Many points of interest here, including the answer to an earlier HN discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090</a> Why were the YC posts about Altman stepping down as YC president & becoming chairman so confusingly edited, and Altman seems to have either never been chairman or have quickly left? Well, because his post lacked candor about him becoming YC chairman:<p>"To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."
After reading more articles about Sam it seems he is a genius in the game of power. Am I right? He is at the center of the stage and many powerful people and organizations trust on him beyond the "anecdotes". He will gain more power while he is an amplifier of capital and business opportunities. For an investor point of view he is a business ace and you just need to be careful about partnering with him because he will always be pursuing new opportunities, even ones that eat part of the company you invested in.
You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way.<p>If he followed the norms, he'd be a mid-level manager at FAANG company.
I've seen variants of this in finance, where the strategy is called "outrunning your mistakes."<p>There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation.<p>Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming their successors for messing up a good thing. Also very good at cultivating a certain subset of journalists who will keep burnishing the legend, never stepping outside the bubble.<p>Loosely related: does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? Because it seems as if Sam & Co. are quite determined to ignore it, deny it or minimize it, while continuing to push for breakneck growth of products with a very troubling design flaw.
Really interesting how Sam gets compared to Steve Jobs quite often. Sam in some ways embodies the reality distortion field that Steve operated under, and has huge influence on those all that are part of that path.
> There were complaints about Altman pursuing side projects, at one point diverting engineers to work on a gay dating app, which they felt came at the expense of the company’s main work.<p>Who among us ...
The more we learn about this person the more we understand how dubious he is. I am not entirely sure what the end game is for those protecting and promoting him. He’s clearly not steve jobs. Behaves and talks more like a cheap imitation.
It’s revealing that Chesky just needed to know Altman hadn’t done anything illegal, and that was enough to start his campaign to defend him. “Not illegal” is a low bar. Those 20 instances of lying/being deceitful could have been consequential. It’s also amazing how much much support from investors can insulate an unscrupulous CEO.
> “The senior leadership team was unanimous in asking for Sam’s return as CEO and for the board’s resignation, actions backed by an open letter signed by over 95% of our employees. The strong support from his team underscores that he is an effective CEO,” said an OpenAI spokeswoman.<p>This is where I stopped reading.<p>At the risk of sounding defensive of Sam Altman. If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support? He's just one man, say that what this article alleges is true, how many tricks does he have up his sleeve to fool the entirety of Silicon Valley?<p>I mean, we can beat around the bush all day but he managed to get his old/new?? job back at OpenAI. This means to me that his ouster was either unwarranted or the board was acting blindly and should have stepped aside just on account of being clearly incapable of making sound decisions.<p>This article does not ask the right questions. Doesn't answer any questions either like the many articles written before it riddled with speculation about Sam's much belabored firing.
My read - wildly successful business person, bad human being. So long as SV values what you do over how you got there (with criminal conduct being the obvious red line in how), Sam A and Steve Jobs types will continue to rise generation after generation.
Altman is the perfect 3-letter inside man, that photo with Nadella towards the end of the article is the perfect representation of that (MS having won the race of "which IT company will the System choose to represent its tech interests?", ahead of Amazon and Alphabet).
Sam is great, some eggs might've been cracked along the way, but overall, very positive influence on the world.<p>You could shine a light into most people's lives and find in most cases broken egg shells here & there. Fixating on them at the expense of the bigger picture is a mistake.<p>Regarding the openai board, the problem imo is that too much weight was given to a nebulous & subjective mission, allowing those sitting to make up ridiculous positions and find them tenable (ie the company going kaput being in line with the mission, like srsly??)