Doesn't Sam Altman famously not own OpenAI? His whole arrangement is so shady.
Where things get really shady and run the risk of IRS violations is when the leadership of the non-profit has a seperate for profit stake in the subsidary.
I dont think it looks bad. The devil is always in the details: Were helion and reddit deals fair market value or self dealing?
So to say that he owns no part of OpenAI is silly.
No doubt some of OpenAI's founding principles like "stop + assist if a competitor gets to AGI first" are likely flying out the window, perhaps in part due to him and also as one might anticipate of initial lofty ideals and promises, but even with the recent New Yorker and other articles he seems like someone who maybe regularly placates people to avoid personal problems and lies to get out of trouble rather than a Machiavellian tech baron.
This would be more plausible were it not for the staggering amount of wealth he’s amassed through those lies.
Living like that is corrupting. When you treat humans like objects, the question of your starting intentions is really secondary.
All it takes is for a few of them to start comparing notes behind your back. Shit goes sideways extremely fast for people pulling this whose victims start talking to each other without them as the intermediary.
This is one of the reasons that startups prefer the young, they often haven't been exposed to the grift and the manipulation. As a tech bro sociopath, I'd be wary of joining a startup with a mixture of ages, genders, experiences across the spectrum of ICs and management. They probably have experienced too much to be griftable in the same ways as an org stacked with young ICs. You also want to make sure that there are other people in the management chain that are more emotionally unstable. It takes much of the focus off of ones own pathologies.
Happy Hacking!
Asking genuinely - why?
But since you value his opinion so much, perhaps you should inform yourself of what he has said about Altman, including “Sam had been lying to us all the time”.
Why people want to believe Altman is good is about the same reason people want to believe in the second coming.
We used to be capable of so much.
AI very likely will cure many cancers and very possibly (assuming combined with good politicians) will bring about global prosperity. A high percentage of AI company employees and executives and open source developers and researchers sincerely believe it will and so they say they believe it will. They have good reason to believe it, and they will likely be proven correct. If 400 (or 40, or 4) years pass and it's still mostly just creating spreadsheets, I will concede, though.
Makes sense. Cue Don LaFontaine: In a world, where one man sacrificed himself for all of humanity… And they learned nothing of his lessons… In a country where people lie in his name as an excuse to hate their fellow man… Where they mock him by wearing his moment of death as jewellery¹… He’s back and adopted a new identity to slowly fuck them all and make the world burn… Johnny W Pussyfoot is Jesus in: The Second Coming.
He was fired from his first startup.
He was abruptly fired from ycombinator in shady circumstances.
He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control.
He took OpenAI from being a non-profit to a for-profit, with obvious benefits to whoever controls it.
He was massively misleading about the capabilities of his product and predicted AGI within years.
At some point the pattern of all these events should have some weight in your judgement of him, no?
He, at worst, finds him to have been (at some point) incompetent, which is very different from finding him immoral. Paul keeps replying to tweets to clarify this when people continue to misportray his stance.
"He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control." is the only thing you wrote which is plainly true and valid to state.
I am sure there may exist good, strong criticisms, but your argument is so tendentiously gish-gallopy that it will if anything just make people more likely to disbelieve his critics. (Not that I would do that, since that'd be just as fallacious.)
Why would OpenAI employees all still be happily working for him and publicly supporting him? Why is the company still so successful, and the leader? Why wouldn't most of them have left in droves to Anthropic or elsewhere, by now? Especially given most technical employees at OpenAI (justifiably) share the eschatological views of AI shared' by Anthropic staff and other TESCREALists, in which case they really really try to be careful about who will be responsible for potential future superintelligence. The board and some executives disliked and distrusted him but it's unclear many other people there did or do now. And I'm not just talking about the petition but the people who have continued working there for years afterwards.
Personally if someone is found to be untrustworthy by multiple people and does weird stuff (like moving from open non-profit to for profit), I trust them a lot less. I don’t know him so don’t pass judgment but wouldn’t trust him and certainly wouldn’t give his statements credence since he’s been so spectacularly wrong on AI outcomes.
As to people at OpenAI and investors in OpenAI, I certainly wouldn’t expect them to denigrate their CEO just before an IPO, the one who fought off the board and installed his own place men and thus has complete control; it is not in their interests to do so.
If there is a bust after this boom I think quite a lot of bad behaviour and circular deals from The main players (nvidia, OpenAI, MS etc) will be revealed at that point. In a financial boom a lot gets hidden.