I'm starting to get the feeling that there might be shenanigans going on around Sam Altman.
Next thing you know, we're going to find out that his name isn't even Sam Altman, OpenAI isn't open, and all the workers have been replaced with robots a la Disney's Black Hole movie from the 1980s.
When did Conde Nast/Advance Publications lose majority shareholder status for Reddit? That comment discusses it happening in 2015, but I've seen mixed citations for later dates, some claiming it still holds a majority stake.
Anonymous source close to the OpenAI situation, according to the Financial Times: "His superpower is getting people onside, shaping narratives, pushing situations into the shape that work for him."
Paul Graham: "Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful."
Yeah, trying to read between the lines of what pg has said/written about sama (and obviously I'm just some rando bullshitting, so what do I know) it seems like he is genuinely in awe of a lot of Sam's capabilities, but he also has some real concerns about his ethics (e.g. when the report came out relatively recently that Sam was fired as YCom president).
Given this background, while I might normally take the comment that "We wanted to get started quickly and the easiest way to do that due to our structure was to put it in Sam's name" at face value, there has been enough past shenanigans that I don't buy that.
The YCombinator application that pg created had a question asking CEOs to tell a story about how they unethical they achieved a goal. He called it "bring naughty" and "hacking a system".
Hiring sama wasn't a a surprise twist. sama was who pg knew he wanted.
> asking CEOs to tell a story about how they unethical they achieved a goal.
I know what you're talking about, and in my opinion that's a gross misrepresentation (that, unfortunately, I've often seen repeated). I think people can judge the actual statement on its own merits, from paulgraham.com/founders.html:
> 4. Naughtiness
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
It really is impressive how some people seem to be able to embed themselves so well in an industry. Not many people have the drive to pull it off, even fewer have the circumstances.
> "We wanted to get started quickly and the easiest way to do that due to our structure was to put it in Sam's name," an OpenAI spokesperson tells Axios. "We have always intended for this to be temporary."
Is some journalist mapping out all the financials, governance structures, and history of OpenAI, and can explain to the rest of us what it all means?
Maybe especially interesting would be determining the intentions of each of the various founders and funders.
(I have different snap reactions to some individual and company names involved, based on other history, but know little of their intentions with OpenAI specifically.)
SolarCity? Tsla saved them when he rolled them into Tesla. Anyone who picked up TSLA shares from that purchase did significantly better than they ever would have as solarcity.
Parallels to Twitter pre-Musk. Altman has been controversial since his days (literally) as Reddit CEO. Yishan had some thoughts on X about the shake up at OpenAI and how they relate to Sam (and Microsoft).
The capital class prefers hungry young sociopaths with flexible morals. I don't know Sam, so I can't say that he's a sociopath, but he certainly is hungry and the morals seem flexible.
Barring some kind of life-changing event (religious conversion, serious accident, birth of a child, etc.), people tend to continue on the path they were on before.
I don't know enough about Altman's previous business dealings to judge, but is this part of a pattern of behavior?
I think the main pattern of behaviour here is that someone who realized the idealists around him believed he was switching to a profit model and licensing their tech to Microsoft out of philanthropic intent ended up assuming that they (and others) would be dumb enough to swallow the idea a $175m venture capital fund quietly spun off what is now the world's most-hyped company gave him full control and all the profits out of lack of resource to figure out any other arrangements...
Your comment is impossible to read because of some severe grammar mistakes, lack of punctuation and the fact that it is one long sentence.
Here is the corrected version:
Someone realized the idealists around him truly believed that he was switching to a for profit model out of philanthropic intent.
That same person assumed, that the idealists would be dumb enough to let him quietly spin off a venture capital fund off the world's most hyped company.
They let him get away with it (my interpretation), by giving him full control and all the profits, out of lack of resources to figure out any other arrangement.
Seems like a great way incentivize the CEO to prioritize developer experience. Maybe Google could follow a similar incentive plan to improve Gemini developer experience.
I find it interesting they keep saying “small investment”. What does that mean? By all accounts Andy Bechtolsheim made a “small investment” in Google, and it turned him into a billionaire. Even back then $100k was a rounding error in funding for a startup.
I don’t care if someone thinks the amount invested was small, I care how much equity that investment resulted in.
I can't even find any evidence to back the claim the Altman owns it... he is listed in that SEC filing you linked to lists him as the manager of the general partner. As CEO of OpenAI, it is exactly what I would expect to see on such a filing. The Axios article provides no source at all.
It appears to be a big nothing-sandwich or maybe some sort of conspiracy to manufacture a conspiracy or something...
I think it's too late for that, my friend. crypto meaning bitcoin is a word that even the idiots have come to know. in today's blessed society, no intellectual subject will supplant that
or alternatively an illustration that the not-for-profit model is horrendously improperly regulated. what is the point of not-for-profit, if it immediately becomes for-profit as soon as it has anything of value?
86 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadNext thing you know, we're going to find out that his name isn't even Sam Altman, OpenAI isn't open, and all the workers have been replaced with robots a la Disney's Black Hole movie from the 1980s.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
Sam even acknowledges past shenanigans.
2017: https://www.vox.com/2017/7/31/16037126/reddit-funding-200-mi...
2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/reddit-eyeing-ipo-charge-mil...
2024: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/01/18/reddit-pl...
On the other hand, Wikipedia claims without source that AP has a 30% stake in Reddit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
Paul Graham: "Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful."
Given this background, while I might normally take the comment that "We wanted to get started quickly and the easiest way to do that due to our structure was to put it in Sam's name" at face value, there has been enough past shenanigans that I don't buy that.
I know what you're talking about, and in my opinion that's a gross misrepresentation (that, unfortunately, I've often seen repeated). I think people can judge the actual statement on its own merits, from paulgraham.com/founders.html:
> 4. Naughtiness
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
https://fortune.com/2024/02/04/sam-altman-one-person-unicorn...?
Is some journalist mapping out all the financials, governance structures, and history of OpenAI, and can explain to the rest of us what it all means?
Maybe especially interesting would be determining the intentions of each of the various founders and funders.
(I have different snap reactions to some individual and company names involved, based on other history, but know little of their intentions with OpenAI specifically.)
Andrej Karpathy was the smart and nice guy of OpenAI, and he is not there anymore.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-11/openai...
Often illegal to do this too egregiously.
I'm still waiting for Elon to get reamed over SolarCity. Oh wait, he never will, and will strong arm the company into giving him another 12% of TSLA.
The nonprofit doesn't pay taxes. Nonprofit buys it's supplies from a for-profit. You mark up the supplies and buy them from the for-profit.
Organize costs so that the for-profit incurs all the costs and the non-profit gets most of the revenue.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012216/how-i....
b)If you do that, why have the not-for-profit incurring costs? Just put it all where there's no company tax.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
||Sam Altman’s $7 Trillion ‘Moonshot’
"Adam also owned the rights to the 'We’ trademark, which the firm decided they must own and paid the founder/CEO $US5.9 million for the rights.
||Sam Altman owns OpenAI's venture capital fund
not saying this is apples to apples, but go on...
You may not owe $celebrity or $billionaire better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The capital class prefers hungry young sociopaths with flexible morals. I don't know Sam, so I can't say that he's a sociopath, but he certainly is hungry and the morals seem flexible.
Sam Altman: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
I don't know enough about Altman's previous business dealings to judge, but is this part of a pattern of behavior?
Here is the corrected version:
Someone realized the idealists around him truly believed that he was switching to a for profit model out of philanthropic intent.
That same person assumed, that the idealists would be dumb enough to let him quietly spin off a venture capital fund off the world's most hyped company.
They let him get away with it (my interpretation), by giving him full control and all the profits, out of lack of resources to figure out any other arrangement.
He's involved in the eye scanning shitcoin 'Worldcoin'.[0] Personally, I assume anyone involved in crypto has suspicious motives at best.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
Well, Paul had to fire Sam from Y Combinator, so there's that.
I don’t care if someone thinks the amount invested was small, I care how much equity that investment resulted in.
And at 175m commit it isn't even that big of a fund.
Also not entirely convinced the author knows what a fund is.
>It always had outside limited partners
>it's legally owned by Altman.
He controls the GP but there are at least 14 LPs. That's not what I'd call "own".
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1877240/000187724023...
It appears to be a big nothing-sandwich or maybe some sort of conspiracy to manufacture a conspiracy or something...
One of them is a young man with questionable ethics who pretended to be altruistic to become wildly rich. The other is involved in dodgy crypto stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
[1]: Don't let them steal the shorthand for cryptography from us.