Court Exhibit·12 JUL 2017
Compute Is the Constraint, Not Cleverness
If the bottleneck is hardware, the winner is whoever buys the most of it first.
Source document — Musk v. Altman (OpenAI) — Docket 351-41 · Musk v. Altman (OpenAI) · 4:24-cv-04722 (CAND), Doc. 379-77, filed 2026-01-06
Excerpt · In Ilya Sutskever's own words
We usually decide that problems are hard because smart people have worked on them unsuccessfully for a long time. It's easy to think that this is true about AI. However, the past five years of progress have shown that the earliest and simplest ideas about AI - neural networks - were right all along, and we needed modern hardware to get them working. Historically, AI breakthroughs have consistently happened with models that take between 7-10 days to train. This means that hardware defines the surface of potential AI breakthroughs. It's not so much that AI progress is a hardware game, any more than physics is a particle accelerator game. But if our computers are too slow, no amount of cleverness will result in AGI, just like if a particle accelerator is too small, we have no shot at figuring out how the universe works. Fast enough computers are a necessary ingredient, and all past failures may have been caused by computers being too slow for AGI. We estimate that Brain has around 100k GPUs, FAIR has around 15-20k, and DeepMind allocates 50 per researcher no questions asked. There is good reason to believe that deep learning hardware will speed up 10x each year for the next four to five years. The world is used to the comparatively leisurely pace of Moore's Law, and is not prepared for the drastic changes in capability this hardware acceleration will bring. Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, and programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs.
Members · Archive
This edition is for members.
The daily letter is free. The archive — every prior edition, fully searchable — is for members. Sign in to start your free week.
$3/month · $30/year · cancel anytime
How this surfaced
- Source type
- Court Exhibit
- Case / record
- Musk v. Altman (OpenAI)
- Citation
- 4:24-cv-04722 (CAND), Doc. 379-77, filed 2026-01-06
- Date authored
- July 12, 2017
- License
- Public domain
- Original
- View the primary source →
More from Elon Musk
Sam Altman & Elon Musk ·OpenAI ·18 FEB 2023
How to Handle a Powerful Critic You Still Need
When a former ally attacks you in public, don't defend — pivot to asking what they'd do instead.
Mark Zuckerberg & Elon Musk ·Meta, Tesla/X ·13 DEC 2024
Zuckerberg Tells Musk Meta Backed His OpenAI Lawsuit
A brief December 2024 exchange reveals that Meta quietly aligned itself with Musk's legal challenge to OpenAI's nonprofit conversion, and that Zuckerberg moved immediately to manage the relationship directly.
Elon Musk & Andrej Karpathy ·OpenAI ·1 FEB 2018
If You Can't Win Open, Find a Cash Cow
Open research without a profit engine isn't idealism — it's free R&D for whoever has the bigger bank account.
Dario Amodei & Emil Michael ·Anthropic ·26 FEB 2026
How to Walk Away Without Burning the Bridge
When the other side rewrites your redlines into meaningless words, name the trick precisely — then keep the door open.
Sam Altman & Elon Musk ·OpenAI ·18 FEB 2023
How to Handle a Powerful Critic You Still Need
When a former ally attacks you in public, don't defend — pivot to asking what they'd do instead.
Mark Zuckerberg & Elon Musk ·Meta, Tesla/X ·13 DEC 2024
Zuckerberg Tells Musk Meta Backed His OpenAI Lawsuit
A brief December 2024 exchange reveals that Meta quietly aligned itself with Musk's legal challenge to OpenAI's nonprofit conversion, and that Zuckerberg moved immediately to manage the relationship directly.