The ongoing Musk v. Altman lawsuit has seen the release of various internal emails relating to OpenAI, which for now are mostly focused on the early years of the company's founding, over roughly the period 2016-2020. OpenAI wasn't nearly as prominent as it would later become, but one of the surprising elements is the involvement of Valve founder and CEO Gabe Newell, who seems to have acted as both an "informal advisor" and put his money where his mouth is.
The first email mentioning this is from Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk. Zilis is a tech venture capitalist who held a seat on OpenAI's board until 2023, and was also romantically involved with Musk: they have four children together. Based on these and other emails, Zilis was both working for OpenAI and providing Musk with the inside track on what was happening.
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In that case, at least, it's easy to see where Newell's interests align. He's the founder of Starfish Neuroscience, which is designing a minimally invasive neural interface chip. In other emails Newell discusses neuroscience interests with Musk.
"For a long time I thought neuromodulation (e.g. rTMS) was weird, mainly because I had an unsophisticated understanding of a bunch of aspects of the brain," wrote Newell. "I've more or less done a 180, and think there is a significant near-term consumer market. Is this something I should bring up with the Neuralink team? If so, anyone in particular I should chat with there?"
Musk gives him some contacts before saying Neuralink has "made some pretty insane technical progress. This is highly confidential, but we're now able to implant ~6000 electrodes in a monkey brain with decent signal / noise. Moreover, the electronics are compact enough to be flush with the skull and the only thing visible is the USB-C opening and slight surround. Very trippy. Just like Neuromancer."
The Musk v. Altman lawsuit continues. Among the other revelations are that, after Hideo Kojima visited Valve in 2018, Newell emailed Musk trying to set up a tour of SpaceX for Kojima: who really, really wants to go to space.