Altman's actions are even more consistent with total confidence & dedication to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever. Plus, a desire to retain more personal control over that outcome – & not just conventional wealth! – than was typical with prior breakthroughs.
I'm a software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company with every intention of taking the slow-and-steady path to retirement. I'm not projecting, I promise.
> to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever
Except that OpenAI isn't a faraway leader. Their big news this week was them finally making an effort to catch up to Anthropic's Artifacts. Their best models do only marginally better in the LLM Arena than Claude, Gemini, and even the freely-released Llama 3.1 405B!
Part of why I believe Altman is looking to cash out is that I think he's smart enough to recognize that he has no moat and a very small lead. His efforts to get governments to pull up the ladder have largely failed, so the next logical choice is to exit at peak valuation rather than waiting for investors to recognize that OpenAI is increasingly just one in a crowd.
I don't see how it could happen at current valuation. Who would want to pay $150 bil. for an OpenAI, where Sam is no longer part of it?
It can be an "exit" in that it makes Sam extremely wealthy while he still hangs on as CEO.
Sure, that's one option. But it's pretty rare for a founder of a $10+ billion startup to immediately liquidate their shares right after an IPO.
It's also a risky bet. If OpenAI goes public, they'll have a hard time justifying the same or a higher valuation than they got Microsoft and Nvidia to buy in at.
You think "smart" implies a low chance of world-epochal AI breakthroughs that would ruin your "slow-and-steady path to retirement". You think OpenAI has "no moat". You think it's wise to satisfice – taking a "decent" paycheck – rather than shoot-for-the-moon (and beyond it, control of the 'lightcone').
That's closer to the "short-term exit" mindset – get a good-enough payout, in mundane dollars, while you can – that you're alleging in Altman than what I'm seeing in his statements & behaviors. Yes, someone with your beliefs would in fact be trying to pump OpenAI's short-term hype for a timely exit and an even-more-cushy retirement.
But Altman's already a billionaire with any creature comfort he'd want, for the rest of his life, plus at least one "doomsday bunker" (per a 2016 'New Yorker' profile).
For at least 10 years, he's been consistently expressing a desire to advance, and control, breakthroughs in AI, AGI, and ASI that could – in a true believers' worldview – wipe away as obsolete all his prior billions – as well as the "slow-and-steady path[s] to retirement" pursued by others.
He knows as an insider and contributor OpenAI's actual lead over others – who have tended to approximately-reach OpenAI's capabilities a year or more later.
That you rate as OpenAI's "big news this week" their "Artifacts" end-user feature, rather than everything else announced & rolled out, plus OpenAI's gigantic leads in funds raised and revenue run-rate, suggests a particular world-view.
I would suggest that you are over-focused on the kind of small-stakes products/markets/ambitions that are highly-legible to a "software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company" – but such considerations are barely afterthoughts in the game of power & legacy that Altman is now playing.
An intuition pump is to think of a religious zealot that has a drastically different worldview and aims and drives from you that seem completely nonsensical (e.g. perhaps not caring about wealth accumulation at all - even for stability - and only about perpetuating God's glory).
Sam is no religious zealot, but the difference in the life game he is playing and the life game most of us are playing is as vast as that between us and the zealot.