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Comment by lumenwrites | Hacker News Reader

I keep reading people on the internet mistrusting him with a lot of confidence, but I haven't heard of any tangible evidence that he's lying about anything.

Can you name a couple of examples of the things he said that we know are lies? Or is it all just people making uninformed assumptions or being snarky?

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The main thing is OpenAI itself. Altman has long pitched it as an open, non-profit and raised hundreds of millions on that. Turns out it's not open and now has been positioned as a for-profit entity owned by a non-profit that is trying to convert itself to a for-profit.

On top of that he repeatedly used the fact that he had no equity to push back on criticism and to appear more altruistic and trustworthy. Turns out, that was just part of the con.

Sam Altman is currently being sued by his sister for raping and sexually abusing her for 9 years. He is denying this, I guess that counts as lies.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/sam-altman-denies-si...

Changing his company from a non-profit to a for-profit once he saw the $$$, seems pretty untrustworthy to me.

OpenAI is not changing to a for-profit. It[1] always was a for-profit entity, owned by a non-profit.

The big change is that the non-profit no longer owns the entirety (or even a majority) of the for-profit entity; it is now a minority owner.

[1] OpenAI as we know it today. OpenAI was once just the non-profit entity, but back then was just an AI think tank. In 2019, it formed the for-profit corporation as a subsidiary to raise money and build the tech that we now know about (and make money from any products built on that tech).

Secretly funding the FoundationMath benchmark, contributors unaware of the COI, having access to the questions and answers with a "verbal agreement" not to train on it.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/19/ai-benchmarking-organizati...

I don't know if this is technically a lie, but he said that he'll purchase electricity made from fusion power within the next couple of years.

I don't know if he believes that himself. But I can tell you with extreme high confidence that this is not going to happen, and it's not even close to anything remotely realistic.

The literal bait-and-switch of "Oh hey Open AI is nonprofit I promise guys!" and then turning around and switching it to profit.

That alone is enough to walk away from him.

One doesn't have to be a liar to be untrustworthy

Why was he removed from leadership positions at Loopt, YC, and OpenAI?

https://www.disconnect.blog/p/kara-swishers-story-about-sam-...

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