The fact that he's a founder and the one that made it "one of the most important companies on the planet"?
>The organization was founded in December 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.
Altman didn't join as CEO until 2019.
Edit: All those names and we're going to say stuff like Altman was "the one" who made the company so important?
>The group’s other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba.
That sentence explicitly lists who the founders are. Note that neither Musk nor Altman are listed before the period closes it out. The next sentence goes on to say...
>Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group.
Alright, cool - we've moved on from the list of founders, I see. It's not until the next sentence that we find out that..
>OpenAI’s co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
So, OpenAI themselves made it a point to separate "founders" from "co-chairs" in their own announcement. I don't really know how it could be any clearer than that.
Funder, not founder, yes.
If OpenAI themselves chose to distinguish between founder and co-chair, then I really dunno what else to tell ya.
There are no shareholders of a charity, instead the board are the notional owners and take decisions that shareholders would.
So in this context Musk is founding board member and thus a founder as it would apply to a for profit entity.
Thing is, I don't really care if I'm wrong or right about that title. We're bickering about semantics at this point, and whether or not he was technically a founder doesn't really change the crux of my first post in this chain.
Which I guess now's as good of a time as any to answer that point about Altman having founded it - no, I don't think that founding something automatically means that you have the capability to oversee it long-term.