Sam Altman, Lately
oftheclock.com
oftheclock.com
> “A growing number of Altman’s startups do business with OpenAI itself, either as customers or major business partners. The arrangement puts Altman on both sides of deals, creating a mounting list of potential conflicts in which he could personally benefit from OpenAI’s work.”
If nothing else this idea that a person that is positioned to lead such a company is willing to do it for just $65k for altruistic reasons, backfired. Clearly the person has many incentives to go find profits somewhere else.
edit: added second quote to clarify
Or any type of small-a altruist, really. Which is in direct conflict of the image he wishes/wished to portray by "only" officially getting a bay-area-intern-level salary with no equity.
Yes.
a $27M home in San Francisco,
a $16M "weekend ranch" in Napa,
and a $43M estate in Hawaii.
In my first draft “backfired” is the exact word I used too but thought it would come off as too targeted language against Sam, so I changed it.
The post is not a “hit-piece” on Sam, nor am I calling him a bad person or anything of the like.
It’s a discussion of the direct contradiction between publicly stating someone is without financial biases and the hard facts of clear financial entanglements.
I’m happy to hear any criticism on how I could’ve written it better to explain my position! :)
The article is well balanced and in my opinion doesn't exhibit a sense of bias. It's clear you're not alone in noticing the dots on the graph are forming a line.
Some may say that merely shining a light on the topic, rather than something more virtuous, is a form of bias. I tend to disagree with those assessments due to the aforementioned reasons.
We're all adults, we can hold a complex view of Sam Altman. It's not about putting him in a good or bad box, but being aware that he does have financial ties to all of this (avoidable or otherwise) and that is the lens we may need to evaluate some of his decisions by.
His actions will ultimately tell his story.
That said, HN can be a little too suspicious and it does frequently trump up malice in the benign.
In your post the comment.
> Graham's attempt to dispel rumors of Altman's supposed firing didn't work as well as hoped, with many of the responses reiterating that making him choose between OpenAI & YCombinator still constituted a form of firing.
Portrays this as a matter of opinion, when if any single opinion should be considered it should be Paul Graham's since he was the person performing the act.
The likely cause for Paul Graham's statement was Helen Toners comments a few days earlier
>if Sam did stay in power as he ultimately did you know that would make their lives miserable and I guess the last thing I would say about this is that this actually isn't a new problem for Sam and if you look at some of the reporting that that has come out since November it's come out that he was actually fired from his previous job at Y combinator which was hushed up at the time
Which clearly carries the implication that this was an inarguable firing for misdeeds. In this context, it does not matter if being asked to make a choice is technically firing. The main point is that this is a rebuttal of the narrative put forth by Helen Toner.
Paul Graham makes this clear
>we would have been happy if he stayed
So this is how you start out, It places the article within a false narrative, but is not even the topic of the post. It would have been better to more concisely state that the thread containing Paul Graham's statement revealed an additional piece of information.
Next you say
>While responding to replies, it seems that Graham was informed - and later confirmed - that Altman had, in a pretty clear conflict of interest
You are combining a conclusion and evidence here. The evidence shows that Sam Altman has a degree of investment in OpenAI through Y Combinator. You need to make the argument that this was a clear conflict of interest separately, additionally you need to state whether you mean the conflict of interest is referring to when he invested the money as the president of Y Combinator, or later in decision making at OpenAI as a stake holder.
>obviously unbeknownst to YCombinator leadership,
Is clearly false because at the time Altman was YCombinator leadership himself.
>a tidy sum of $10 million
Everything is relative, it is worth taking into context how much $10 million represents to the people concerned. In your provided reference, Paul Graham describes the sum as
>This was not a very big investment for those funds.
I cannot critique the accuracy of your representations of the Wall Street Journal, as it is paywalled.
The Gist of the critique is that there are deals between OpenAI and enterprises that Sam Altman has an investment in. It is not uncommon for individuals to be in decision making roles in one company while it does dealings with another in which they have a financial interest.
It is not enough to establish that this connection exists for it to be a story. There needs to be some suggestion and evidence that there were decisions that were improperly influenced by the person with the conflict of interest. The typical way to avoid even the appearance of improper influence is for the person to declare their conflict of interest and leave that decision to non conflicted parties. Declarations of conflict of interest are commonplace, because conflicts of interest are not bad in themselves, only when they influence events.
If you are alleging that Sam Altman improperly influenced the negotiation with Reddit for data, or any similar conflicted negotiation, then you really have a story. You also need evidence to say that it happened. Even evidence that Sam Altman refused to step aside from such negotiations would be significant news. While he may not have influenced negotiations to his own advantage, being in a position where it appears that it might have happened would generally be considered a lapse in judgement.
Barring that evidence. You have a story about someone's investments that have increased in value, which is what people expect their investments to do.
Opinion is one thing. But PG's story of "we asked him to choose and he chose OAI" doesn't gel with the -actual evidence- that Altman proposed making himself the Chairman of YC, then went ahead and actually announced it on YC, and then it was hastily deleted and he "chose" OAI.
> Which clearly carries the implication that this was an inarguable firing for misdeeds. In this context, it does not matter if being asked to make a choice is technically firing. The main point is that this is a rebuttal of the narrative put forth by Helen Toner.
I actually agree with Paul Graham's post — totally reasonable thing to ask someone to do, and I didn't agree with the replies to his post. I tried to point out what happened — he posted the image and people didn't believe him — rather than how I felt about that specific topic. Arguably could've done better, however.
> The Gist of the critique is that there are deals between OpenAI and enterprises that Sam Altman has an investment in. It is not uncommon for individuals to be in decision making roles in one company while it does dealings with another in which they have a financial interest.
> It is not enough to establish that this connection exists for it to be a story. There needs to be some suggestion and evidence that there were decisions that were improperly influenced by the person with the conflict of interest.
> If you are alleging that Sam Altman improperly influenced the negotiation with Reddit for data
I highly recommend you use archive.today, or whatever means to read the WSJ articles (even a paper copy, if it's in there), because the assertions about impropriety or influence of deals originally stems from those two articles. I didn't just claim that with no evidence, I was highlighting statements and assertions already made.
My reaction to this, and all other discussions on the topic, is that it rings hollow.
Here’s why & I’m very curious for your response:
Conflict of interest is a fact of life in elite, cutting edge work.
“No conflict, no interest” is as old as SV and VC for that reason. It’s a small pool of people who create great companies and invest.
How someone structures themselves around that conflict is the signal. Disclosing potential conflicts of interest is the ethical bar and that has been done.
Whatever the real reason for the original OpenAI’s board to ouster Sam, the current board has found no wrongdoing on Sam’s part and crucially made no request for him to cease investment activity.
My hypothesis: that’s because Sam’s investment is a powerful signal and one the AI startup community greatly benefits from.
I do think Sam’s virtue signaling before Congress has painted Sam into a corner here, but we keep shining the flashlight on it and coming out with the same conclusion: Sam is studious about governance and an astute risk taker. Even the latest ScarJo incident shows that. I don’t see how OpenAI could do better for CEO.
It is possible for Sam to take both positions.
1. Not taking financial gains from OpenAI so that his decisions are guided by building safe AGI
2. Investing in companies that are betting on trends he has the most conviction and knowledge about
Perhaps a simple test is- is the moral hazard here worse than owning stock in OpenAI?
If we don’t expect luminaires to be anything other than people, the OpenAI team’s convergence to bring Sam back is the clearest signal anyone could have on who they believe the best leader to bet on is.
It’s human nature to find fault and we all have our faults. My concern with making this the hill to die on in critiquing Sam & OpenAI is we feed a narrative that has little explanatory power and perpetuates unrealistic expectations on how life in a position of power works.
Isn't then the criticism about the acceptance that "life in a position of power works" this way and is essentially morally corrupt? Couldn't it be better? Greed is among the chief reasons for such conflicts of interest to arise, shouldn't we criticise such aspect and expect better from the "elites" in positions of power? Since greed will eventually corrupt we could probably want to expect better from the ones taking positions of power, I personally wouldn't like to accept that this is the best system we can live under, and for it to change we need to criticise it for the optics to change over time.
It was once accepted to own slaves, eventually we all landed on the same page: it is morally corrupt to do it, it's unethical. More modern examples like insider trading, stock fraud, were once accepted until we didn't accept it anymore as "it's the way it is".
I don't see a reason to not strive making other morally corrupt aspects of our systems (such as conflicts of interest) also unethical and frowned upon. People are people and shared ethics is how we level ourselves against each other.
> How someone structures themselves around that conflict is the signal. Disclosing potential conflicts of interest is the ethical bar and that has been done.
This is kind of the problem though, it hasn't been done. Graham, my example in the post, didn't know YC invested in OpenAI. The previous board didn't know about Altman's ownership of the Startup Fund. His growing investments were, for most of them, published on the WSJ — yesterday.
> Whatever the real reason for the original OpenAI’s board to ouster Sam, the current board has found no wrongdoing on Sam’s part and crucially made no request for him to cease investment activity.
The original reason was a lack of trust, and the original board was pushed out so he could return. Of course the current board, one built from it's foundation to be much more receptive and docile to Sam's activities and statements.
> It is possible for Sam to take both positions.
> 1. Not taking financial gains from OpenAI so that his decisions are guided by building safe AGI
> 2. Investing in companies that are betting on trends he has the most conviction and knowledge about
The whole point here is that the second contradicts the first. If you're still directly making money off OpenAI's decisions & deals, the hand-waving of "being guided by building safe AGI" and not money ceases to be trust, because there are clearly billions at stake for Altman.
> we feed a narrative that has little explanatory power and perpetuates unrealistic expectations on how life in a position of power works.
The thing here is, Sam could realistically be an altruistic monk, not driven by any financial incentive when it comes to AI. There are a ton of different options, if he wants to live up to the standard he set for himself.
For example, putting investments into a trust that have to do with AI, not investing in related companies at all, putting a majority of his wealth into a Bill & Malinda Gates-style charity — the list goes on.
If had not tried to tell everyone he's doing this for the good of humanity and not money, he could take a multiple million $ salary + a huge personal stake in OpenAI and no one would bat an eye. It's the fact that he himself is position his image to be one thing, which is not the case.
Its unbelievable that apparently no-one has noticed a 10M stake in the hottest company that could well have >10x'd in the meantime. Watching Paul try to handwave it away and pretend he doesn't understand how investments work is incredible.
Like the other Sam, his bank account has not been inflating by accident, and him insisting that he is not that much interested by money should be taken, at least, with a reasonably sized pinch of salt.
Can we believe that Sam could actually be a good person? Today, Kara Swisher in her podcast on Pivot said, "Every time I tell people I actually like Sam, they become widely offended".
Depends on what good means to you. This is a person that we have evidence on repeatedly using these kind of underhanded techniques. Maybe he's not physically hurting anyone, but this is a person I would avoid.
What in the article is underhanded? Worst case, he has undisclosed conflicts of interest.
> this is a person I would avoid
Does Altman have a Trump-like wake of ruined careers and lost riches among former allies? Everyone he's been close to seems to have done well from it.
Given the size of these deals, that's kind of a big deal. It isn't an "oops, it slipped my mind" small little conflict of interest kind of thing, imo.
For investors, sure. (And the investors are more than fine with Altman, warts and all.) For the public, eh.
He very clearly isn't being honest there, and it's so obvious that many people are starting to question everything he says.
But all of that is quite separate from these conflicts, which are entirely a matter for Altman and his investors, investors who have no reason to complain about him.
But when you see him being duplicitous in some situations, it's hard not to suspect it bleeds into other situations.
Ricardo Montalban had a great quote about the life stages of an actor, enumerating them as follows:
1. Who is Ricardo Montalban?
2. Get me Ricardo Montalban.
3. Get me a Ricardo Montalban type.
4. Get me a young Ricardo Montalban.
5. Who is Ricardo Montalban?
As far as I can tell, Johansson’s complaint is that when OpenAI reached out to her for voice acting and she turned them down, that they instead got a Scarlett Johansson type, and that OpenAI should be categorically prohibited from hiring any voice actor who sounds like her at all. Which is not how acting has ever worked, but for some reason the topic of artificial intelligence gets a lot of people worked up to the point of artificial stupidity.
OpenAI's public claims about how they produced the Sky voice followed Johansson's public statement. They could be true or false. We don't know what claims or evidence they gave Johansson's counsel.
Agreed, and according to Midler v. Ford that is not permitted:
"We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California."
Here, have a look:
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
https://higgslaw.com/celebrities-sue-over-unauthorized-use-o...
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-right-publicity....
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...
> You've never seen it, huh? Google is super easy to use.
Please stop acting like an asshole.
You take care now.
I’m arguing in good faith, in the sense that I’m expressing my own genuine rationale for my own opinions. Your inability to cope with that and remain civil is the only show of bad faith in this entire discussion.
You take care now. I will not be responding to you further.
undisclosed = underhanded
> Does Altman have a Trump-like wake of ruined careers and lost riches among former allies? Everyone he's been close to seems to have done well from it.
I'm not talking about Trump, and I don't think Trump should be a reference for what is or isn't acceptable.
I'm not seeing good and evil in this post. It's calling Sam out for not being transparent. Given he's elevated OpenAI, in public testimony, to an extinction-level threat to humanity, that lack of transparency is of public concern.
Not being transparent doesn't make him evil, doesn't mean he is unlikeable and doesn't per se mean he's dishonest. (Though OpenAI and he do have a likeability problem, at least in politics, albeit one I think they can fix.)
Money, a little image coaching, and have Aaron Sorkin write a movie.
(We've seen a similar situation before.)
Maybe next time I could press more about the transparency factor, but I thought it was concise enough.
Has he ever plead poverty?
> “He owns no stake in the ChatGPT developer, saying he doesn’t want the seductions of wealth to corrupt the safe development of artificial intelligence, and makes a yearly salary of just $65,000.”
According to OpenAI themselves.
So he takes a “low” salary and no ownership as to, according to him and the company, not influence his decisions in the pursuit of financial gain — yet that’s a complete omission of the whole truth.
I’ll stop short of calling it a flat-out lie, but a mischaracterization of reality for sure.
In my opinion a mischaracterisation of reality is just a lie with layers of indirection to weasel oneself out of it. It's definitely a lie.
The issue has become polarized, for reasons I don't rightly understand, but nevertheless this is where we have ended up.
To write on the topic in this environment it would be advisable to be clear on what they are saying, what they have an issue with, and what the appropriate remedy would be.
To just throw out some insinuations in a "I'm just asking questions" manner doesn't in-itself condemn a person. It isn't happening in isolation though. No snowflake believes itself to be responsible for the avalanche.
"But it's worth noting that much of Sam Altman's presentation is just a mask (one he puts a ton of effort into and is good at maintaining), even if he's still less evil than the Sacklers or a mob boss."
How do people even come up with this narrative?
They literally did all of that, though?
I never said Sam is evil, nor anything close.
Ok but based on what ?
edit: I don't know the specifics of Altman's case.
Based on public reporting, Altman's wealth came from his family office piggybacking alongside YC versus his share of carry in YC's funds.
He sold Loopt for $40mm and then invested his share of that into start-ups like Stripe. (That investment alone should have taken him past $100mm.)
> Hydrazine bought out a portion of startup shares owned by Graham, a transaction that gave Altman stakes in some of the hottest companies backed by Y Combinator. The sale hasn’t been previously reported.
https://archive.is/x2hx4#selection-2672.0-2672.1
Depending on what companies and how much, that could have been an extraordinary windfall.
Having conflicts doesn't make someone bad.
What if someone is willful opaque about their conflicts?
The emphasized phrase doesn’t make sense. At the time, Altman was YCombinator leadership. Graham had retired to England by then; it’s hardly unusual or surprising that he wasn’t keeping track of every single YC investment.
A startup from the current crop whose $500K investment for 7%? Sure.
Pretty much the hottest topic ON THE PLANET, north of $80B valuation? Yeah, I'm a bit more skeptical that "it's not unusual he wouldn't be paying attention to that investment".
Prior to Ian Hathaway's takeover a few months ago Sam Altman owned over 75% of the fund, according to their Form ADV filings with the SEC.
I get why you're confused, though, given their use of fake filing names I think the ownership and structure of the OpenAI fund has been so opaque from the start it's actually hard to know who has what.
Direct owner is a term that basically means someone who has ownership, beneficial ownership, voting rights, or rights to sell. Sam Altman was that. He was also an indirect owner through OpenAI Startup Fund GP I, which is the other entity you are talking about. You don't need either to be GP, though it can make things simpler. As far as the bundle of rights in ownership is concerned, yes, he did own the fund.
Anyway, the obfuscation bit is from the filings with the state, not so much the SEC - there for a period of time OpenAI Startup Fund GP I was managed by Vespers, Inc. and had a bunch of registrants with fake names and fake directors and board members on the filings, all with the same address, an affordable housing unit in Santa Ana.
The statement that he owned 75% of the fund is deliberately misleading. That he was in control of an entity that acted as the GP of a partnership means "he was acting as GP". But, that doesn't sound as nefarious, and it doesn't sound so sensational, and that's why it's not being said that way.
The only way to know if something shady is going on is to read the partnership agreement of the actual fund. That's where the rubber meets the road.
Trying to hand wave away a 10M stake in OpenAI taken when they were valued at <1Bn and then trying to weasel out by saying profit is capped. Why yes it is Paul, at 100x initially with the cap raising by 20% a year. And then trying to claim that the PPUs aren’t liquid despite regular liquidity events being the entire reason we know OpenAIs current valuation.
Didn’t think I’d see the founder of YC try the “I’m a moron who doesn’t understand how investments work” defense.
Incorrect round
Helion is a fusion startup, not fission. That's what makes it particularly interesting. Getting a simple but obvious detail like that wrong is odd.
He’s allowed to make money. Musk bezo etc all did and nobody whined
There is plenty to attack him on legitimately…yet people seem obsessed with this angle
No one cares about another billionaire founder if they were honest about it . The valley created dozens if not more each wave .
The current generation of founders have drunk their own cool aid it seems and are no longer satisfied with becoming a billionaire they also want be to adored and revered as the savior the next Jesus or MLK, Gandhi or Mandela.
It belittles the people who sacrifice their careers, money and livelihoods to make a difference on actual social missions.
Ultimately, I ask myself, is my life better because Sam was born and did what he did? And the answer is 1,000 times "yes!" because the introduction of ChatGPT changed so much and enabled so much creation and learning for me personally. And I have a strong suspicion that if the Helen Toners of the world had their way, it never would have been released at all. And without all that money and prestige floating around OpenAI, I doubt they would have been able to create such a dream team that allowed the thing to happen in the first place. And I think all of that comes down at least in large part to Sam's vision and scrappiness and willingness to just do stuff and not get stuck in institutional morass.
True, but it's hard to start something as big as OpenAI and not warrant a little scrutiny. At least, I think there is plenty of public interest here, in particular because of the chosen mission statement for the company.
> Ultimately, I ask myself, is my life better because Sam was born and did what he did? And the answer is 1,000 times "yes!" because the introduction of ChatGPT changed so much and enabled so much creation and learning for me personally.
Which is a very reasonable position, but is the fact that your life is better negate concerns that applications of ChatGPT may actually make other people's lives worse? And that the lack of transparency around conflicts of interest raises reasonable concerns about both judgement and the ability of the organization to deliver on its mission?
And I also don't feel like I am somehow owed a huge amount of transparency around the exact details of how Sam may or may not benefit financially from his association with OpenAI, or the legal agreements they had with departing staff. Even if he does benefit, is that really so horrible? They have a for-profit division now so they are paying taxes. And the fortunes made from OpenAI stock with be taxed for sure. And the people who left are rich and got to work on a world changing product.
Where is all the harm? It's really hard to point at any real harm from my standpoint. But the benefits and gains are palpable, and they are obvious to anyone without an agenda to push or axe to grind.
People have lost jobs and likely careers to AI models trained on their works. You could assert in the long run all individuals will be better off. You could assert the benefits to others made the harms virtuous. You could assert they deserved it. I don't know how you could deny they were harmed. You could assert it was inevitable. But this would negate credit if it would negate blame. This is a distraction from the question of trust however.
If we believe OAI. Before anyone mentions the WaPo article, that was a bundle of documents handed to them by OAI. WaPo hasn't spoken to the voice actress. What they have is that this voice actress, who has to remain anonymous because of, quote, "fears for her safety", told her agent (who also has to remain anonymous for reasons) in a statement that "she wasn't told to sound like Scarlett". I'm not sure that it's been shown that SJ wasn't either a training source, by herself, or with this actress, or other.
> being associated with a crypto project (Worldcoin)
A crypto project that didn't launch in the US but in Africa, where they offered more and more and more money to people for retinal scans to sign up (to the point where it was often two month's wages for people) doesn't sound exploitative?