Internal Tech Emails Canon vs OpenAI Non-Profit to For-Profit

Public:“Google fosters an open culture of discussion. We take document retention and legal compliance seriously across all executive communications.”

Private:“Also can we change the setting of this group to history off please.”

Public:“People use Google because it's helpful, not because they have to. Competition is just one click away on the web. Anyone can switch their search provider in a few seconds.”

Private:“Defaults are the most powerful weapon in search... queries drop 80% on devices where Google is not set as the out-of-the-box default engine. Losing default placement is an existential threat to our search volume.”

Public:“We never saw ourselves in a platform war with Google. They decided to compete with us, but we just focus on making great products that delight users.”

Private:“2011: Holy War with Google... all out effort to tie all our products together, further lock customers into our ecosystem... catch up to Android where we are behind (notifications, tethering, speech).”

Public:“Our goal in acquiring gaming studios is to bring more games to more people on more devices, not to pull games from competitor platforms or disadvantage PlayStation gamers.”

Private:“We (Microsoft) are in a very unique position to be able to go out of business Sony... It is practically impossible for anyone to start a new video streaming service at scale at this point... spending $2B or $3B in 2020 to avoid a situation where Tencent, Google, Amazon, or Sony become the Disney of games is well worth it.”

Public:“Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! Fundamental to our mission is to be the most respected advertising platform in the world.”

Private:“A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues... if they boycott, they can go fuck themselves.”

Public:“We were wrong to be open source in the past. As models become more powerful, safety dictates that sharing weights is a bad idea. Closed models are about safety.”

Private:“Exclusive commercial licensing of model weights to Microsoft is vital to secure the multi-billion-dollar compute allocations required to maintain competitive dominance against Google.”

Public:“Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!”

Private:“Musk: What did you get done this week? I am not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

Public:“Elon Musk will depart the board as OpenAI enters an advanced phase. This will eliminate a potential future conflict of interest with Tesla's self-driving AI work.”

Private:“Musk: 'OpenAI has zero chance of beating Google DeepMind without massive capital. My assessment is that OpenAI should be attached to Tesla as its cash cow.' Altman & Brockman: 'We cannot agree to Elon having full control and majority ownership.'”

Public:“Our 30% fee is fair compensation for the incredible platform, security, and curation we offer. We treat every developer equally without playing favorites.”

Private:“Jobs: I think this is all pretty simple: iBooks is going to be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We should tell Amazon: you either use our in-app payment and pay us 30%, or you can not be in the App Store. Let’s make them pay.”

Public:“We believe deeply in user privacy, data security, and end-to-end encryption. Protecting our community’s data is the central priority across everything we build.”

Private:“Whenever someone asks about Snapchat, the answer is that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics... Given how quickly they are growing, it seems important to figure out a new approach. Can we establish a kit using Onavo to decrypt their SSL traffic? You should figure out how to do this.”

Public:“We're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. We need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.”

Private:“One business idea behind buying them is to neutralize a potential competitor... What we are really buying is time. Even if some new competitors spring-up, buying Instagram... will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.”

Public:“We integrate Internet Explorer into Windows purely for the convenience of our customers. Consumers benefit from free, innovative software seamlessly connected to the operating system.”

Private:“We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they are selling, we are going to give away for free until they suffocate and can no longer fund development.”

Public:“We have a great relationship with Google. We carry their search on the iPhone, we carry their Maps on the iPhone. We're partners with them on many things.”

Private:“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

Public:“Microsoft is dedicated to an open computing ecosystem where multiple multimedia formats compete on technological merit and developer enthusiasm.”

Private:“Do they have anything else we could threaten them with? We need to push them to cancel QuickTime... if they don’t agree, we should pull Office for Mac and kill their authoring business.”

Public:“OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

Private:“We need to structure a startup-like equity compensation plan or researchers will simply take the $2M offers at DeepMind. The non-profit structure is great for optics and mission, but we need equity upside to retain talent.”

Public:“I have no equity in OpenAI. I make enough money for health insurance and that's it. I do this because I love the work.”

Private:“Transitioning OpenAI from a non-profit-controlled entity into a Delaware public benefit corporation, creating an equity stake for CEO Sam Altman valued at tens of billions of dollars.”