In court testimony Monday, Ilya Sutskever said he voted with other OpenAI board members to fire Sam Altman as CEO because of longstanding concerns about his truthfulness and management style. But after Microsoft offered to hire all of OpenAI’s staff, and most threatened to quit, he supported Altman’s reinstatement. “I felt that, had I not done this, the company would be destroyed,” he said. (Reuters, Business Insider)

Talking point: OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk is suing Altman and the firm over its pursuit of a for-profit business model. Sutskever, an Israeli-Canadian computer scientist, is a pivotal figure in “the blip,” OpenAI staff’s term for the five-day period between Altman being fired and rehired. Sutskever left the ChatGPT maker shortly after to start Safe Superintelligence, a competing maker of foundation AI models. But he remains a major OpenAI shareholder, with a stake that could be worth US$7 billion, he told the court on Monday. Altman testified Tuesday.