Ilya Sutskever to Musk — A New Year's note of thanks
Unsealed in the 2026 Musk v. OpenAI litigation. On New Year's Day 2018, OpenAI's chief scientist thanks Musk for pushing him beyond his academic comfort zone (blind-copying Greg Brockman).
I enjoy working together. You quickly pushed me out of my academic comfort zone … I can think of many examples, the biggest one is the decision to build the custom hardware. — Ilya