Elon Mails

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The OpenAI Company

Elon Musk to Ilya Sutskever, Pamela Vagata, Vicki Cheung, Diederik Kingma, Andrej Karpathy, John D. Schulman, Trevor Blackwell and Greg Brockman, December 11, 2015

Musk writes to the founding OpenAI team on the day OpenAI was publicly announced.

Exhibit
From
Elon Musk
Sent
Friday, December 11, 2015 4:41 PM
To
Ilya Sutskever, Pamela Vagata, Vicki Cheung, Diederik Kingma, Andrej Karpathy, John D. Schulman, Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman
Cc
Sam Altman
Subject
The OpenAI Company
Congratulations on a great beginning! We are outmanned and outgunned by a ridiculous margin by organizations you know well, but we have right on our side and that counts for a lot. I like the odds. Our most important consideration is recruitment of the best people. The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it. If we are able to attract the most talented people over time and our direction is correctly aligned, then OpenAI will prevail. To this end, please give a lot of thought to who should join. If I can be helpful with recruitment or anything else, I am at your disposal. I would recommend paying close attention to people who haven't completed their grad or even undergrad, but are obviously brilliant. Better to have them join before they achieve a breakthrough. Looking forward to working together, Elon
EMX-000030

The whole thread

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  2. Nov 22, 2015 Elon Musk Blog sounds good, assuming adjustments for neutrality vs being YC-centric. I'd favor positioning the blog to…
  3. Dec 8, 2015 Elon Musk It is super important to get the opening summary section right. This will be what everyone reads and what the…
  4. Dec 11, 2015 Elon Musk Congratulations on a great beginning! We are outmanned and outgunned by a ridiculous margin by organizations…