That phrasing struck me as oddly limp. They would have been “fine” for their president to stay At his job? That’s not exactly a strong statement of support. If my boss told me they’d be “fine” if I stayed at my job I’d be pretty worried.
You're overanalysing something that wasn't the actual word used, and is an accurate word. We might all be a bit used to hyperbole, but the lack of it doesn't imply anything. Stop reading into it.
It's also the kind of thing you'd say if you knew that their heart isn't in it.
I don't think this press release (is it that?) does a very good job of dispelling the rumors that it wasn't entirely mutual, though. He ought to have said something like "delighted to have him stay".
pg disputing the narrative that Sam was forced out for being dishonest is totally valid, there is just some real interesting language parsing here to rule this not a “firing”. He lost employment at his employer’s behest and it wasn’t a layoff.
I think Sam has amassed a net worth enough to live comfortably not having to work another day in his life.
To me that changes the meaning of "fired". I'd read it as "co-entrepeneurs parting ways". Yes one of the co-entrepeneurs has more say in who stays and who goes. But even if there was an employment contract, I'd see it more as a good/bad leave clause when no body loses their much required primary source of income.
I'm not saying he's technically fired or not (i think "fired" is a term with a law-definition).
I'm saying that he prolly has a deal at OpenAI with some stock and a good/bad leaver agreement, and a salary. Getting fired in this cases is not the same as firing someone who has zero stock and needs the jobs to put food on the table.
It just does not carry the same weight for me, regardless of the lawful definition.
Yeah. The provided explanation certainly sounds like firing to me. If he had been performing at a level worthy of his continued employment he wouldn't have gotten the ultimatum.
It doesn't sound like he was incapable of doing that - just incapable of doing that while also running OpenAI.
Not that I’m looking to take any side here, but they could see it as a conflict of interest, especially given YC may wish to invest in competitors, which wouldn’t have anything to do with performance.
It was involuntary that is the point . It was not Sam idea to leave YC at the time
Your remote work example is not different companies ask a performance improvement plan they are saying improve your performance or leave. That “ or leave” doesn’t always mean you get fired legally , some companies would be more generous with severance if you resign voluntarily, but it doesn’t alter the fact you were asked to do so and effectively were fired.
Senior management typically leave by mutual agreement even if they “asked to resign”.
His employment was not terminated by YC legally yes , that would be rare and would happen if there is no trust left that he would do so properly when asked to resign, like it happened in OpenAI for him .
I don't think an employer can legally force that, can they? They can request that employees stop working from home, and they can fire them if they refuse. Forcing them to come to the office would be kidnapping.
It does indeed sound a lot like firing. But what if the conversation went like this:
PG: Quit your second job or be fired
Altman: You can't fire me, because I quit
PG: Great, as thanks for going quietly I'll tell everyone you "weren't fired"
It's a firing for all practical purposes, sure. But technically Altman voluntarily resigned.
This is actually somewhat common when firing people - if you ever find yourself in a disciplinary meeting with HR and you know you're about to get fired, you can just resign right then and there, one second before they tell you you're fired, and they'll accept. You sacrifice the right to sue for unfair dismissal, in exchange they'll tell future employers that you left voluntarily and weren't fired.
> They can and will tell future employers that you suck and aren’t eligible for rehire though.
I believe that's increasingly uncommon, I believe due to legal risk. I think it's usually the case that HR will only verify the bare objective facts of employment: dates of service, title, salary, etc.
I also know of at least one company where policy states everyone who leaves involuntarily is not eligible for rehire, and that includes people who were laid off due to downsizing/site closures/etc. So "not eligible for rehire" my not indicate any performance or behavioral issues.
You also sacrifice unemployment benefits in many cases, which costs businesses time to administer and risks fines and higher insurance rates. So, a lot of businesses will pressure you to quit instead of being fired, since it's easier for them.
(this whole terminology debate is so futile and useless, mental food for the bored. WTF cares which exact colorful sticker we put on disagreements and the consequent parting. It's over, carry on.)
I live in Germany, a country infamous for its strong employee protections. It’s very hard to fire someone here. Yet, I don’t see how this is in any way unjust. Your employer pays you for putting your skills and time to their use.
If you start working on a side gig, that will take up a chunk of your time and invariably occupy your brain; thus, your employer doesn’t get their full value out of you anymore. Up to a certain degree, employers (have) to tolerate this—in Germany, that would be when your performance at your job starts to suffer from it. But once your commitment to the side gig increases so much that you’re about to become CEO, there’s no reasonable way to claim you can still carry out your contractual duties to your employer.
If your employer then offers you to either step down from that side gig or lose your employment, that is completely reasonable and frankly something you should expect?
Put differently, if you pay me to paint your shed, and after finishing the front side I went off and painted my own house with the rest of the paint, you certainly wouldn’t consider the job done or full payment to be justified.
Then you are dreaming (because of course running a second demanding company will affect your work, in some way, not necessarily negatively) but, more importantly, people might disagree about the impact and either side would have a hard time proving anything. So probably be upfront about the rules and make a choice, when you have to.
Well in Germany specifically it's a legal issue (and some other EU countries), because there are labour market laws stipulating the maximum amount of time someone can work per week (48hrs).
Sure, you can fly under the radar if you're working on your own business/start-up by simply lying about the hours worked, but if you're doing paid work for another employer it will be obvious, and they would not be legally able to employ you if total working time goes above 48hrs/week.
That may work if you’re coding in you’re spare time on a side project that may turn into a business at some point. But even then, you’re going to be more tired and drained at your main job—humans just aren’t capable of working two jobs for a prolonged amount of time without one of them being negatively affected. Sure, you might be the one out of thousands that manages. But most are not.
And we’re not talking about creating a small online T-shirt store, but being CEO of a venture backed organisation to evolve the state of AI. There’s just no way to pull that off.
As you live in Germany, you know that many members of boards and C-Levels serve so in multiple companies. There is a difference in being a regular employee and C-Level/Board level.
There’s a huge difference between c-level and board responsibilities. I think it’s generally not wise for c-levels to be at multiple companies. Board is a totally different role
This is common the world over. Board roles typically aren't meant to be full time. However executive officer (chief or otherwise) roles typically are.
I'm sure people can manage doing one of both (so long as there is no conflicts of interest). Heck, now that I think of it, technically I'm a chief science officer of a startup and a casual employee of a university...
> If you start working on a side gig, that will take up a chunk of your time and invariably occupy your brain; thus, your employer doesn’t get their full value out of you anymore.
It's the same if you have a family, an interest, or any semblance of a life really.
That’s true, but a generally accepted fact of life employers have to cope with. They don’t have to cope with employees taking on another responsibility next to their existing job and family.
As long as it doesn’t interfere with you performing your contractual duties to your employer? Sure. Although that can include showing up to work tired because you spent your night tending a bar, using knowledge acquired at your primary job for your side gig, or being unfocused in meetings because you constantly think about the other venture.
So instead, you might just want to check with your employer beforehand and talk about what they’re cool with. Something Sams could have chosen to do, but did not, apparently.
No, you resigned. It’s completely possible to have adult conversations and to part ways without being terminated for cause (which “fired” is a euphemism for).
Departure by mutual agreement can be a secret way of getting fired, but if both parties go out of their way to deny it was a firing, then I've no reason to doubt them. Even silence by one or both, which allows doubts to remain, isn't enough to be positive evidence that it was actually a firing, owing to the legal implications of different causes of departure in different jurisdictions.
I've had several job contracts which say I'm not allowed to have another job at the same time unless I have written permission, which they can't say no to without good reason — "This has become a conflict of interest, pick one" or "both of these are now full time, pick one" seem like reasonable grounds to for an employer to rescind permission.
(It's also one of the ways Musk gets flack, given how many companies he's CEO/CTO/president of).
I think you'll find that humans do many things that aren't necessary, particuarly when they're trying to convey something and it helps the reader understand
CEO of one of the most insert your chosen adjective here tech companies and formerly ran YC which runs Hackernews. I can't imagine a topic that this website would care about more…
"We didn't want him to leave, we were very happy that he went off and started a different company while he was working for us, and when we asked him to please either work full time at the job we're paying for, he quit".
I know that Silicon Valley VC is all about relationships (read: not calling out shitty behaviour) but it's difficult to spin someone just full on walking off the job.
It's not a reigning in if he quit. It sounds a lot like Sam went off and found another job, didn't bother to quit his old one, and when challenged... quit.
I'm sure PG and many others don't want to get on the bad side of someone who controls a decent amount of deal flow, but really it's pretty obvious that's unacceptable behaviour. It's the same thing that happens with Elon Musk - people run around excusing the shitty things he does, but if you drill down the excuse is basically "Elon Musk controls a bunch of things that could line my pocket and I don't want to piss him off", that doesn't suddenly make things ethical.
Reigning in an enthusiastic person they know, not an employee.
> It sounds a lot like Sam went off and found another job, didn't bother to quit his old one
He didn't "find another job", or that's a silly way to put it. He was already was running OpenAI not for profit. When that company decided to create a for-profit subsidiary, and SA to go with it, is when they said to him he couldn't be both.
> and when challenged... quit.
If you're saying he wasn't fired, you're right. He chose to leave and move to another company full time. That's what makes this such a dull topic.
Anyway - breaking this down point by point is unnecessary, because it's all in the original Tweet, and you're still saying what you're saying.
I mean sure... if you redefine Sam as not an employee then you can definitely argue he wasn't fired. Also, you seem to imply that OpenAI decided to start a non-from profit but.. isn't that just... Sam? Like Sam was running the non-for-profit, Sam decided to start a for-profit part of it -and from what we know of what went on at OpenAI it seems like Sam was the one driving that. So you're presenting this as if this was thrust upon Sam, but so far all we've seen seems to indicate the exact opposite, that all the way along Sam has been the one driving this.
To be clear, I'm not saying he was fired. I'm saying he acted unethically, pushed PG to the point where he gave an ultimatum and then quit, but PG is smart enough not to burn bridges.
> if you redefine Sam as not an employee then you can definitely argue he wasn't fired
No, I'm saying the "reigning in" was a personal one, not an employee one. Obviously Sam was an employee.
> So you're presenting this as if this was thrust upon Sam
No, I'm not. I'm saying he didn't go and find another job. His role changed with OpenAI's structure change, and he probably didn't think it through as to him it was a gradual transition.
> I'm saying he acted unethically, pushed PG to the point where he gave an ultimatum and then quit, but PG is smart enough not to burn bridges.
Okay. At this point we're just doing celebrity gossip, but with tech celebrities. I've no idea if your guess is correct or not.
Well PG, you didn't let him stay. Not to imply that you were the bad guy, or this was a bad decision. The idea that you fired sam was certainly a lot more gangster than this story.
In light of sams public perception I find it interesting that PG is clearing the air NOW.
EDIT: it needs to be stated that "when we found out from a press release that our CEO would be double dipping at another for profit venture..." is shitty way to find out your CEO is moonlighting. The fact that you DIDNT fire him on the spot isnt the best look.
YMMV : sometimes, X seems to force being connected. Sometimes not. And when not, it sometimes bury the tweet in lot of popups to ask you to connect which makes it very painful to access the information.
So, yeah, if people could stop assuming everybody can read X/Linkedin/Facebook, that would be nice…
Sometimes twitter just decides that it's had enough of you and won't show anything. I can't figure out what triggers this but one day you'll find you can't see anything, and then the next day you'll be able to view it just fine.
Twitter is quickly becoming as bad as discord for siloing information.
> […] you can see it all without needing to be logged in.
No, you can't, Twitter is degenerating further:
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
[Try Again]
/!\ Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com
(Weird how no other website has issues like this…)
This just means that there are exceptions for twitter.com that haven't been switched to x.com. I use uBlock Origin with all scripts and third party resources blocked by default and got this page when they switched to x.com, but it works once you unblock the same stuff on x.com that was unblocked on twitter.com.
The exception is that some accounts still require login to read. I'm not sure why but I'm guessing that it might be a per account setting that won't be set by accounts that haven't logged in for a long time (I don't have an acount to check). Actually, worble and ploum's comments below would explain what I see, I usually don't try to check the same content twice (or anything all that often) so I wouldn't notice if it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
> (Weird how no other website has issues like this…)
The Firefox 126 preferences UI for the "Strict" setting shows this warning:
"Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or content to break."
When the panel for that setting is expanded, it shows an additional warning:
"Heads up! This setting may cause some websites to not display content or work correctly. If a site seems broken, you may want to turn off tracking protection for that site to load all content."
Presumably such problems are not unexpected or unheard of if two warnings are deemed necessary for that setting.
Slight problem: you're assuming I use Firefox and have that setting on "Strict". Only half of that assumption is correct: I use Firefox. But the setting is on "Standard"…
(I'm not a web person, so I'll save my speculation on what is breaking there, but Twitter is the only webpage I experience as broken. It is absolutely possible I mucked around with some setting 5 years ago and completely forgot about it. Or Twitter is doing weird things. Probably a combination of both.)
We can't know before clicking whether it's a single image, single statement, or 800-tweet essay that should have been a blog post. (Unless someone tells us, as you did here).
All too often it's the latter, meaning anyone without an account can't see the content, meaning it has zero value. No way in hell am I creating an account. So the conclusion is twitter links are now useless.
I was a curious cat - what a weird place. Lots of discussions about "jews", anime and how hard white people have it. Feels a bit like *chan displayed on a Twitter-like UI.
> People have been claiming YC fired Sam Altman. That's not true. Here's what actually happened. For several years he was running both YC and OpenAI, but when OpenAI announced that it was going to have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO, we (specifically Jessica) told him that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI, we should find someone else to run YC, and he agreed. If he'd said that he was going to find someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could focus 100% on YC, we'd have been fine with that too. We didn't want him to leave, just to choose one or the other.
For context, Helen Tonor [0] was a board member of OpenAI before they tried to fire Sam Altman. She claimed that Sam was fired by YC in a recent interview [1]. In the interview, she implied that Sam's firing at YC was kept quiet and that there was something underhanded about it.
I think that the split seems amicable, but from a 10k view “we had a convo telling Sam he couldn’t do both at once” leading to him leaving rhymes with a firing. Sometimes this stuff can be amicable!
He had a choice to either go to work the next day or not as he preferred. That isn't a firing in the usual sense of the word. As described it is an amicable end to his time at YC that was agreed on by both parties.
If people really want to describe that as "fired" there is no stopping them. But it isn't. PG is more correct than that quadrant of the backseat managers.
Paul said they'd have "been fine" with Sam staying, which is different than wanting him to stay:
> For several years [Sam] was running both YC and OpenAI, but when OpenAI announced that it was going to have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO, we (specifically Jessica) told him that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI, we should find someone else to run YC, and he agreed. If he'd said that he was going to find someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could focus 100% on YC, we'd have been fine with that too. We didn't want him to leave, just to choose one or the other.
It's interesting that YC had to raise the issue, rather than Sam saying to YC, "Hey, I've found this other thing I want to do full-time, can we start looking for my replacement?"
I read there was additional drama related to Sam leaving YC; unilaterally declaring himself Chairman of YC, including a YC blog announcement that was quickly deleted. [0]
Paul Graham would have been officially retired from YC at the time. Jessica Livingston still worked full-time at YC for some years after Paul Graham hired Sam Altman to replace him as president and hired Dan Gackle to replace him as moderator. If Paul Graham had not been retired, this entire conversation wouldn't exist. His retirement is why Altman was president of YC.
He was still one of the two main founders and married to the other main founder. He wasn't totally uninvolved with the company.
He still did Office Hours, at least for a time. He described that as "ten percent of what he did" and hired at least two people to divide up the other 90 percent.
I imagine he and Livingston discussed the company over breakfast/dinner and a lot of decisions were likely joint decisions privately hashed out. It's a company founded by a dating couple who later married. There is probably no clear, bright dividing line between "her" decisions and "his."
Well, if you want to read it tendentiously, I guess your choices are the buck stopping with Jessica, with Paul, or with Jessica and Paul. Seems straightforward to reason about.
What does it mean to be officially retired in the YC firm world view anyway... if you have a significant ownership stake are you actually ever really retired? Are major decisions not vetted by the stakeholders? YC was founded by JL and PG (I'd assume equally). And this decision is now described as a JL decision.
Anyway, there's a Hollywood movie in this drama... maybe I'll write a script using ChatGPT... :)
As a guess: It means he got to see his kids grow up instead of working 100 hours a week.
He handed off a lot of the day-to-day scut work. He didn't go "I'm just a shareholder who reads the annual report and counts my pennies from the DRIP."
To be fair to Helen Toner, she was probably was going off the Washington Post/WSJ articles that were discussed here 6 months ago.[0] And pg has been trying to de-sensationalize the issue ever since, and often doing a pretty terrible job at it by complimenting Altman without directly denying certain statements.
The WP article implied that there was a drop in Altman's performance and hands-on presence due to multi-tasking of his other interests including OpenAI, whereas pg seems to imply that jl gave the ultimatum to Altman before there were any performance complaints.
It's also a little strange that pg doesn't mention the for-profit Worldcoin at all, which announced a 4 mil seed round a few months prior to Altman exiting YC and for which Altman was already CEO.
I'm not sure pg is aware how much he's risking, or how much he's putting Jessica's reputation at risk. He often posts touting Jessica as being a great judge of character.[1] The world is witnessing in real time just how great a character his prince really is. But at least he had the courtesy to mention that Jessica was the one that gave Altman the ultimatum.
There was something missing in his post though. He forgot to add "Sam and Paul" at the end of his statement.
[1] To be fair, it's usually for determining whether the person has characteristics that make a good startup founder, like resilience or co-founder compatibility. "Having moral fiber" might be at the bottom of the list in terms of priority.
“To be fair Helen was going off of “articles” from WaPo” is some kind of defence. What kind of competence did she have if she just forwards stuff without thinking or investigating first? I would say this solidifies why she wasn’t fit for the job
The WaPo article states unambiguously that Altman was fired from YC for dropping the ball. It apparently cites three anonymous sources from YC, not pg. Why would she bother investigating whether that was true or not when she was already fired from OpenAI? You would only know that was disputed if you were actively following pg's twitter account, or somebody quoting pg's tweets.
I was fired from Taco Bell as a kid and I would talk trash about the management and the company to anyone who asked.
I can't imaging being fired from a company like OpenAI and being asked my thoughts about the people responsible and the company and people taking it seriously! LOL
Don’t buy the hustle porn. Most people in these roles are leisure class and working essentially part time jobs. Their most important functions are PR and sales, which in this age aren’t nothing for sure — that’s just not enough work to really take your whole day. It’s why seeing people be CEO of multiple companies actually isn’t rare and how all these folks manage to hold down so many board seats while also working so much. Decision making, especially in technical companies, has to be delegated out of the C-suite.
When you can be CEO of multiple companies at the same time _and_ be on the board of several other companies, being CEO clearly isn't a full time job, at least for the people that aren't just focused on being CEO of a single company.
That’s my observation at all the bigger companies I worked for. The manager of the manager of the lowest level workers has no contact with the workshop reality. They live in the PowerPoint world with hockey stick growth slides and ideal project plans. There were exemptions, but very rare. One level above has absolutely no touch with reality without any exemptions. Some of them were able to participate in meetings from the shower with enabled camera in the past… I doubt these are working hard.
A lot of people here bending over backwards to try to interpret this maximally negatively.
Probably because the "Sam Altman is an amoral, power hungry mastermind who was run out of all his previous gigs" is a more interesting narrative than whatever is actually happening.
Yeah, this is about the most positive and amiable way to solve the real problem of Sam Altman not having enough time to lead YC. It is a testament to Sam's own marketing skills that even banal stuff is driving mad speculation.
This is such a tired and wrong argument. People are allowed to disagree with, dislike, and distrust others without being jealous of them. Think of anyone you don’t like. Pick a specific politician you abhor. Now imagine someone saying you dislike them because you’re jealous. Does that make sense to you? If it does, you have a very warped view of the world.
> It is a testament to Sam's own marketing skills that even banal stuff is driving mad speculation.
That’s beginning to enter “he’s playing 5D chess and making you think exactly what he wants” territory. Would you say that it’s a testament to tobacco companies’ marketing skills that everyone talks about cigarettes being cancerous?
The mad speculation is due to him being CEO of a highly talked about company but also the creator of dubious exploitative ventures[1][2] and rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, many of which talk in vague terms instead of being specific from the start.
I wish I could appraise someone’s skill at something without that being considered as a general endorsement but I guess not.
I don’t think Sam Altman is probably that great at most of what he would like ppl to think he is great at. But he must be alright at marketing and getting into the right places because we are talking about him.
> I wish I could appraise someone’s skill at something without that being considered as a general endorsement but I guess not.
Ironic[1] that that you’re lamenting a misunderstanding of your comment while misunderstanding mine. I don’t think you were generally endorsing him, my claim is that you’re giving him credit for a skill based on faulty assumptions.
> But he must be alright at marketing and getting into the right places because we are talking about him.
That’s what I disagree with. Would you say that Justine Sacco[2] was great at marketing too? For a while there everyone was talking about her, which she did not intend and didn’t end particularly well for her. Being talked about and being good at marketing don’t automatically correlate. Barbara Streisand knows that very well[3].
Agree, people need to chill. The thread says they would have been happy if Sam stayed, they just wanted him to choose one or the other which he agreed with. It seems like a very amicable parting of ways when the parties involved were being pulled in different directions.
I should’ve phrased it better. It seems like many people think those in power are entitled to some moral leniency when they should face higher scrutiny.
No, what you are seeing is people refusing to be spun up into rumor-mongering, which is good because you don't want all the air going to spurious claims and counterclaims when there are factual and uncontroversial observations to be angry about instead
"The thread says they would have been happy if Sam stayed"
No, he said they would have been fine with it. That has a different quality and honestly, I am quite sure they knew sama was so invested in OpenAI that he would not have choosen to step away from it.
So everybody could save face and no one was "fired".
Have you ever seen Sam Altman with his palms pointing at the camera? You can clearly see from the intersection of his life and fate lines that he is a supervillain in the making.
I see. That is, now I do - without an X account, I could just see the single top post. (Which uses a bitmap for text, so people can read the whole statement. This whole thing represents everything I cannot stand about Twitter)
What you call "maximal negativity" is what I would call skepticism about spin. Giving Sam an ultimatum, forcing him to choose one or the other, is a very forceful move. PG is not universally opposed to people running multiple organizations. He's fine with Musk being in charge of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Starlink. I don't think pg was unhappy about Dorsey running both Square and Twitter[1]. OpenAI leadership was fine with Sam in both roles. But Sam had to either quit OpenAI or quit YC, and would get fired from YC if he refused to choose.
This is Sam being given an ultimatum and making a choice before being fired. Is it effectively the same thing? Yes. But technically, he left to pursue OpenAI. YC never said “You’rrrrrrrrrrrre Firedddd!!!” (In my best Spacely Sprockets voice); it just politely asked him to leave if he couldn’t give 100%.
Fired means or at least connotes a specific thing, I.e., is against the will of the departing employee. Leaving the organisation by mutual agreement after an adult conversation to focus on exciting new project is a very different thing to fired.
The adult conversation in question being, in a nutshell: "We've decided it's time for you to move on. Would you like the public perception of this event to be that it was a mutual decision, or would you prefer to burn some bridges on your way out?" Sure, in some sense the departing individual chooses to go one way rather than the other.
Except that isn't at all what Paul is claiming here—he says YC offered him the choice between running YC and running OpenAI but not both at once. Altman chose OpenAI. That might have been the obvious choice in the circumstances (it certainly appears so in retrospect), but that doesn't turn the conversation into the kind you're claiming.
Or the adult conversation was: you need to pick one thing to focus on, we’d prefer it was YC but obviously we can’t force you to choose YC.
PG’s telling if it, and Occam’s Razer, support that version.
Many people here want to imagine that it was vastly more dramatic than this, or need to reinterpret the word “fired” to support the narrative that Sam is bad. I understand it can be fun to think that way.
For the record I’m no great fan of OpenAI and I think people who are convinced they are about to achieve AGI are, er, mistaken. I mostly just care about correct definitions of words and avoiding sensationalism.
My point is mainly that PG's telling isn't trustworthy, because that's what you agree to say when the person you're "firing" chooses to go quietly. Obviously I have no specific insight into the situation, but given what I have observed about how career changes happen for people who've reached a certain level of power, I have no faith that the people involved have any interest in accurately describing the situation to the public.
All you have to do is look at the fact that PG has been consistently effusive about Sam in his public comments and essays since the mid 00s through till the present day, for it to be clear that Sam wasn’t simply fired.
Of course these situations are always complex behind the scenes, with many factors and considerations at play.
But the no he must really just have been fired against his will claim just doesn’t pass the sniff test to anyone paying attention.
I wonder how much of the impulse to believe (in the face of the evidence) that Altman parted ways with YC/PG on bad terms is really rooted in an impulse to believe that YC/PG couldn't be complicit in enabling the kind of person that it now increasingly appears that Altman is.
If Altman truly is as bad a person as it appears that he might be, that doesn't reflect well on the people who have praised him through the last few decades. If you like those people, then cognitive dissonance forces you to either believe that Altman is being unduly villainized or to believe that the people that you like secretly hate him but just can't say so openly.
Virtually all info that reaches outsiders has a strong PR component, and often is entirely PR. We're left to "read the tea leaves" from our own experience with such statements.
You're not just saying that PG isn't trustworthy. You're making a claim beyond that:
The adult conversation in question being, in a nutshell: "We've decided it's time for you to move on. Would you like the public perception of this event to be that it was a mutual decision, or would you prefer to burn some bridges on your way out?"
I think you're falling into the classic reasoning trap:
1. I have realized someone has an incentive to portray the truth in a specific way.
2. They are portraying it to me in that way.
3. Therefore, they are lying.
But 3 isn't necessarily the case! All you can say is "3. Therefore, I can't tell what the truth is." I think that's what people are reacting to in terms of negativity. You actually don't know that PG is lying. You just know that, if Sam was actually fired, PG would have an incentive to portray it as mutually amicable. You really don't have evidence whether or not it happened.
History being different than it has been. Like the statements Paul has made to date have been in agreement with the common perception of it being a firing, not very consistent with this newer counter narrative. Obviously just imo and ymmv.
Giving Sam an ultimatum, forcing him to choose one or the other, is a very forceful move.
Sure, but is that what happened? Or, did they sit down and have a chat and mutually agree that on what was best? I guess we will never know with certainty (and I frankly don't care).
I don't know what happened either and I wouldn't even be surprised if the parties have internalized it in ways that aren't 100% consistent. I do know that situations arise where it becomes mutually apparent that a parting of the ways is best for everyone concerned even if not explicitly stated. And, in those circumstances, there's a public story that is often not untrue but isn't the whole backstory either because it's simpler for everyone involved that way.
"Secret reason" = Paul knows it looks bad for him to fire the guy. So he comes up with justifications why it's not really firing. Maybe he even believes them.
You seem to have an axe to grind with @sama. This deep-rooted bias does not make for an honest discourse; as you are just expressing your opinions. If you have some facts to back up your claims, please put them out.
Otherwise, I would urge just stepping away and taking a few deep breaths.
Someone doing something bad, like financial fraud or significant lying to the company is much different than a situation where someone is working 2 jobs and is asked to focus on one.
To describe the 2nd situation as being "fired" is dishonest. As it attempt to imply that there is some crazy hidden drama going on.
Admit that those 2 situations are significantly different.
> Why would you assume that "fired" likely means some form of gross misconduct
Since you seem to have not been following this story, it is because that is the accusation that lots of people are making against Sam Altman.
The rumor, for years, was that he was fired for some sort of significant dishonestly or misconduct.
Furthermore, there is other context in which Sam Altman was temporarily removed as CEO from OpenAI, for the stated/claimed reason of not being consistently candid with the board.
The obvious comparison that everyone is making would go something like "Well, there is this rumor that Sam got fired for dishonestly in the past, therefore it makes sense why he got fired again at OpenAI for dishonesty".
Paul G's tweet is a refutation of and in response to this context that is clear and obvious to anyone who has been following this story.
It doesn't matter what the reason was. The rumor could have been that he was "fired" for no fault of his own; it would still be false. When you are asked to stay on and concentrate full time on being the CEO of YC, you are not being fired as the CEO of YC.
The thing here is, a lot of people have (for reasons I cannot really fathom) invested some of their identities in the idea that they have worked out the bones of the whole Sam Altman story, and the First Commandment of Message Boards is "I'm not wrong".
> The thing here is, a lot of people have (for reasons I cannot really fathom)
Is it that hard to fathom? The internet likes to play teams with these personalities, it does it with Musk and Lisa Su and it did it with Marissa Meyer, etc. It's just waves of hating / hyping.
> Probably because the "Sam Altman is an amoral, power hungry mastermind who was run out of all his previous gigs" is a more interesting narrative than whatever is actually happening.
It's not either or. The above can be true and also the reason pg wanted him to run YC.
Does he forget that it is known that Sam posted to YC's site that he was now Chairman in the day or so prior to him leaving? So... what... they asked him to choose, he decided to promote himself and make a post about it, and then they hurriedly deleted that post and then Same "chose" to leave YC?
> Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me”, he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” Jessica Livingston said her husband was correct.…To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090) scrubbed from the post…For years, even some of Altman’s closest associates—including Peter Thiel, Altman’s first backer for Hydrazine—didn’t know the circumstances behind Altman’s departure.
No whoopsie there, Sam figured he could do whatever he wanted.
> "Got fired" may be a tad ambiguous, but being told "stop working on that other thing or leave" is not too far off.
It's very different.
When employees begin working at my company, they're told a list of things they're not allowed to do. And, they're told if they do these things, they will be shown the door.
By your definition of "not too far off", we're basically firing people on day one. Absurd.
Getting fired usually implies they did something wrong. Sam was always going to have a lot going on in his life so it was a given there would be competing priorities when he joined YC.
It’s like not he was some random full time employee at YC and concealing his busy life.
So when a smaller AI project he started (with PGs involvement) rapidly turned into a monster overnight and started demanding the bulk of his attention, it’s not a big deal to ask him if he has enough time for both, and to make a decision early on before it becomes overwhelming (note: he still gave him the choice to decide).
Like a lot of entrepreneurs they take on a lot of responsibilities and think they can swing a lot more stuff than they really can, and PG’s whole thing is guiding entrepreneurs to make the best decisions.
Isn't it interesting that Altman cries for government regulation of "AI" sellers but not for requiring a permit to use "AI" for their potential customers?
I mean, if he were concerned about our safety he'd want restricted access, not universal...
Between the weird exit agreements OpenAI had departing employees sign and the Scarlett Johansson voice incident, people are wondering if there's a pattern to Altman's behavior.
I mean, so what, this still has no bearing on what happened between pg and sama. I may think sama has done some sketchy things but why would that lead anyone to believe pg is lying? It's not like he had to make this statement or anything - it appears much more likely that it was just characterized in a way pg thought was not true.
So the YC board found out Altman would be CEO of a for-profit OpenAI when it was publicly announced, just like the OpenAI board found out about ChatGPT when it was publicly announced. Thanks for the clarification!
What in earth are you talking about? PG is clearly saying he was running both for years, everyone knew, everyone was happy, but when openai became a for profit, it was time to choose.
Nothing nefarious, nothing sneaky, no tricks, nada, ziltch.
The immense bias, bull, made up junk, and outright maliciousness in some of these replies is beyond disgusting.
You left out the part where PG wrote that Altman had already been doing two jobs for several years ("For several years he was running both YC and OpenAI").
OpenAI the non-profit was partly funded by YC or at least affiliated with "YC Research." So it is still odd for them to find out about the quasi-conversion to for-profit like that.
CEO isn’t that kind of job. I don’t have any love for Altman but this reasoning doesn’t fly. You can be CEO of multiple companies at once, and apparently he had been for some time.
> The immense bias, bull, made up junk, and outright maliciousness in some of these replies is beyond disgusting.
Imagine if you were in a classroom and some new students entered the room and all sat together in a group and were wearing walkie talkies, and then started shouting out comments non-stop at the teacher that seemed to have some non-constructive motive.
>PG is clearly saying he was running _both_ for years,
Friendly clarification about "both" because the OpenAI structure is very confusing and muddies up the narrative.
(1) first in 2015, there was the 501c3 non-profit OpenAI entity. From the public statements, this was more of a "idealistic research & development" organization to create truly open and publicized machine learning data & algorithms so humanity wouldn't be beholden to big tech like Google "controlling AI". This is the entity that Elon Musk and others (including YC Jessica Livingston) donated $40+ million to and the one that Sam was "running for years" along with YC. Maybe this non-profit R&D gig seemed more like a "part-time" job to PG.
(2) then in 2019, OpenAI created a new for-profit OpenAI company (a subsidiary) to raise money and build proprietary products. Sam was then tapped to also run this for-profit company. This new entity is not part of the "running both for years". That's where PG said Sam needed to choose where to be full-time. The additional responsibilities of being the CEO for the new for-profit company was a change in circumstances.
And what would this be an issue? If we want to consider this firing or not firing, it's the same. PG did the right thing asking his employee to fully focus on 1 thing. Honestly, what's the big deal about all this?
It's like the British Royals - way too many people obsessed with it...and keeping those obsessions going is a steady paycheck for way too many "journalists".
Fired generally implies that the employee was removed because they were not needed or they were adding negative value. It does not appear to be the case here.
Sam was given an option to continue with YC but he chose a bigger project.
Agreed. Hard to say he was "fired" when he had a chance to stay if he decided to leave his other project. Like, "You are fired -- but you can stay if you want."
No you’re twisting meanings here. If it was just “stay if you want” that wouldn’t be firing but saying “if you want to remain here you have to stop doing X” is firing someone full stop
Fired means forced to quit employment. It's not illegal to have two jobs, they made him choose, thus firing him. I don't know why Paul is so defensive about this.
Easy to understand why he would want to make it look smooth Sam has now generated an incredible amount of power since being at YC. Also most people when they part ways with an organization want to smooth any differences in case there is some way to work together in the future.
Also FWIW it just sounds like PG needed someone full time at YC - Sam couldn't and thus he went elsewhere. The length of discussion on this thread is quite long given the banality of the content. Yes I realize by commenting I am adding to that length.
So if I go to my boss and say I have another job X, they say choose, and I say no thanks I'll keep both. What's going to happen? They essentially fired him, but with different paperwork. Paul is being pedantic.
Two things: first, you could choose to prioritize the first job whereas firings are unilateral, second, consider yourself in a similar situation making a similar choice and then someone describes you leaving as being fired. You would likely feel badmouthed because of the specific connotations that word has.
Oh probably worth considering that we can describe the last position you voluntarily left as being fired - you weren't going to show up anymore, so what was going to happen? You got fired but with different paperwork.
No, you still had the choice of quitting the job at X and keeping the one with your boss.
Therefore it's not firing.
Words meaning things isn't being pedantic. It's that words actually have meaning and you can't just change them to mean what you want -- not if you want to be understood when you communicate.
It's no different from if your office moves to a different building 5 minutes away and your boss says you have to show up at the new address and you say no thanks I'll only go to the old address. You're not "essentially fired but with different paperwork". You're being unreasonable and choosing to quit.
Expecting to keep a full-time position at one company while also being a full-time CEO somewhere else is being unreasonable and Sam chose to quit.
Your boss can be like, "Hey, you can continue working here but you will need to take a 50% paycut." You say, "Uh, no." So, you end up leaving the place.
Were you fired? Yes, that's being fired. They were renegotiating the terms of your employment - just like they were with Sam. The terms of his employment now became contingent on not working at another company - which weren't the terms of his employment before.
No, it's not. It's getting a (horrific and generally unrealistic) pay cut. In more realistic terms, things like 10% pay cuts sometimes do happen when a company is struggling, and nobody calls those "firings". Because they're not.
Words have meaning. Being fired has a specific meaning, which is a different meaning from being laid off, and is a different meaning from quitting/resigning when you don't like how your job has changed.
(Also, terms of full-time employment often are contingent on not working full-time at another company -- this is a pretty standard clause. So the terms didn't necessarily change at all -- what changed was Sam became CEO of another for-profit company. That was his choice.)
Oh cool. I'm not firing any of my employees then. I'm just saying, "Hey, you can continue working here as long as you work for free! No benefits either, haha! You're totally not fired though - just gotta work for free! Definitely don't try to file anything with the unemployment office because it won't work! You're totally not fired!"
> Also, terms of full-time employment often are contingent on not working full-time at another company -- this is a pretty standard clause
This is also not in any contract that I've ever signed and I've been in SV for a decade.
Your example is nonsensical. There are minimum wage laws. And if somebody is not getting paid at all, then of course they are fired. You've completely changed the example to where they clearly are fired, so I don't know what you're trying to argue.
> This is also not in any contract that I've ever signed
Are you sure you've looked? It can also be implicit in standard clauses such as the company owns all rights to all of your work. In which case starting a second job would be fraudulent.
But of course it's also one of those things that's so common sense it doesn't need to be written into a contract in at-will employment countries (although it often is). There's the expectation in a full-time salaried professional job that the employer is getting all your productive professional work. It's mentally impossible to give 100% to two full-time jobs simultaneously. There's no reasonable expectation that anyone should be able to hold a second full-time CEO job. Nobody is "changing the terms" when the terms are commonly understood. If you start showing up to work shirtless and it wasn't in your employment contract that you're required to wear a top, complaining that they're "changing the terms" is missing the point entirely.
Considering a shit ton of employees in SV are working on their own projects in their spare time, start their own companies, and moonlight - I don't think this is as common in contracts as you're making it out to be.
No, a great deal of that is explicitly prohibited.
If you work for Google, they own anything you develop on the side. They're actually nice in that they have a review process where they will give you your rights back if they decide it isn't competitive with any of their lines of business.
A lot of other companies don't even provide that. If you start a business on the side, they own all of its IP. Period.
This is extremely common. Both with large corporations as well as with startups. You just might not be aware of it.
I’ve done startups myself and it’s not common in any contracts I’ve signed nor have my coworkers. If it was, we all wouldn’t be able to start our own companies.
Why are you trying to make this argument with a hyperbolic and/or inapplicable definition? Working for free would mean no job or slavery. It's not an effective way to make an argument in this case.
I was given an option to improve my performance, but I chose a different path.
Look if this was dave from some no name company, there would be no real debate about what happened.
Altman isn't special, he's just rich and well connected.
Altman was booted from YC because he shouldn't have been making money from his side gigs. He broke the rules, and had some level of consequence.
Now that he's rich, and famous, he's not going to get much consequence, unless he vaporises a lot of money from the wrong people. But then he might be WeWork cult leader good and get away with it.
In risk capital businesses making money from side deals/gigs has long been acceptable, but there has always been a line and Sam danced right over even the most generous conception of it and was duly removed.
Isn't this the usual "we're not going to fire you because we want you to preserve your own dignity, so you should step down now or else we will fire you and it's going to get ugly" spiel? Y'know, the same thing that happens whenever [big corporation] gets into a scandal and heads are required to roll in the C-suite; rarely do they actually get fired but "they step down" as if it was from the good of their own heart.
I dunno, PG claims that Altman wasn't fired but to me this reads like a difference that ultimately doesn't matter.
But that is not the case. He was told that he had to choose between the two options, and he did. "You can no longer head YC and OpenAI at the same time, pick one", and he did. This does not sound like firing. It sounds like basic adulting on both sides.
I think the fact he had to be told this by the board is more telling here. It's pretty obvious that YC was told about Altman becoming CEO of the for-profit OpenAI at the same time everyone else was told about it.
Effectively, they gave him an ultimatum: stay at YC and drop that CEO offer or leave. Sure, it's dressed up in nicer words to protect Altman's dignity (which is fine, in terms of "this is bad" it's pretty low, so preserving his dignity makes sense), but that's still what it is. The ultimatum is obviously not a realistic one - be beholden to the board or become your own chief while it's blatantly clear where his ambitions lie, so effectively it's a firing.
People have been claiming my wife left me. That's not true. Here's what actually happened. For several years I was sleeping with both her and another woman ...
I mean literally yes? It's a weird analogy but if you decide to leave your wife for another woman then that's you leaving your wife, not your wife leaving you?
If you decide to leave one company to focus on working for another company then that's not the first company firing you, that's you leaving the first company?
"For several years I was sleeping with both her and another woman" generally implies that the wife left him, not that he left the wife. The guy in that scenario is pretty clearly fine not leaving his wife.
> "For several years I was sleeping with both her and another woman" generally implies that the wife left him
No it doesn't.
"For several years, I was sleeping with both her and another woman, she eventually had enough and filed for divorce" means that the wife left.
"For several years, I was sleeping with both her and another woman, she eventually had enough so she asked me to choose between her and the other woman. I chose to leave her for the other woman" means that the husband left. He could have chosen to stay with the wife, but chose not to.
This isn't a coherent viewpoint. How do you distinguish these two cases?
-----
1(A). Wife discovers cheating.
1(B). Wife gives ultimatum.
1(C). Husband declines ultimatum.
1(D). Husband leaves.
-----
2(A). Wife discovers cheating.
2(B). Wife gives ultimatum.
2(C). Husband declines ultimatum.
2(D). Wife leaves.
-----
You seem to be arguing that it's always scenario 1, because in step (C), the husband "could have chosen to stay with the wife, but chose not to". But that immediately implies that this scenario cannot occur:
3(A). Wife discovers cheating.
3(B). Wife gives ultimatum.
3(C). Husband declines ultimatum.
3(D). Wife stays.
What we know is that the husband sees no reason for the marriage to change, and the wife does. The breakup of the marriage, in this context, is almost always the wife's choice, as identified by the very simple criterion that it's something the wife wants and the husband doesn't want. She can equally choose to take the husband's offer of a stable marriage with adultery.
No, it's more like... People have been claiming I left my wife. That's not true. She had a guy BFF but then this guy publicly announced that my wife and him would start dating. So I said it's me or him. She chose him and we thereafter divorced.
> but when OpenAI announced that it was going to have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO
If anything (in case you're looking for a scoop), PG implies that YC found-out about Sam's raising the stakes on OpenAI through a third-party ("OpenAI announced"), which does not look good for Sam. There's even a subtle "but" in there. The firing versus resigning discussion is irrelevant, the focus is probably (and arguably) the lack of clear communication on Sam's part regarding a conflict of interest for both parties, YC and Sam.
As a counter-argument, OpenAI was a running show anyway, which YC was on the know and apparently openly allowed and the for-profit thing was just a matter of time.
It’s actually fine to sleep with multiple people over the same time span as long as everyone knows about it and everyone consents. It’s only a violation of trust when one of the people is under the impression they’re sexually monogamous with the person who has multiple sexual partners. Then that person has broken an agreement.
Sometimes in these situations, one party who was consenting to non-monogamy decides that they want to be monogamous. When that happens, their partner is asked to make a choice as to whether they want to participate in monogamy with that person or go their separate ways.
Good faith here, but where were the absolutes? I said that if everyone knows and everyone consents then it’s okay. That’s not really absolute, that’s precisely qualified. Is there a culture in which everyone could both know about it and consent to it and it would still be morally wrong?
You’re assuming “it’s a violation of trust!” is the hazard in this situation but that’s a very shallow, naive understanding of why having two “partners” is almost universally frowned upon. See the sibling comment for a full write-up.
The human psychological and interpersonal aspect is the real hazard. You either A) don’t find two other people that can emotionally handle it or B) do find two other people that can emotionally handle it but suffer from the trauma they’ve experienced that numbed them enough to be able to emotionally handle it, which is a hazard in itself. Either way, it just doesn’t work in the long run.
Respectfully, this is a deeply misinformed perspective. I am not some naive dreamer, this is a journey I have been on for nearly 20 years. Over ten years ago I decided I needed to learn how to do non-monogamy properly, and in this time I have read plenty of books on polyamory, monogamous relationships, and personal growth. For over a decade I have had the guidance of a supportive therapist who has studied non-monogamy professionally and works with multiple non-monogamous clients. Some notable books on polyamory I have read are "The Ethical Slut", "More Than Two", and "Polysecure".
I have practiced non-monogamy for 9 years, and along the way I dated a lot of people who were only doing it because they wanted to date me, and I was non-monogamous. Those situations always go poorly. Now I only date people who both want to be non-monogamous for their own reasons and have read the books and done the work to learn how to do it properly.
You are incorrect in your suggestion that people who learn how to do poly well do it by becoming numb. In the terms of the book Polysecure, people learn how to do non-monogamy properly by learning ways of fostering secure attachment that don't rely on monogamous concepts. That book explores the existing body of research on secure attachment, which is primarily focused on monogamous relationships, and applies those concepts to polyamory, with the ultimate takeaway being the HEARTS method described here: https://www.kcresolve.com/blog/creating-a-secure-attachment-...
You are incorrect in your two options presented, which both boil down to "you cannot find emotionally healthy polyamorous people". In my community in Oakland CA, with the people I tend to date, polyamory is actually the norm. You can find people who are immature and problematic, and you can find people who are stable, emotionally mature, and willing to do work when needed to maintain healthy relationships. I have learned to broadly differentiate between the two types pretty quickly. Note that I am 39 and tend not to date anyone younger than 35.
I currently have two partners. They are both dating another person who I will call M. I am also friends with M, and M and I actually text more than I do with either of our mutual partners. We've been having movie nights recently that are cute and wholesome as hell. I've never seen a whisp of jealousy or related issues amongst us. We've all been poly in this community for long enough, and we are all in therapy, that we have learned how to navigate things.
I hate to say it, but "poly simply doesn't work" is what every person who has lived in a monogamous culture and hasn't done the research is likely to say. It's absolutely not easy to learn how to do it and is very much is not for everyone. Some people really should just be monogamous, that much I have learned. But to make the blanket statement that it doesn't work in the long run is sorely misinformed, and if you gave that advice to someone who trusted you, who actually did need to do the work and learn how to be polyamorous, you could do serious harm to their life. If I had tried to stick with monogamy, it simply would have been wrong for me and would have led t continued misery.
It took a while to get here, and I know all too well the pitfalls, but I have finally learned enough, and critically moved to the right place, and now I am flush with lovely non-monogamous connections that fill my heart with joy. I have two loving partners and I go on lots of dates with other cute people. My relationships are healthier than they have ever been, and I finally feel like I have found myself.
So please, don't go telling people that non-monogamy doesn't work. It isn't easy to learn how to do it, and it is not for everyone, but once you learn how it actually becomes second nature (if its right ...
This is a terrible analogy that implies all instances of “doing two things at once” are somehow immoral. You would compare someone eating both steak and potatoes for dinner to an adulterer.
Sometimes a topic comes up that you not only don’t care about, that you can’t even conceive of a way to incentivise yourself to care about it. It’s not that you harbour some hidden like or dislike, it’s just that to the extent humanly possible, you really REALLY don’t care.
Reading the replies and the tribal colours / flag waving is fascinating. I suppose This tribalism happens for every topic but it’s just hard to be gifted this perspective on topics your career is invested in.
It’s been fun reading clearly fabricated explanations that don’t base themselves on any objectivity but on the posters inner desires.
I have heard the term "wish casting" used to refer to this phenomenon. When people are deeply emotionally charged, they start asserting facts they want to be true, and ignoring the line between fantasy and reality, as if saying something enough makes it real
I see it almost exclusively online, and people don't seem to notice what they are doing.
Plus whenever powerful people are involved they get treated as these great masterminds, always conspiring, and it’s a given there’s more to the story than the plebs will never know about. So with that assumption people’s minds start filling in the blanks with all the things that are REALLY happening behind the scenes and anyone who doesn’t assume the same is naive at how the powerful operate (just look at Twitter discourse for anything related to the British monarchy).
IRL the vast majority of the time they are just flawed humans like the rest of us. Sometimes people take on more responsibilities in life than they can realistically handle. And everyone needs to be challenged and questioned whether they’re being honest with themselves at various points in their lives.
Yeah, there is a deep human drive to both form opinions on topics and fit them to narratives. Most people are deeply uncomfortable admitting that they don't know, cant know, or will never know something.
As a result, random people on the street form strong opinions on everything, from Sama's psychology and internal narrative to nuclear reactor design.
The comment (what I said would make a great tweet) is autological (as in it defines itself). The intrinsic irony is that the author is also unaware therefore proving its own example. The reader who takes it at face value would be similarly unaware.
In other words, the comment is a construct of that definition; And a demonstration of the fallacy of opinion.
I think there’s a third level to it as well. It is also a true statement which is a contradiction of itself.
Logically then it is not self-consistent which also makes it logical.
Is the only way out is to assert as you do that some opinions are less valid than others? I don’t think that resolves the paradox.
Philosophers must have studied this... I understand that in math we have Gödel incompleteness which is an axiomatic version of a similar argument.
I dont know anything about Gödel incompleteness, but of course some opinions are more and less "valid" than others. Some topics are also closer or more distant to the individual. There is no reason to assume equality.
I can have a valid , well informed, and even actionable opinion about what my wife would like for dinner.
Inversely, my opinions on what happened behind closed doors between PG and SamA in 2019 isnt informed, actionable, or generally useful.
To the extent my post could be seen as critical of opinions(which is I think where you draw the irony from), it wasnt critical of holding just any opinion, but holding a certain class of poorly formed and completely unnecessary opinions.
From the outside you might think that this itself is useless navel-gazing, but I have found it to be actionable. It has helped me to question some of my own compulsive behaviors.
I'm more interested in the metaphysics of the comment itself. It clearly exists in an ontological universe because it can be constructed but it cannot apply to itself because self-evaluation renders it false. So it is de facto meaningless but it is actually not meaningless because in the universe where "the only thing we know is that we don't know anything" we would now know two things. I guess that means we've learnt something?
Anyway there is some connection to AI and AGI in this that is worth exploring...
I'm pretty convinced that the majority of these people actually "know" that they are asserting claims that they wish are true instead of actually true.
The evidence is that if you challenge them with the actual facts, they sometimes don't accuse you of being factually wrong, instead they accuse you of wishing the other way (i.e. being on the other camp).
> can’t even conceive of a way to incentivise yourself to care about it
A lot of people on this forum came of age at a time when the internet and computers and tech companies built around them were ascendant and seen as a force for good in the world. We had the open source movement and peer-to-peer sharing and everything was going to be free and egalitarian and connected. Google was "organizing the world's information" and went from underdog to champion while telling us "don't be evil" was their core value. Kids who were bullied for being sincere and passionate were becoming the adults who ran things and got success and admiration.
Also, in the first ~decade or so that I was on HN speculative fiction about AI was extremely popular here. We weren't really sure if superhuman intelligence would happen anytime soon, but we all had the sense that if/when it did it better be designed and run by people with high ethical standards if we have any hope of avoiding major catastrophe.
(I personally see the concerns about mis-aligned "superhuman AI" and mis-aligned mega-corporations as representing essentially the same underlying anxiety: that there are powerful forces in the world that are beyond our ability to influence in meaningful ways but which have outsized effects on our environment and lives while being completely agnostic to our happiness or even our existence.)
Now we've been through one or more cycles of seeing our heroes turn into villains. Google got rid of "don't be evil". Musk turned his attention away from the stars and the "good of humanity" and toward petty political spats and gossip. And now OpenAI, which sold itself as the organization that will "do AGI" and do it the safe and ethical way, looks like it's run by somebody who is incredibly shrewd and self-serving.
So while I understand why you wouldn't care about this, I also completely understand why it's such an engaging topic for so many people here.
Complex effects of mundane decisions become compelling stories of good and evil involving heros and villains.
People don't really want to litigate these things in particular but use it as proxy for their own personal feelings about the effects of AI or even capitalism itself.
- (PG/YC) Assuming that someone who is (or is about to be) the CEO of a different company won't have time to 100% commit to your own company and planning accordingly seems like a reasonable position.
- (SA) The new CEO of a company wanting to commit as much of their time as possible to that company also seems like a reasonable position.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] threadIf my boss told me he was "fine with me staying at my job", I'd take it to mean that they were fine with me staying at my job.
I don't think this press release (is it that?) does a very good job of dispelling the rumors that it wasn't entirely mutual, though. He ought to have said something like "delighted to have him stay".
Yet he doesn't do that (in this tweet) as it's only an alternative reason and does not address those accusations.
To me that changes the meaning of "fired". I'd read it as "co-entrepeneurs parting ways". Yes one of the co-entrepeneurs has more say in who stays and who goes. But even if there was an employment contract, I'd see it more as a good/bad leave clause when no body loses their much required primary source of income.
I'm saying that he prolly has a deal at OpenAI with some stock and a good/bad leaver agreement, and a salary. Getting fired in this cases is not the same as firing someone who has zero stock and needs the jobs to put food on the table.
It just does not carry the same weight for me, regardless of the lawful definition.
It doesn't sound like he was incapable of doing that - just incapable of doing that while also running OpenAI.
An employer who forces employees to stop working from home or leave the company isn't firing them, for example.
Your remote work example is not different companies ask a performance improvement plan they are saying improve your performance or leave. That “ or leave” doesn’t always mean you get fired legally , some companies would be more generous with severance if you resign voluntarily, but it doesn’t alter the fact you were asked to do so and effectively were fired.
Senior management typically leave by mutual agreement even if they “asked to resign”.
His employment was not terminated by YC legally yes , that would be rare and would happen if there is no trust left that he would do so properly when asked to resign, like it happened in OpenAI for him .
PG: Quit your second job or be fired
Altman: You can't fire me, because I quit
PG: Great, as thanks for going quietly I'll tell everyone you "weren't fired"
It's a firing for all practical purposes, sure. But technically Altman voluntarily resigned.
This is actually somewhat common when firing people - if you ever find yourself in a disciplinary meeting with HR and you know you're about to get fired, you can just resign right then and there, one second before they tell you you're fired, and they'll accept. You sacrifice the right to sue for unfair dismissal, in exchange they'll tell future employers that you left voluntarily and weren't fired.
I believe that's increasingly uncommon, I believe due to legal risk. I think it's usually the case that HR will only verify the bare objective facts of employment: dates of service, title, salary, etc.
I also know of at least one company where policy states everyone who leaves involuntarily is not eligible for rehire, and that includes people who were laid off due to downsizing/site closures/etc. So "not eligible for rehire" my not indicate any performance or behavioral issues.
(this whole terminology debate is so futile and useless, mental food for the bored. WTF cares which exact colorful sticker we put on disagreements and the consequent parting. It's over, carry on.)
If you start working on a side gig, that will take up a chunk of your time and invariably occupy your brain; thus, your employer doesn’t get their full value out of you anymore. Up to a certain degree, employers (have) to tolerate this—in Germany, that would be when your performance at your job starts to suffer from it. But once your commitment to the side gig increases so much that you’re about to become CEO, there’s no reasonable way to claim you can still carry out your contractual duties to your employer.
If your employer then offers you to either step down from that side gig or lose your employment, that is completely reasonable and frankly something you should expect?
Put differently, if you pay me to paint your shed, and after finishing the front side I went off and painted my own house with the rest of the paint, you certainly wouldn’t consider the job done or full payment to be justified.
Sure, you can fly under the radar if you're working on your own business/start-up by simply lying about the hours worked, but if you're doing paid work for another employer it will be obvious, and they would not be legally able to employ you if total working time goes above 48hrs/week.
And we’re not talking about creating a small online T-shirt store, but being CEO of a venture backed organisation to evolve the state of AI. There’s just no way to pull that off.
I'm sure people can manage doing one of both (so long as there is no conflicts of interest). Heck, now that I think of it, technically I'm a chief science officer of a startup and a casual employee of a university...
It's the same if you have a family, an interest, or any semblance of a life really.
So instead, you might just want to check with your employer beforehand and talk about what they’re cool with. Something Sams could have chosen to do, but did not, apparently.
Perhaps we can agree that "firing" is a fairly fuzzy term, and maybe not entirely fit to meaningfully contain, both:
a) me losing my job because I am (apparently) not creating enough value for the company
b) me losing my job because I am not willing to split time between my current main gig and my unicorn startup
It doesn’t take 40 hours of work all the time, especially if you can delegate well.
I've had several job contracts which say I'm not allowed to have another job at the same time unless I have written permission, which they can't say no to without good reason — "This has become a conflict of interest, pick one" or "both of these are now full time, pick one" seem like reasonable grounds to for an employer to rescind permission.
(It's also one of the ways Musk gets flack, given how many companies he's CEO/CTO/president of).
The cult of personality.
Okay, okay, I see what's happening here
You're face to face with greatness, and it's strange
You don't even know how you feel
It's adorable
Well, it's nice to see that humans never change
Open your eyes, let's begin
Yes, it's really me, it's Altman
Breathe it in
I know it's a lot
The hair, the bod
When you're staring at a demi-god
It's usually not necessary to indicate what tune the words are set to when you haven't changed more than one of them.
I know that Silicon Valley VC is all about relationships (read: not calling out shitty behaviour) but it's difficult to spin someone just full on walking off the job.
I'm sure PG and many others don't want to get on the bad side of someone who controls a decent amount of deal flow, but really it's pretty obvious that's unacceptable behaviour. It's the same thing that happens with Elon Musk - people run around excusing the shitty things he does, but if you drill down the excuse is basically "Elon Musk controls a bunch of things that could line my pocket and I don't want to piss him off", that doesn't suddenly make things ethical.
Reigning in an enthusiastic person they know, not an employee.
> It sounds a lot like Sam went off and found another job, didn't bother to quit his old one
He didn't "find another job", or that's a silly way to put it. He was already was running OpenAI not for profit. When that company decided to create a for-profit subsidiary, and SA to go with it, is when they said to him he couldn't be both.
> and when challenged... quit.
If you're saying he wasn't fired, you're right. He chose to leave and move to another company full time. That's what makes this such a dull topic.
Anyway - breaking this down point by point is unnecessary, because it's all in the original Tweet, and you're still saying what you're saying.
To be clear, I'm not saying he was fired. I'm saying he acted unethically, pushed PG to the point where he gave an ultimatum and then quit, but PG is smart enough not to burn bridges.
No, I'm saying the "reigning in" was a personal one, not an employee one. Obviously Sam was an employee.
> So you're presenting this as if this was thrust upon Sam
No, I'm not. I'm saying he didn't go and find another job. His role changed with OpenAI's structure change, and he probably didn't think it through as to him it was a gradual transition.
> I'm saying he acted unethically, pushed PG to the point where he gave an ultimatum and then quit, but PG is smart enough not to burn bridges.
Okay. At this point we're just doing celebrity gossip, but with tech celebrities. I've no idea if your guess is correct or not.
In light of sams public perception I find it interesting that PG is clearing the air NOW.
EDIT: it needs to be stated that "when we found out from a press release that our CEO would be double dipping at another for profit venture..." is shitty way to find out your CEO is moonlighting. The fact that you DIDNT fire him on the spot isnt the best look.
So much drama is created by overanalysing the timing of things, though. It's just air.
Also, I bet he'd be getting annoyed if clarifying things to multiple people. Before, no one gave a damn, so it didn't matter, but now Sam's hot news.
So, yeah, if people could stop assuming everybody can read X/Linkedin/Facebook, that would be nice…
Twitter is quickly becoming as bad as discord for siloing information.
No, you can't, Twitter is degenerating further:
(Weird how no other website has issues like this…)The exception is that some accounts still require login to read. I'm not sure why but I'm guessing that it might be a per account setting that won't be set by accounts that haven't logged in for a long time (I don't have an acount to check). Actually, worble and ploum's comments below would explain what I see, I usually don't try to check the same content twice (or anything all that often) so I wouldn't notice if it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
The Firefox 126 preferences UI for the "Strict" setting shows this warning:
"Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or content to break."
When the panel for that setting is expanded, it shows an additional warning:
"Heads up! This setting may cause some websites to not display content or work correctly. If a site seems broken, you may want to turn off tracking protection for that site to load all content."
Presumably such problems are not unexpected or unheard of if two warnings are deemed necessary for that setting.
(I'm not a web person, so I'll save my speculation on what is breaking there, but Twitter is the only webpage I experience as broken. It is absolutely possible I mucked around with some setting 5 years ago and completely forgot about it. Or Twitter is doing weird things. Probably a combination of both.)
> Firefox blocks the following:
> Social media trackers
> Cross-site cookies in all windows
> Tracking content in all windows
> Cryptominers
> Known and suspected fingerprinters
All too often it's the latter, meaning anyone without an account can't see the content, meaning it has zero value. No way in hell am I creating an account. So the conclusion is twitter links are now useless.
https://nitter.poast.org/paulg/status/1796107666265108940
I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened:
> People have been claiming YC fired Sam Altman.
> That's not true. Here's what actually happened.
> For several years he was running both YC and OpenAI,
> but when OpenAI announced that it was going to
> have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going
> to be the CEO, we (specifically Jessica) told him
> that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI,
> we should find someone else to run YC, and he
> agreed. If he'd said that he was going to find
> someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could
> focus 100% on YC, we'd have been fine with that
> too. We didn't want him to leave, just to choose
> one or the other.
https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940
[0] https://x.com/hlntnr
[1] https://link.chtbl.com/TEDAI
If people really want to describe that as "fired" there is no stopping them. But it isn't. PG is more correct than that quadrant of the backseat managers.
Firing implies you want somebody gone.
> For several years [Sam] was running both YC and OpenAI, but when OpenAI announced that it was going to have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO, we (specifically Jessica) told him that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI, we should find someone else to run YC, and he agreed. If he'd said that he was going to find someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could focus 100% on YC, we'd have been fine with that too. We didn't want him to leave, just to choose one or the other.
It's interesting that YC had to raise the issue, rather than Sam saying to YC, "Hey, I've found this other thing I want to do full-time, can we start looking for my replacement?"
So it's not like they are impartial parties either.
[0] https://archive.is/Vl3VR
Accusing Graham of being "absent" sounds silly.
He still did Office Hours, at least for a time. He described that as "ten percent of what he did" and hired at least two people to divide up the other 90 percent.
I imagine he and Livingston discussed the company over breakfast/dinner and a lot of decisions were likely joint decisions privately hashed out. It's a company founded by a dating couple who later married. There is probably no clear, bright dividing line between "her" decisions and "his."
Anyway, there's a Hollywood movie in this drama... maybe I'll write a script using ChatGPT... :)
He handed off a lot of the day-to-day scut work. He didn't go "I'm just a shareholder who reads the annual report and counts my pennies from the DRIP."
The WP article implied that there was a drop in Altman's performance and hands-on presence due to multi-tasking of his other interests including OpenAI, whereas pg seems to imply that jl gave the ultimatum to Altman before there were any performance complaints.
It's also a little strange that pg doesn't mention the for-profit Worldcoin at all, which announced a 4 mil seed round a few months prior to Altman exiting YC and for which Altman was already CEO.
I'm not sure pg is aware how much he's risking, or how much he's putting Jessica's reputation at risk. He often posts touting Jessica as being a great judge of character.[1] The world is witnessing in real time just how great a character his prince really is. But at least he had the courtesy to mention that Jessica was the one that gave Altman the ultimatum.
There was something missing in his post though. He forgot to add "Sam and Paul" at the end of his statement.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216
[1] To be fair, it's usually for determining whether the person has characteristics that make a good startup founder, like resilience or co-founder compatibility. "Having moral fiber" might be at the bottom of the list in terms of priority.
I can't imaging being fired from a company like OpenAI and being asked my thoughts about the people responsible and the company and people taking it seriously! LOL
That said, the interviewer tries to sensationalize the upcoming interview as much as possible in the intro, so I didn't love that
Sure some CEOs might drop out and play golf, but all that proves is you have slackers at any level of an org
Probably because the "Sam Altman is an amoral, power hungry mastermind who was run out of all his previous gigs" is a more interesting narrative than whatever is actually happening.
That’s beginning to enter “he’s playing 5D chess and making you think exactly what he wants” territory. Would you say that it’s a testament to tobacco companies’ marketing skills that everyone talks about cigarettes being cancerous?
The mad speculation is due to him being CEO of a highly talked about company but also the creator of dubious exploitative ventures[1][2] and rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, many of which talk in vague terms instead of being specific from the start.
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
[2]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
I don’t think Sam Altman is probably that great at most of what he would like ppl to think he is great at. But he must be alright at marketing and getting into the right places because we are talking about him.
Ironic[1] that that you’re lamenting a misunderstanding of your comment while misunderstanding mine. I don’t think you were generally endorsing him, my claim is that you’re giving him credit for a skill based on faulty assumptions.
> But he must be alright at marketing and getting into the right places because we are talking about him.
That’s what I disagree with. Would you say that Justine Sacco[2] was great at marketing too? For a while there everyone was talking about her, which she did not intend and didn’t end particularly well for her. Being talked about and being good at marketing don’t automatically correlate. Barbara Streisand knows that very well[3].
[1]: Or maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40507616
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Justine_Sacco_i...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
No, he said they would have been fine with it. That has a different quality and honestly, I am quite sure they knew sama was so invested in OpenAI that he would not have choosen to step away from it.
So everybody could save face and no one was "fired".
https://x.com/paulg/status/1796114790722449429?s=46&t=kEOaRx...
[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/1235363862159003649
I don't see why that matters, YC is "his" organization, other organizations can do what they want
Take out all the names, and it's just a belief that YC should be run by someone that's all in / fully committed.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
(Not saying that this is such a situation.)
PG’s telling if it, and Occam’s Razer, support that version.
Many people here want to imagine that it was vastly more dramatic than this, or need to reinterpret the word “fired” to support the narrative that Sam is bad. I understand it can be fun to think that way.
For the record I’m no great fan of OpenAI and I think people who are convinced they are about to achieve AGI are, er, mistaken. I mostly just care about correct definitions of words and avoiding sensationalism.
Of course these situations are always complex behind the scenes, with many factors and considerations at play.
But the no he must really just have been fired against his will claim just doesn’t pass the sniff test to anyone paying attention.
If Altman truly is as bad a person as it appears that he might be, that doesn't reflect well on the people who have praised him through the last few decades. If you like those people, then cognitive dissonance forces you to either believe that Altman is being unduly villainized or to believe that the people that you like secretly hate him but just can't say so openly.
The adult conversation in question being, in a nutshell: "We've decided it's time for you to move on. Would you like the public perception of this event to be that it was a mutual decision, or would you prefer to burn some bridges on your way out?"
I think you're falling into the classic reasoning trap:
1. I have realized someone has an incentive to portray the truth in a specific way.
2. They are portraying it to me in that way.
3. Therefore, they are lying.
But 3 isn't necessarily the case! All you can say is "3. Therefore, I can't tell what the truth is." I think that's what people are reacting to in terms of negativity. You actually don't know that PG is lying. You just know that, if Sam was actually fired, PG would have an incentive to portray it as mutually amicable. You really don't have evidence whether or not it happened.
Sure, but is that what happened? Or, did they sit down and have a chat and mutually agree that on what was best? I guess we will never know with certainty (and I frankly don't care).
When your immediate superior sits you don't for a "chat", and you "mutually agree on what is best", it comes across an awful lot like an ultimatum.
Maybe YC requires more dedication than Altman could provide to both it and OpenAI.
You print off companies as if being a CEO is just being a CEO, and as if Musk doesn't work an unhealthy amount of hours.
Or maybe there's some secret reason for pg to carry water for Sam and it's worth his integrity.
Otherwise, I would urge just stepping away and taking a few deep breaths.
Someone doing something bad, like financial fraud or significant lying to the company is much different than a situation where someone is working 2 jobs and is asked to focus on one.
To describe the 2nd situation as being "fired" is dishonest. As it attempt to imply that there is some crazy hidden drama going on.
Admit that those 2 situations are significantly different.
Since you seem to have not been following this story, it is because that is the accusation that lots of people are making against Sam Altman.
The rumor, for years, was that he was fired for some sort of significant dishonestly or misconduct.
Furthermore, there is other context in which Sam Altman was temporarily removed as CEO from OpenAI, for the stated/claimed reason of not being consistently candid with the board.
The obvious comparison that everyone is making would go something like "Well, there is this rumor that Sam got fired for dishonestly in the past, therefore it makes sense why he got fired again at OpenAI for dishonesty".
Paul G's tweet is a refutation of and in response to this context that is clear and obvious to anyone who has been following this story.
The thing here is, a lot of people have (for reasons I cannot really fathom) invested some of their identities in the idea that they have worked out the bones of the whole Sam Altman story, and the First Commandment of Message Boards is "I'm not wrong".
Is it that hard to fathom? The internet likes to play teams with these personalities, it does it with Musk and Lisa Su and it did it with Marissa Meyer, etc. It's just waves of hating / hyping.
It's not either or. The above can be true and also the reason pg wanted him to run YC.
Does he forget that it is known that Sam posted to YC's site that he was now Chairman in the day or so prior to him leaving? So... what... they asked him to choose, he decided to promote himself and make a post about it, and then they hurriedly deleted that post and then Same "chose" to leave YC?
This line of thinking just reads as sensationalist or needlessly conspiratorial given that the indictment it is trying to support is so weak.
> Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me”, he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” Jessica Livingston said her husband was correct.…To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090) scrubbed from the post…For years, even some of Altman’s closest associates—including Peter Thiel, Altman’s first backer for Hydrazine—didn’t know the circumstances behind Altman’s departure.
No whoopsie there, Sam figured he could do whatever he wanted.
This thread exposes who buys into whatever the SF/VC overlords say.
"Got fired" may be a tad ambiguous, but being told "stop working on that other thing or leave" is not too far off.
It's very different.
When employees begin working at my company, they're told a list of things they're not allowed to do. And, they're told if they do these things, they will be shown the door.
By your definition of "not too far off", we're basically firing people on day one. Absurd.
It’s like not he was some random full time employee at YC and concealing his busy life.
So when a smaller AI project he started (with PGs involvement) rapidly turned into a monster overnight and started demanding the bulk of his attention, it’s not a big deal to ask him if he has enough time for both, and to make a decision early on before it becomes overwhelming (note: he still gave him the choice to decide).
Like a lot of entrepreneurs they take on a lot of responsibilities and think they can swing a lot more stuff than they really can, and PG’s whole thing is guiding entrepreneurs to make the best decisions.
The lies start at the company name. What's "open" about OpenAI?
It's "open" for everyone to use, for the right fee.
I mean, if he were concerned about our safety he'd want restricted access, not universal...
WaPo has not spoken to the actress.
And the agent claims that they both have to remain anonymous due to "fears for her safety".
I think we have different definitions of "verifiably".
I mean, so what, this still has no bearing on what happened between pg and sama. I may think sama has done some sketchy things but why would that lead anyone to believe pg is lying? It's not like he had to make this statement or anything - it appears much more likely that it was just characterized in a way pg thought was not true.
There appears to be a pattern in regards to honesty and integrity.
[1]: Adding it is popular on Mastodon but I’m unsure if Twitter allows it.
[2]: I’m guessing this is Twitter and not Paul.
Nothing nefarious, nothing sneaky, no tricks, nada, ziltch.
The immense bias, bull, made up junk, and outright maliciousness in some of these replies is beyond disgusting.
PG did not think so....
Imagine if you were in a classroom and some new students entered the room and all sat together in a group and were wearing walkie talkies, and then started shouting out comments non-stop at the teacher that seemed to have some non-constructive motive.
You would see something was up immediately.
On the Internet this is harder to see.
"When OpenAI announced that it was going to have a for-profit" clearly indicates it wasn't something that was communicated beforehand to YC.
Friendly clarification about "both" because the OpenAI structure is very confusing and muddies up the narrative.
(1) first in 2015, there was the 501c3 non-profit OpenAI entity. From the public statements, this was more of a "idealistic research & development" organization to create truly open and publicized machine learning data & algorithms so humanity wouldn't be beholden to big tech like Google "controlling AI". This is the entity that Elon Musk and others (including YC Jessica Livingston) donated $40+ million to and the one that Sam was "running for years" along with YC. Maybe this non-profit R&D gig seemed more like a "part-time" job to PG.
(2) then in 2019, OpenAI created a new for-profit OpenAI company (a subsidiary) to raise money and build proprietary products. Sam was then tapped to also run this for-profit company. This new entity is not part of the "running both for years". That's where PG said Sam needed to choose where to be full-time. The additional responsibilities of being the CEO for the new for-profit company was a change in circumstances.
Try reading again both there original tweet and the comment you replied to, slower this time.
Sam was given an option to continue with YC but he chose a bigger project.
If you don't stop spitting in the food, we're going to have to part ways.
Sam didn't want to leave but had to leave.
Also FWIW it just sounds like PG needed someone full time at YC - Sam couldn't and thus he went elsewhere. The length of discussion on this thread is quite long given the banality of the content. Yes I realize by commenting I am adding to that length.
Correct.
> thus firing him
Not correct, because he was free to keep the YC job by leaving OpenAI.
Firing is when you aren't given a choice.
Oh probably worth considering that we can describe the last position you voluntarily left as being fired - you weren't going to show up anymore, so what was going to happen? You got fired but with different paperwork.
Therefore it's not firing.
Words meaning things isn't being pedantic. It's that words actually have meaning and you can't just change them to mean what you want -- not if you want to be understood when you communicate.
It's no different from if your office moves to a different building 5 minutes away and your boss says you have to show up at the new address and you say no thanks I'll only go to the old address. You're not "essentially fired but with different paperwork". You're being unreasonable and choosing to quit.
Expecting to keep a full-time position at one company while also being a full-time CEO somewhere else is being unreasonable and Sam chose to quit.
Actually, that's not what it is.
Your boss can be like, "Hey, you can continue working here but you will need to take a 50% paycut." You say, "Uh, no." So, you end up leaving the place.
Were you fired? Yes, that's being fired. They were renegotiating the terms of your employment - just like they were with Sam. The terms of his employment now became contingent on not working at another company - which weren't the terms of his employment before.
No, it's not. It's getting a (horrific and generally unrealistic) pay cut. In more realistic terms, things like 10% pay cuts sometimes do happen when a company is struggling, and nobody calls those "firings". Because they're not.
Words have meaning. Being fired has a specific meaning, which is a different meaning from being laid off, and is a different meaning from quitting/resigning when you don't like how your job has changed.
(Also, terms of full-time employment often are contingent on not working full-time at another company -- this is a pretty standard clause. So the terms didn't necessarily change at all -- what changed was Sam became CEO of another for-profit company. That was his choice.)
> Also, terms of full-time employment often are contingent on not working full-time at another company -- this is a pretty standard clause
This is also not in any contract that I've ever signed and I've been in SV for a decade.
> This is also not in any contract that I've ever signed
Are you sure you've looked? It can also be implicit in standard clauses such as the company owns all rights to all of your work. In which case starting a second job would be fraudulent.
But of course it's also one of those things that's so common sense it doesn't need to be written into a contract in at-will employment countries (although it often is). There's the expectation in a full-time salaried professional job that the employer is getting all your productive professional work. It's mentally impossible to give 100% to two full-time jobs simultaneously. There's no reasonable expectation that anyone should be able to hold a second full-time CEO job. Nobody is "changing the terms" when the terms are commonly understood. If you start showing up to work shirtless and it wasn't in your employment contract that you're required to wear a top, complaining that they're "changing the terms" is missing the point entirely.
The example is in the headline.
If you work for Google, they own anything you develop on the side. They're actually nice in that they have a review process where they will give you your rights back if they decide it isn't competitive with any of their lines of business.
A lot of other companies don't even provide that. If you start a business on the side, they own all of its IP. Period.
This is extremely common. Both with large corporations as well as with startups. You just might not be aware of it.
I’ve done startups myself and it’s not common in any contracts I’ve signed nor have my coworkers. If it was, we all wouldn’t be able to start our own companies.
However, it can be fairly common at larger companies, especially in specific segments.
It seems pretty clear that PG thought Sam was distracted from his YC job and forced him to choose.
That would imply that Sam was adding negative value to YC, and PG replaced him as a result.
Look if this was dave from some no name company, there would be no real debate about what happened.
Altman isn't special, he's just rich and well connected.
Altman was booted from YC because he shouldn't have been making money from his side gigs. He broke the rules, and had some level of consequence.
Now that he's rich, and famous, he's not going to get much consequence, unless he vaporises a lot of money from the wrong people. But then he might be WeWork cult leader good and get away with it.
I dunno, PG claims that Altman wasn't fired but to me this reads like a difference that ultimately doesn't matter.
Effectively, they gave him an ultimatum: stay at YC and drop that CEO offer or leave. Sure, it's dressed up in nicer words to protect Altman's dignity (which is fine, in terms of "this is bad" it's pretty low, so preserving his dignity makes sense), but that's still what it is. The ultimatum is obviously not a realistic one - be beholden to the board or become your own chief while it's blatantly clear where his ambitions lie, so effectively it's a firing.
If you decide to leave one company to focus on working for another company then that's not the first company firing you, that's you leaving the first company?
No it doesn't.
"For several years, I was sleeping with both her and another woman, she eventually had enough and filed for divorce" means that the wife left.
"For several years, I was sleeping with both her and another woman, she eventually had enough so she asked me to choose between her and the other woman. I chose to leave her for the other woman" means that the husband left. He could have chosen to stay with the wife, but chose not to.
-----
1(A). Wife discovers cheating.
1(B). Wife gives ultimatum.
1(C). Husband declines ultimatum.
1(D). Husband leaves.
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2(A). Wife discovers cheating.
2(B). Wife gives ultimatum.
2(C). Husband declines ultimatum.
2(D). Wife leaves.
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You seem to be arguing that it's always scenario 1, because in step (C), the husband "could have chosen to stay with the wife, but chose not to". But that immediately implies that this scenario cannot occur:
3(A). Wife discovers cheating.
3(B). Wife gives ultimatum.
3(C). Husband declines ultimatum.
3(D). Wife stays.
What we know is that the husband sees no reason for the marriage to change, and the wife does. The breakup of the marriage, in this context, is almost always the wife's choice, as identified by the very simple criterion that it's something the wife wants and the husband doesn't want. She can equally choose to take the husband's offer of a stable marriage with adultery.
> but when OpenAI announced that it was going to have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO
If anything (in case you're looking for a scoop), PG implies that YC found-out about Sam's raising the stakes on OpenAI through a third-party ("OpenAI announced"), which does not look good for Sam. There's even a subtle "but" in there. The firing versus resigning discussion is irrelevant, the focus is probably (and arguably) the lack of clear communication on Sam's part regarding a conflict of interest for both parties, YC and Sam.
As a counter-argument, OpenAI was a running show anyway, which YC was on the know and apparently openly allowed and the for-profit thing was just a matter of time.
Sometimes in these situations, one party who was consenting to non-monogamy decides that they want to be monogamous. When that happens, their partner is asked to make a choice as to whether they want to participate in monogamy with that person or go their separate ways.
That’s what this is like.
The human psychological and interpersonal aspect is the real hazard. You either A) don’t find two other people that can emotionally handle it or B) do find two other people that can emotionally handle it but suffer from the trauma they’ve experienced that numbed them enough to be able to emotionally handle it, which is a hazard in itself. Either way, it just doesn’t work in the long run.
I have practiced non-monogamy for 9 years, and along the way I dated a lot of people who were only doing it because they wanted to date me, and I was non-monogamous. Those situations always go poorly. Now I only date people who both want to be non-monogamous for their own reasons and have read the books and done the work to learn how to do it properly.
You are incorrect in your suggestion that people who learn how to do poly well do it by becoming numb. In the terms of the book Polysecure, people learn how to do non-monogamy properly by learning ways of fostering secure attachment that don't rely on monogamous concepts. That book explores the existing body of research on secure attachment, which is primarily focused on monogamous relationships, and applies those concepts to polyamory, with the ultimate takeaway being the HEARTS method described here: https://www.kcresolve.com/blog/creating-a-secure-attachment-...
You are incorrect in your two options presented, which both boil down to "you cannot find emotionally healthy polyamorous people". In my community in Oakland CA, with the people I tend to date, polyamory is actually the norm. You can find people who are immature and problematic, and you can find people who are stable, emotionally mature, and willing to do work when needed to maintain healthy relationships. I have learned to broadly differentiate between the two types pretty quickly. Note that I am 39 and tend not to date anyone younger than 35.
I currently have two partners. They are both dating another person who I will call M. I am also friends with M, and M and I actually text more than I do with either of our mutual partners. We've been having movie nights recently that are cute and wholesome as hell. I've never seen a whisp of jealousy or related issues amongst us. We've all been poly in this community for long enough, and we are all in therapy, that we have learned how to navigate things.
I hate to say it, but "poly simply doesn't work" is what every person who has lived in a monogamous culture and hasn't done the research is likely to say. It's absolutely not easy to learn how to do it and is very much is not for everyone. Some people really should just be monogamous, that much I have learned. But to make the blanket statement that it doesn't work in the long run is sorely misinformed, and if you gave that advice to someone who trusted you, who actually did need to do the work and learn how to be polyamorous, you could do serious harm to their life. If I had tried to stick with monogamy, it simply would have been wrong for me and would have led t continued misery.
It took a while to get here, and I know all too well the pitfalls, but I have finally learned enough, and critically moved to the right place, and now I am flush with lovely non-monogamous connections that fill my heart with joy. I have two loving partners and I go on lots of dates with other cute people. My relationships are healthier than they have ever been, and I finally feel like I have found myself.
So please, don't go telling people that non-monogamy doesn't work. It isn't easy to learn how to do it, and it is not for everyone, but once you learn how it actually becomes second nature (if its right ...
I have some bad news for you
Reading the replies and the tribal colours / flag waving is fascinating. I suppose This tribalism happens for every topic but it’s just hard to be gifted this perspective on topics your career is invested in.
It’s been fun reading clearly fabricated explanations that don’t base themselves on any objectivity but on the posters inner desires.
I see it almost exclusively online, and people don't seem to notice what they are doing.
IRL the vast majority of the time they are just flawed humans like the rest of us. Sometimes people take on more responsibilities in life than they can realistically handle. And everyone needs to be challenged and questioned whether they’re being honest with themselves at various points in their lives.
As a result, random people on the street form strong opinions on everything, from Sama's psychology and internal narrative to nuclear reactor design.
It is wildly delusional when you think about it.
In other words, the comment is a construct of that definition; And a demonstration of the fallacy of opinion.
Is the only way out is to assert as you do that some opinions are less valid than others? I don’t think that resolves the paradox.
Philosophers must have studied this... I understand that in math we have Gödel incompleteness which is an axiomatic version of a similar argument.
I can have a valid , well informed, and even actionable opinion about what my wife would like for dinner.
Inversely, my opinions on what happened behind closed doors between PG and SamA in 2019 isnt informed, actionable, or generally useful.
To the extent my post could be seen as critical of opinions(which is I think where you draw the irony from), it wasnt critical of holding just any opinion, but holding a certain class of poorly formed and completely unnecessary opinions.
From the outside you might think that this itself is useless navel-gazing, but I have found it to be actionable. It has helped me to question some of my own compulsive behaviors.
Anyway there is some connection to AI and AGI in this that is worth exploring...
The evidence is that if you challenge them with the actual facts, they sometimes don't accuse you of being factually wrong, instead they accuse you of wishing the other way (i.e. being on the other camp).
A lot of people on this forum came of age at a time when the internet and computers and tech companies built around them were ascendant and seen as a force for good in the world. We had the open source movement and peer-to-peer sharing and everything was going to be free and egalitarian and connected. Google was "organizing the world's information" and went from underdog to champion while telling us "don't be evil" was their core value. Kids who were bullied for being sincere and passionate were becoming the adults who ran things and got success and admiration.
Also, in the first ~decade or so that I was on HN speculative fiction about AI was extremely popular here. We weren't really sure if superhuman intelligence would happen anytime soon, but we all had the sense that if/when it did it better be designed and run by people with high ethical standards if we have any hope of avoiding major catastrophe.
(I personally see the concerns about mis-aligned "superhuman AI" and mis-aligned mega-corporations as representing essentially the same underlying anxiety: that there are powerful forces in the world that are beyond our ability to influence in meaningful ways but which have outsized effects on our environment and lives while being completely agnostic to our happiness or even our existence.)
Now we've been through one or more cycles of seeing our heroes turn into villains. Google got rid of "don't be evil". Musk turned his attention away from the stars and the "good of humanity" and toward petty political spats and gossip. And now OpenAI, which sold itself as the organization that will "do AGI" and do it the safe and ethical way, looks like it's run by somebody who is incredibly shrewd and self-serving.
So while I understand why you wouldn't care about this, I also completely understand why it's such an engaging topic for so many people here.
People don't really want to litigate these things in particular but use it as proxy for their own personal feelings about the effects of AI or even capitalism itself.
- (SA) The new CEO of a company wanting to commit as much of their time as possible to that company also seems like a reasonable position.