Sam Altman, Lately

&gt; 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.<p>&gt; “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.”<p>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.<p>edit: added second quote to clarify

The author here, just want to clarify:<p>The post is not a “hit-piece” on Sam, nor am I calling him a bad person or anything of the like.<p>It’s a discussion of the direct contradiction between publicly stating someone is without financial biases and the hard facts of clear financial entanglements.<p>I’m happy to hear any criticism on how I could’ve written it better to explain my position! :)

The cat is out of the bag now, and the Toyota Corolla trick was evented, but I think he could have used it, or a less Miami-esque version of it.<p>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.

Paul Graham came out publicly to defend Sam, and we instantly have this blog post about, wait, just a sec, let&#x27;s dissect actually why Sam is still evil.<p>Can we believe that Sam could actually be a good person? Today, Kara Swisher in her podcast on Pivot said, &quot;Every time I tell people I actually like Sam, they become widely offended&quot;.

So... not entirely joking: at what point do we declare that &quot;OpenAI&quot; the non-profit was basically a scam? It&#x27;s clear it isn&#x27;t now what it originally presented itself to be, and it&#x27;s increasingly looking like it was never meant to be. The public-face of an open non-profit was, what, just a recruiting tool to be able to hire folks who otherwise wouldn&#x27;t want to leave academia?

I’m astounded he amassed $500+ million even before this. Loopt can’t have earned him more than one digit, are YC partners paid <i>this</i> well?

Unpopular but true: if you don&#x27;t have conflicts of interest, you aren&#x27;t really in the game. I don&#x27;t know any serious business person who doesn&#x27;t have conflicts. Some manage them as honestly and fairly as possible, others not so much.<p>Having conflicts doesn&#x27;t make someone bad.

&gt; While responding to replies, it seems that Graham was informed — and later confirmed — that Altman had, in a pretty clear conflict of interest and <i>obviously unbeknownst to YCombinator leadership</i>, invested a tidy sum of $10 million through YCombinator into OpenAI’s for-profit arm.<p>The emphasized phrase doesn’t make sense. At the time, Altman <i>was</i> 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.

I&#x27;m a little bit surprised by these articles. I thought it was well known (or at least an open secret) that sama is one the most prolific tech investors? Yes, sure, there are conflicts of interest but this is par for the course. If you make many bets and startups pivot to greener pastures then inevitably you end up up funding startups that compete head-on. When people take sama&#x27;s money they know he has a stake in 400 other startups. But sama&#x27;s network is also one of his great assets.

Paul Graham comes off as such a gormless chump.<p>Trying to hand wave away a 10M stake in OpenAI taken when they were valued at &lt;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 <i>then</i> trying to claim that the PPUs aren’t liquid despite regular liquidity events being the entire reason we know OpenAIs current valuation.<p>Didn’t think I’d see the founder of YC try the “I’m a moron who doesn’t understand how investments work” defense.

<i>&gt; Altman’s personal investments range in everything from nuclear fission reactor start-up Helion</i><p>Helion is a fusion startup, not fission. That&#x27;s what makes it particularly interesting. Getting a simple but obvious detail like that wrong is odd.

I find it strange that people keep attacking him on this.<p>He’s allowed to make money. Musk bezo etc all did and nobody whined<p>There is plenty to attack him on legitimately…yet people seem obsessed with this angle

I don&#x27;t see any of the comments here, is that a bug?

It really seems like criticizing Sam is the new hot thing to do, with tons of people jumping on the bandwagon. Whether it&#x27;s hiring a voice actor who sounds like ScarJo, having non-disparagement clauses in separation agreements (something basically all big companies and institutions tend to do), being associated with a crypto project (Worldcoin), &quot;lying&quot; to OpenAI board members, etc. No one is perfect, and when you are put under a microscope, just about anyone can look bad in the wrong light.<p>Ultimately, I ask myself, is my life better because Sam was born and did what he did? And the answer is 1,000 times &quot;yes!&quot; 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&#x27;s vision and scrappiness and willingness to just do stuff and not get stuck in institutional morass.