Sam Altman didn’t take any equity in OpenAI, report says | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman didn’t take any equity in OpenAI, report says

cnbc.com

158 pointsSirLJ202 comments

From the original article linked to by this CNBC story:

> Altman also made an unusual decision for a tech boss: He would take no equity in the new for-profit entity, according to people familiar with the matter. Altman was already extremely wealthy, investing in several wildly successful tech startups, and didn’t need the money.

> He also believed the company needed to become a business to continue its work, but he told people the project was not designed to make money. Eschewing any ownership interest would help him stay aligned with the original mission.

https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Do we know if Altman continues to have no equity in OpenAI?

The article re-asserts that he still has no equity in its closing paragraphs:

> For Altman, it’s not about money, either. One of the most surprising things in all of this is that he does not own even a tiny piece of OpenAI, which highlights the unusual nature of this company and the entire AI industry.

What about options? He might own options.

Or be able to negotiate a management carve out

> Do we know if Altman continues to have no equity in OpenAI?

Even if he doesn’t, he might in one of OpenAI, LPs, business partners / investors that is benefitting from the work, like Microsoft. Which would provide just the right distance for plausible deniability of a personal profit motive while very much having a personal profit motive.

As I understand, OpenAI started as a non-profit entity and has taken on large donations. Then, the for-profit entity has been created and is using the technology developed by the non-profit entity, which was developed presumably by using the donated funds. So, maybe it's not about altruism at all, but instead Sam Altman is just protecting himself against potential lawsuits from the donors? There was probably some agreement on how the technology will be used.

Elon Musk has donated $100M USD, and does not look happy about the developments, based on his tweets.

Elon tried to buy the company and become CEO and OpenAI said no. I also heard that they knew they were going to burn through the 100M, and were counting on the 1B he promised, and couldn't raise enough money as a non profit so that's why they went for profit.

Happy accidents.

As a rule of thumb, its never about altruism.

Obviously. It's Sam Altman, not Sam Altruism.

Sam 'I altruistically give up equity control in my companies' Altruism

Bit of a mouthful

Rules of thumb often apply.

The non-profit-oh-wait-just-kidding nonsense feels like an existential risk to OpenAI. I agree that Altman may be (unintentionally?) protecting himself from lawsuits, but I don't see it being enough to avoid the spotlight.

I expect someone will eventually sue OpenAI for the shenanigans, and that a competitor (Meta?) or Elon Musk will fund the lawsuit. The goal won't be to actually win the case, but instead to motivate US regulatory action to undercuts OpenAI's perceived advantage.

Bill Gates and Microsoft will have something to say about that.

>>Elon Musk has donated $100M USD, and does not look happy about the developments, based on his tweets.

He is not happy because he could have invested in OpenAI instead of Twitter.

> Elon Musk has donated $100M USD, and does not look happy about the developments, based on his tweets.

Sour grapes?

A few years ago, he wasn’t happy with his investment in the company because they were behind Google.

So he proposed becoming the CEO, and got snubbed by Altman and the rest (presumably from fear of how it played out for the original Tesla founders, at the time).

One possibility is - that he is genuinely concerned, and his vision of AI included some hardcoded rules - such as Asimov’s rules for robots. Can’t dismiss it completely, as this was his original purpose for starting OpenAI.

Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

This is like Charlie Lee selling all his litecoins. Divesting from the project in order to prove that he's not after enriching himself. But the idea landed really poorly with people who assume a leader is more motivated when personal wealth is at stake.

"Eschewing any ownership interest would help him stay aligned with the original mission."

Is this a nice acknowledgement that the capitalist drive for profit can produce bad outcomes, which Altman wanted to avoid?

Buried in the article is this gem: "The latest language model, GPT-4, has 1 trillion parameters." - have no idea if it's true or not.

> While Altman’s lack of initial equity reportedly gave investors pause in 2019...

Initial equity.

Doesn't say anything about whether he has an agreement in place to receive future equity.

Does he have any options or warrants?

Is he a member of, or LP in, any organization that invested?

Did the reporter not ask any follow up questions?

Or was this careful phrasing ("initial equity") intentional?

It's not in the cropped bit, but the original Semafor article this clips from closes with that

Shareholders and the company will also inevitably have an Employee Share Scheme.

At that point as CEO he will have equity and benefit.

Or just an agreement from, say, Microsoft that once they've made a certain amount of money, Altman gets a sizeable one-time payout.

So who owns large stakes in OpenAI exactly? Seems like a somewhat important question given how important the company is shaping up to be to the future of society.

Microsoft owns 49% IIRC. Prob a bunch of the other folks who pledged $ at the beginning as well (Thiel, Musk, etc)

Musk also says he has no equity.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1639142924985278466?s=46...

Musk says a lot of things...

This is like how they get a cut of each Android phone sold. Microsoft is gonna profit off of every new wave of technology that others built until the end of time, aren’t they

That ownership stake is 'on loan' to them until they make 100x their money back. Then ownership reverts back to OpenAI.

> Microsoft owns 49% IIRC.

Which makes Microsoft the majority shareholder. Which means that for all intents and purposes, we can consider OpenAI as a Microsoft venture now.

In what world is 49% a majority?

No, they got 49% of profits up to some very large number. It wasn't equity.

> company is shaping up to be to the future of society

It's definitely a terrifyingly powerful company, but "future of society" seems a little strong.

I think it's the future for spam, writing rote emails/documents/code, disinformation, plagiarism, lying, cheating, and impersonation, but those are subsets of society -- not all of society.

I've already had managers try to weigh in on technical discussions by posting ChatGPT's "thoughts" as if it had a seat at the table. They also quoted it to answer a question of when we need to worry about scale (a big part of the discussion we were having).

The answer was useless btw. Just a coarse, high-level, unactionable summary of what we had already talked about. Dressed up in a few nicely-worded paragraphs.

I wonder if this is gonna be a new pain in my ass. Wait until managers start using it to disagree with my estimates - I might blow my top lol.

What a bleak outlook you have. Here are some good things it can do:

1. Answer student questions and effectively act as a tutor. Duolingo is already using it like this, and ChatGPT can of course do it directly as well.

2. Make natural language interfaces to APIs easily. Look at the ChatGPT plugins announced yesterday for examples.

3. Provide basic customer support. Ideally, it could answer most common and basic questions and possibly even fix common problems via a plugin. Then the actual human customer support could step in for more complex problems.

There are endless positive examples like these.

Regarding 1., it appears to have about a 30% accuracy rate, and the other 60% is complete nonsense, often complete with fabricated citations. I dearly hope that nobody is ever encouraged to have this machine as their tutor.

You're right. They won't make any progress on this metric at all.

They might do, but what error rate do you think is acceptable? How do you actually measure and test the error rate? It's a use I can imagine in the future, but I think it's really premature to be using 'personal tutor' as a benefit (as openai do in their advertizing materials) when the program, as it stands, is essentially a fluent and convincing bullshitter, which is the single worst possible trait for a teacher.

Error is acceptable in all things that don't need to be deterministic. Which is most thing in life. How do I discover a good career path? Why do you structure a repository of a program into folders? What is the best place to vacation? What is the best way to learn math? What is a good way to articulate socialism? How do I increase my vocabulary? What is corporate strategy?

Ask 10 different people "smart" people (define smart however you want), you'll get 10 different answers to these questions. These are all questions an LLM could answer amazingly. Probably a lot better than most humans.

If you don't ask it what 2+2 is or who came to in America in 1875 then you get useful things.

Asking a LLM deterministic questions right now is like asking a calculator what the meaning of life is. If you use the tool for something it's not good at you get unusable answers.

If you ask an idiot what he thinks about something, and he gives you a totally wrong answer, you have still learned at least one fact: a person believes a thing. As a human, living in a democracy, that has some worth. ChatGPT's wrong answer has absolutely no value at all.

Further, 10 different smart people will give 10 different answers because they have coherent worldviews and biases and proclivities, so by accounting for those, you can work out what the right answer is. Even if ChatGPT was anywhere close to a human expert when it comes to accuracy (what's the error rate in a peer reviewed journal article?) it would still have no coherent worldview or bias to contextualize its statements.

I see what you’re saying. The world has lost its collective mind.

HN seems to want to hand over the keys to the kingdom to basically a string generator. The string generator believes nothing, understands nothing, knows nothing but here we are.

Any intelligence that gpt4 shows is an emergent property. Humans are the ones reading GPT’s output and imputing meaning to it.

Reminds me of astrology and mass hysteria - people convincing each other to give this new oracle a chance because they personally have seen value in its ramblings.

I understand what you're saying. I just thing the world isn't so black and white. When you ask the idiot, or the smart person for that matter, a question, you have no idea if they are right or not. You only know after the fact when you get enough data to prove them wrong or someone that you trust more than that person tells you otherwise.

What is your error rate? What is my error rate? All of this stuff is unknown because we don't have counter factuals and we don't think of the world in this way (Did you order the correct food at dinner? Did you wash your clothes at the optimal time?)

To me you're thinking of it as a classical deterministic (binary) computer rather than a probabilistic thing. It's not an oracle, or a miracle, or anything other than some thing that gives useful information some percentage of the time. If something has to be right 100% of the time for it to be useful, or even 60% of the time, then the world is missing out on a lot of value.

Investors are right ~51% of the time, startup founders in the aggregate are right ~10% of the time, a great batting average is ~30%, etc.

I don't know, I guess I'd have to measure the accurate rate of the average personal tutor and then wait for it to cross that threshold.

30% accuracy rate in what exactly? Take a look at the GPT-4 announcement page for graphs showing the accuracy on different standardized tests. It’s not perfect, but making improvements with each release.

One big area where it does poorly right now is math. But they just announced a ChatGPT plugin for Wolfram, which I expect will make it very good at math. Wolfram also has a large database of curated information to draw on.

Technology improves over time. GPT is still new and improving quickly. What it does now isn’t perfect, but it is still incredible.

There's a post on /r/askhistorians where somebody asked ChatGPT for book recommendations on various historical topics. Some of them didn't exist. It actually took an expert reader to identify which books were made up, misatributed, and so on. That's much worse than nothing: it's a horrific timewaste.

My guess is stuff like math, where you can fairly easilly verify the factuality of ChatGPT's answers, is an area where you could certainly see progress. More general stuff like history, where it's important to have a really firm grasp of facts, inutition, and nuance, ChatGPT will likely be hard to improve, and worse, much harder to verify. Worse, these things can be insiduous: if you've learned something straightforwardly wrong, it corrupts future conclusions drawn from that erroneous premise.

I think the plugin system will ultimately help for most areas where LLMs are weak today.

Need to do math? Use the Wolfram plugin.

Need to have hard facts from reliable and citable sources? Use a plugin that queries databases like Arxiv. The LLM could give you links to sources and provide quotes from those sources to support its reasoning.

Those seem underwhelming positives in the face of the obvious negatives.

"The nonprofit, OpenAI Inc., is the sole controlling shareholder of OpenAI LP" from Wikipedia.

Clearly Microsoft has a large stake as well. It sounds like equity was distributed to employees, but according to Fortune some was sold: "OpenAI’s other investors include Hoffman’s charitable foundation and Khosla Ventures. Last year, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Bedrock Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz reportedly purchased shares from preexisting shareholders in a sale valuing the company at around $20 billion, according to The Information."

https://fortune.com/2023/01/10/microsoft-investment-10-billi...

So, the usual suspects, then. The more I learn about OpenAI, the more it looks like just another SV venture, not some special "for the good of humanity" thing.

Is there an example of a solely "for the good of humanity" thing that has come out of SV? Seems like a strange thing to expect from the technology sector. I think tech companies are (very) net positive for society but don't have to be designed as solely for the good of humanity to achieve this goal.

Exactly the point I was making. We may quibble about whether or not SV companies overall have been a net positive, but that's neither here nor there.

OpenAI has been selling themselves as a do-gooder kind of project. I think that they're being disingenuous in doing so. They're building just a regular old SV money-spinner.

Just to piggyback on these guys not being the good guys, I don't think good people would have released this yet. This is gas on a fire when you look at the issues people are having figuring out whats going on in the world and making sense of it.

Every interaction with the public and these AIs I see screams "this was not ready for general consumption"

Wikipedia?

> I think tech companies are (very) net positive for society

There are certainly huge positives, but do you really feel something like Facebook is a net positive? Facebook, which intentionally stoke(d/s) genocide? Genocides have existed before Facebook, yes, but so did communication and racist relatives.

Do you have a source on them intentionally stoking genocide? I’m not fan of Facebook, but if there’s reliable evidence on that I’d expect summons to The Hague in short order, which I’ve yet to see.

Some people certainly believe so[1], there are also plenty of other links if searching for ’facebook myanmar genocide’ (though I would assume they a few common sources). But intentions are of course hard to prove.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Benetech [https://benetech.org/]

Code for America [https://codeforamerica.org/]

SFTech4Good [https://www.sftech4good.com] - a newsletter and monthly meetup in SF for orgs/people interested in technology and social impact

There are also social-cause startups (which obviously have to be monetized by some funding source, typically govt, grant or ESG).

Also, Yahoo (RIP) was by reputation as community-minded and pro-open-source as a for-profit business citizen can get.

>Yahoo (RIP) was by reputation as community-minded and pro-open-source as a for-profit business citizen can get.

As someone who went through Yahoo acquisition and total bungling of tumblr, where community feedback fell on deaf ears, that's news to me. (Granted, the next owners were the ones who immediately managed to drop the userbase by like 80%, so maybe you're not totally wrong)

I said was. Meaning pre-2012. What year in your opinion did Yahoo jump the shark, as an employer?

(IIRC Yahoo culture had the reputation for being very friendly to employees open-sourcing their code, and not aggressively pursuing BS patent suits; this was different to most of MAANG + telecomms.)

Investors include Y Combinator, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft, Amazon, Infosys, Tiger Global, Elevation Capital, Bedrock Capital, Wikus Ventures, Social Discovery Ventures, Pre IPO Club, Matthew Brown Companies, Change.org, and Fenrir.

Most are okay, except a few. Taking on investors, with or without equity, is marriage to them nonetheless.

Avoid:

- Thiel and Tiger (Coleman III) - Political meddlers

- Khosla - beach-hoarder and waster of taxpayer dollars

- Social Discovery Group - Russia

The ChatGPT trust, whose beneficiary is ChatGPT itself (the AI, not the company).

/-s

Wonder how it would be if one day (lets say when agi is reached), the ai owns the company that develops the ai.

Is there some other arrangement? It was originally a nonprofit, so there might be something else going on, like board voting rights that he doesn't have to give up - or special voting shares.

For being a nonprofit, Microsoft has demonstrated pretty well how you can basically do an acquisition non-acquisition. They've got special exclusive rights to certain uses of the models, all the code, and OpenAI dumping cash into Azure.

Isn’t it Microsoft cash that openai is dumping into azure?

Details, details

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/microsoft...

Microsoft's margin on Azure spending is around 75%, so their investment may really be 4 times smaller than reported if it all funnels back in to exclusive spending on their high margin datacenter business (I'm sure lots goes to salaries and other expenses too though).

Maybe it is altruistic but their comp structure is bizarre, watch some individual compensation go from millions to $30k and others do almost the inverse:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...

If there's one thing Open AI does not appear to be, it's altruistic. It's just hard, cold business.

Read the article. The non-profit angle was contingent on a $1B donation from Elon Musk. When Musk was rebuffed for the CEO job, he reneged on his donation and they no longer had the available funds to run the business.

"OpenAI"

I guess the name was still fine?

AI is something to be opened, like Pandora's box.

While snarky, this is a pithy comment. You made me chuckle (and wonder what we're in for).

I read the article. I'm not saying that OpenAI didn't start with some sort of altruistic ideals. I'm not saying they did, either -- I don't know either way. But if they did, those ideals appear to be dead and buried now.

I'm certainly not convinced that they are altruistic, but they don't seem to be a hard, cold business either (after all, why would Altman not have taken equity if that was the case).

I don't think that Altman's position about equity means anything about OpenAI.

> why would Altman not have taken equity if that was the case

Because he is already at the more-money-than-god level and it’s more valuable for him to just leverage the “altruism”.

> Is there some other arrangement?

I heard Sam Altman gets to be in the room when the AGI hatches so that it imprints on him. He took that in lieu of equity.

Does he then immediately do an iris scan and sell it some coins?

Tbf those first impressions matter

Better hope it slept through its training on Freud.

Henry, Henry, Henry, why didn't you tell me? I insist on being here when they're born.

Is this a reference to something?

The scene in Jurassic Park where owner John Hammond chides the lead geneticist Henry Wu that he likes to be present when the dinosaurs hatch.

OpenAI is unlikely to IPO or be acquired outright anytime soon, equity is meaningless - instead, who controls the spice controls the universe.

Sam Altman is only 37. He has time to wait.

We will see a los of OpenAIs (FAANG first) soon. It is the kind of innovation where anybody will catch up.

> It is the kind of innovation where anybody will catch up.

Technically? Probably yes.

But where is your startup going to find millions of users for extra training data?

> But where is your startup going to find millions of users for extra training data?

The (big) community. There are existing decentralized approaches to accomplish this. And I am not mentioning the data that could be consumed beyond DMCAs.

The startups will use the existing LLMs to bootstrap theirs, getting access to the data by proxy. This will transfer cash to the early LLMs but give a means for startups to get going.

Some startups will use the existing LLMs to bootstrap theirs, getting access to the data by proxy. This will transfer cash to the early LLMs but give a means for startups to get going.

everywhere? what moat does openAI have?

Microsoft Office suite

People will be copying this spice recipe pretty quickly.

Or it’ll crash and burn like Loopt.

You can read up on the corporate structure here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

> The nonprofit, OpenAI Inc., is the sole controlling shareholder of OpenAI LP. OpenAI LP, despite being a for-profit company, retains a formal fiduciary responsibility to OpenAI Inc.'s nonprofit charter. A majority of OpenAI Inc.'s board is barred from having financial stakes in OpenAI LP. In addition, minority members with a stake in OpenAI LP are barred from certain votes due to conflict of interest.

> The company then distributed equity to its employees and partnered with Microsoft, announcing an investment package of $1 billion into the company. OpenAI also announced its intention to commercially license its technologies. OpenAI plans to spend the $1 billion "within five years, and possibly much faster". Altman has stated that even a billion dollars may turn out to be insufficient, and that the lab may ultimately need "more capital than any non-profit has ever raised" to achieve artificial general intelligence.

Otherwise it sounds like Greg Brockman is the main guy of the for profit business?

I wish we had some real smart people as CEOs like Peter Norvig. Unfortunately, smart people don't like those kind of jobs. Instead we get some guy who made some "share my location" social media app and has been failing up ever since!

>Musk reneged on a publicly announced funding arrangement, providing only $100 million of his planned $1 billion in support, according to the report.

So does Musk still have equity with his $100 million investment or did he also pull out of that?

No. It wasn't an equity stake, it was a donation.

Question answered by Elon himself on Twitter:

>I donated the first $100M to OpenAI when it was a non-profit, but have no ownership or control

Tangential: how can this thing be sustainable, if it uses content from various web sites, robbing them of impressions and ad revenue? Evil Google at least sends some traffic your way.

This piece is just outrageous. Sam Altman, who is incredibly handsome, wealthy, and generous, did not take any equity in OpenAI. He's basically doing this work out of the goodness of his heart folks. Very similar to SBF, who also received many fluff pieces from the media, who was only making money from his crypto exchange so he could use it to change the world -- all from the goodness of their hearts. Until we find out it's not.

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.

Spoiler tag on that last sentence please.

Which last sentence: 'Altman won’t make any money on his new startup, but he’s earned himself a place in history.'

and/or

'Until we find out it's not.'

The last last sentence?

I'm all for being cynical and jaded, but what do you suppose his secret evil plan is in this case?

It's not necessarily evil. It's probably just to make a shit ton of money. Plenty of ways to do that without directly taking equity in OpenAI.

You don't get to his level of wealth without having an innate desire for more of money. Everything always comes back to that.

Hypothetically, if he doesn't end up making as much money as he would have if he'd taken equity, does that mean his secret plan failed, or that he's got an even more secret plan going on in the background?

Or he didn't realize it would take off the way it did and made a mistake. Now he's getting fluff pieces written to at least try and make the best of the mistake.

I don't believe for a second that he essentially donated billions of dollars in equity on purpose.

I've not seen Game of Thrones, but I am aware of a meme about Daenerys Targaryen surprising viewers by doing in the finale exactly and specifically what she said she was going to do throughout the show.

So anyway, Sam Altman is working on creating and aligning this super-duper artificial intelligence that, if it works out, makes all of human labour and economic value to date pale in comparison.

It's amazing how that is still a difficult concept for people here in 2023.

How is this comparable? SBF did own equity in FTX+Alameda. Altman doesn't. That removes the monetary incentives. It is not everything but it is a big deal.

SBF was going to benefit from FTX running a ponzi and not being caught and being rich.

Altman will not benefit monetarily if OpenAI becomes incredibly valuable. Decoupling the monetary incentives is a very good thing here.

It's naive to think not having equity (if it's even true?) means there's no monetary incentive, which you then build the rest of your reply on.

There might be some incentive still. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing story. The fact that he has 0 equity by itself makes the SBF comparison ridiculous (which is what the parent poster was connecting to). It is clear there is not the same level of monetary incentive.

>Decoupling the monetary incentives is a very good thing here.

Didn't seem to help.

> Didn't seem to help.

With what?

Leading OpenAI in an altruistic direction rather than a profit-seeking one.

I don't think a non-profit OpenAI would ever have had enough resources to be anything but another also ran AI startup.

It doesn't matter. If you create a 100 billion dollar company there is no way to escape becoming rich.

Hmm, but how much does his Cayman Trust own?

If he took say 25% of the shares, he could become one day soon the next Bill Gates/Elon Musk.

Maybe, but he didn’t so what’s your point?

> If he took say 25% of the shares, he could become one day soon the next Bill Gates/Elon Musk

And perhaps that's exactly why he didn't take shares.

While having that much money is certainly tempting, becoming that type of person is much less tempting.

He's already worth more than a person can reasonably spend - why risk becoming Bill or Elon?

Strange to group those two into a cautionary statement. Bill seems very happy and seems intent on leaving the world much better than he found it by spending his vast riches, while Elon Musk is Elon Musk.

That's a fairly jaundiced and narrow view of the both of them.

Can we agree that say, at least half the people who strongly dislike one of them probably admires the other to some extent? I know marxists would hate both just on the grounds they're wealthy, but everyone else, I'd argue, probably respects one or the other, likely depending on one's own politics.

I admire both Elon and Bill. They are both geniuses in their own respects. Elon is more anti-social, but probably because Bill had a much comfortable childhood.

What makes Elon a genius in your view?

I'm probably one of the five people on this earth who gets Elon (not in a way his fanbois do).

Let me point out the negatives of Elon

i) He is a bull-shitter. He has no clue about a lot of things, yet he has plenty of hubris.

ii) He is mis-trusting of people (this always comes from upbringing and environment. If people constantly misplace your trust growing up, your default is to mistrust people). I can understand why you wouldn't want to work under Elon. That's a perfectly valid reason

What makes Elon different, and which a lot of people don't get about him (including his fanbois)?

i) He is a true Engineer in the sense, even if he starts with bullshit and hubris, he is a quick learner. He breaks things to learn from first principles (Things he has repeatedly demonstrated everywhere). Media/HN focus on him breaking things, but that's what how everyone learns about complex systems.

People don't appreciate how quickly he went from from 'Alien Dreadnought' to 'Tent in a backyard' and then back to AI Automation at Tesla.

ii) Bias for action with the right amount of risks. Some people have bias for action, some people take risks and some are constant learners. But, I have never seen anyone combine all three like Elon. He is successful not because of his knowledge, but his willingness to take risks despite massive adversity and guaranteed mock by media.

iii) He is narcisstic, but not like Trump. He has several times shown self-deprecating humor and acknowledged his mistakes (and quickly learns from them).

It's easy to hate Musk lately, and I haven't forgotten when Gates was a ruthless monopolist who made "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" Microsoft's unofficial motto. Gates has made a show of philanthropy, yet he's wealthier than ever. Both men associated with Epstein after his release from prison. I respect both of them in the same way I respect pitbulls.

I dislike them both, but for different reasons. I dislike Gates for the serious damage he did to the software industry, and I dislike Musk because I think he's a con artist.

But my dislike for both of them has nothing to do with politics or their wealth.

Gates, during his quest for money was a ruthless business man who squashed nearly every business that stood in his way for more money and more dominance for the company he ran.

Musk is very much the same in his destruction of things that stand in the way of him and more money. His attitude isn't the ruthless businessman but rather the unrepentant troll - but his approaches to prevent the funding of things that stand in his way of Tesla ascendant (you get things like https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali... ).

Gates is largely over his quest for money and now more concerned with legacy, but that doesn't erase his history. Musk is still very much enmeshed in his quest for money.

I believe that Sam Altman doesn't want to have that be part of his goals and with the resources that he already has can fairly comfortably work on what he feels is meaningful now rather than waiting 30 years until he retires.

According to the article Elon Musk could've been even more Elon Musk. He reduced his investment by $900m because he thought it was fatally behind Google's effort.

It was never an investment, it was a donation back when they were still nonprofit. He said they would never catch Google unless he ran the company, Altman and co refused, he took the ball and went home, then Altman and co beat Google on their own. They just needed to take actual investment and cease being a non-profit to stay funded.

If I bought 25% of Bezos' book business I could have been the next Bill Gates too!

Board of the OpenAI nonprofit:

Greg Brockman Ilya Sutskever Sam Altman Adam D'Angelo Will Hurd Tasha McCauley Helen Toner Shivon Zilis

Shares are not the important part here. Board memberships are controlling OpenAI Inc.

If Sam Altman really wants to show that he's not doing it for money / power, he should give up his board membership.

> If Sam Altman really wants to show that he's not doing it for money / power, he should give up his board membership.

Why would he want to show anything? Maybe he likes the work.

I have no problem with people wanting to get rich / powerful, just writing things like he doesn't get shares as he's not interested in money is virtue signaling, just like closed open ai.

SBF showed how dangerous virtue signaling can be, as he earned a lot of trust from people for something fake, which translated to billions of dollars stolen from people who trusted him.

Right now the stake is something much more powerful, and the Microsoft deal showed clearly how much he wanted to stay in control.

The article says he didn't write that, but some research company discovered it.

> Altman didn’t take an equity stake in the company when it added the for-profit OpenAI LP entity in 2019, Semafor reported Friday.

Interesting... they're all, except Will, under 40.

Zilis actually stepped down today. She presumably represented Musk's interests (she's an executive at Neuralink and gave birth to his twins last year via IVF). https://nypost.com/2023/03/24/shivon-zilis-mother-to-elon-mu...

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