head of AI work for mid-market operators for the past year, I get the same question every discovery call: "what happens to my data and my workflow if [vendor] gets bought, sued, or pivots?"

The Brockman diary is the rare moment where the people running the vendor write the answer in their own words, in real time. What it actually shows is the people closest to the conversion knew the governance risk was real and contested. Not an argument for picking sides between Musk and Altman. An argument for the boring practitioner version: if your business depends on a model API, your contract and your switching cost are the only things that matter. The internal ethics of the vendor are not a hedge.

We default to Claude for client work right now with the explicit caveat that we'd swap to whichever model is best and cheapest in 18 months, and we structure the stack so they can. That's the lesson the diary should put on every CTO's whiteboard, regardless of who they think is the bad actor.

> This is pretty damning for OpenAI

I don't see how. Cases are decided by facts and law, not feelings -- except to the extent those feelings are probative of state of mind, which is relevant for some legal issues but not others. My understanding is that the crux of the case is on the extent to which a number of informal messages should be considered a binding contract.

Trying to go from a single admission like this to an overall legal conclusion is a lot like seeing a single line in a program and then concluding there's a bug -- without having ever seen the rest of the program. You might think "this line always crashes, " but actually it's never called (does not go to any matter at issue), or none of the terms mean what you think they mean, etc.

From what I heard at the time, Elon was running OpenAI as, to some degree an element of the Elon keritsu. Neurallink was upstairs from OpenAI, and OpenAI badges would open doors at Tesla and vice-versa. Elon will also move people from one of his companies to another if the need arises. I think some of the OpenAI execs were very upset when he moved Karpathy from OpenAI to Tesla to take over Autopilot.

Ofcourse you can steal a charity! So long as it's not _his_ charity.

Though as far as I can tell the charity which Musk put about $30m into still exists and holds 26% of OpenAI's commercial arm valued at ~200bn. So rather than being stolen it's still there and with 7000x as much assets? Not sure how that plays out legally? It looks hard for Musk to win to me. IANAL.

He kept them on his work laptop, and they were swept up in discovery. Don't ignore your security team when they talk about data protection and not doing personal business on work devices.

If you learn anything from this, it's that anything you write can ultimately show up in court. You have no right to privacy and your written words, no matter where they are written, are subject to be taken as evidence.

Yes it feels intrusive, but it's literally the first thing a lawyer would ask for.

Discovery is a lot more intrusive than people expect.

Discovery is terribly intrusive and invasive, more than you would ever think.

It's one of the huge reasons that lawsuits are often settled, because ain't nobody want all the dirty laundry aired.

Discovery asking for a peon's diary is likely to get squashed pretty easily, discovery asking for the president's personal diary is likely to be approved if there's an argument it applies (and likely you'll see what happened here, it's provided sealed, and if both sides agree it's applicable, it's unsealed).

They do it to keep track of the stories they have told different people.

Jounaling is a habit of most of the highly successful people I know (granted, that's a single-digit number, so TIFWIW).

Journaling is widely recognized as a positive for mental health I think?

> I’m too paranoid to write a diary, even a handwritten one, and I’m literally a nobody.

Also a nobody and I feel this. See also: therapy, I'm sure I would/could benefit from it but I have zero trust that those records wouldn't be leaked/stolen/compelled in the future. Especially with the current US government, I wouldn't want a (more of a) record of "wrongthink" (whatever the window shifts to make that in the future).

Yeah, the Framers of the constitution felt the same as you and the 5th amendment used to apply to your belongings as well so a diary you wrote couldn't be used against you.

You have options:

- Don't write it down.

- Delete it before you're subpoenaed.

- Mail it to your attorney.

This is the angle I think is going to matter for everyone reading.

A growing share of operators I work with use ChatGPT and Claude the way Brockman used a private journal: to think out loud, draft messy first thoughts, vent about colleagues, work through hard decisions. They treat the chat window as an extension of the inside of their head.

It's not. Every prompt is logged on the vendor side and is discoverable in litigation. Most enterprise buyers I deal with have not connected this dot. Their company's policy on email retention is rigorous; their policy on AI chat retention is "default settings, whatever those are."

Brockman's diary being read aloud in court is going to do for AI chat history what email did for casual workplace correspondence twenty years ago. People are going to start writing as if a lawyer might read it eventually. And the thoughtful internal candor that kept companies honest is going to migrate somewhere even less discoverable, or stop happening at all.

Have you considered shredding the journal pages after?

The simple solution is to "not write your private thoughts on someone else's loaned paper".

Keep your personal life to personal paper and personal devices. Don't write your life out onto something subject to discovery by someone else's legal department.

have to use a local llm for that if thats how you wish to use them.

Would he have had to provide it if it were locked in a safe?

He would have to reveal it, and refusing to decrypt would be a contempt of court charge, or a "jury, presume that everything in this damn document is the worst you can imagine."

This is why politicians don't write things down and can 'never recall'.

With a duress password, it could have allowed him to destroy it, but that itself would be illegal and he'd likely be found in contempt of court and probably with some other charges related to tampering with evidence. But he wouldn't have had to have read it in court. IANAL

I'm imagining a Dungeon Crawler Carl style view-meter that shows more people tuning in as he gets to some juicier parts of his journal. B-b-b-b-b-b-b-osss BATTLE!!!!

That just means HN anti-flamewar has been triggered, it’s fairly standard on this site for controversial topics

> anymore?

This is how discovery has always worked.

> submitted

Doesn't necessarily mean they volunteered it. Either submission or the unsealing could have been in response to a subpoena or court ruling.

Maybe the solution is to write at the top of your journal that you are cc'ing your lawyer on it. (Not legal advice!)

Because he had them on an OpenAI device and when OpenAI lawyers saw them, they knew they would be penalized more if they hid them. This happens a lot, I believe it was a Sony lawsuit where personal emails on work devices exposed a number of affairs unrelated to the case because it was all part of discovery.

It's actually very helpful! Even just to keep track of what you did and how you were feeling on a given day.

I didn't keep one for a long time because I grew up in a household where I didn't feel secure - if I had a journal my parents would have snooped for sure. As I've gotten older I (a) see the value in remembering the past (b) feel more trust in the people around me.

Highly recommend trying a journalling habit for a month. It's also very satisfying to do it in a little notebook with a pen instead of typing. It feels more tangible.

It is actually a decent sized community. As someone who works in technology, I enjoy the aspect of actually creating something physical when so much is ones and zeros on silicone. While not daily, I try to journal regularly as a practice to slow down, focus my thoughts, and use it as therapy to get frustrations/emotions/musings out so I can move on.

I do! It's cathartic and peaceful. :)

What's the big deal if people do? Why judge? Why even... care? :)

Sometimes a sentence can end with a question mark but demonstrate the diametric opposite of curiosity.

As others have said journals are pretty neat and actually live on a spectrum where the chronological aspect is the common defining feature. By that I mean you can keep something like a gratitude journal where you write daily a set number of things you are grateful that day (after a bad flu I was grateful to be able to swallow without pain for example) or at the other end you have work journals to keep track of what you've done on that day if you ascribe to the CYA professional principle. For a while I kept a physical bullet journal but at some point I went digital instead.

Generally speaking even the "Dear diary," style of journal is helpful, if not to gather your thoughts and reflect then at least to practice writing.