Too Powerful [Alt]man, No [Alt]ernative AI Boss-Profile
DC 3.11am
Samuel Harris ‘Sam’ Altman has shown the world that he’s not to be messed with. But also means, his brain, his ability still very rare in AI industry, and…. its bad. Too few people really 10000% can handle AI business and industry. Too big dependence for few people like Sam.
With his return to OpenAI, Sam Altman joins a list of big name ‘boomerang’ chief executives and leaders who have made comebacks. OpenAI's near-death experience will inject a healthy dose of caution into venture capital fundraising negotiations.
Also, because boomerang moment of Sam, OpenAI actually faces a fundamental challenge in reconciling its mission with its choice of corporate structure and business model. Microsoft is to become a non-voting observer on the non-profit board that governs OpenAI. The role of former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is undetermined. Of course, for Satya Nadella, Sam is his golden boy, golden brain. With ‘boomerang’ moment of Sam, in rival side, Google’s company-defining effort to catch up to OpenAI is turning out to be harder than expected.
OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever made a key research advance in the months before forming a team focused on alignment. The breakthrough raised concerns among some staff that the company didn’t have proper safeguards in place to commercialize such advanced AI models.
Literal fire alarm went off at the OpenAI celebration party months ago, fire trucks showed up, and firefighters declared it a false alarm (a smoke machine from the party triggered it.) If OpenAI try to give a proper profile comp for investor, incident like this must zero in the future. If tech executives everywhere could resist changing control of their companies today, it would be appreciated.
Years before the recent drama at OpenAI turned CEO Sam Altman into a household name, the former Y Combinator president went on an extraordinary 18-month, $85 million real-estate shopping spree, according to records reviewed by Business Insider — including a previously unreported $43 million Hawaii estate on land that locals describe as historically significant.
The purchases, which also include multimillion-dollar residences in San Francisco and Napa, California, took place between early 2020 and mid-2021, when Altman was ginning up support for his eyeball-scanning crypto startup, Worldcoin, and releasing OpenAI products in private beta.
Altman's precise net worth isn't known. As the CEO of OpenAI, his salary is just $58,333, according to IRS filings, and his equity stake in the company is so small that it's "immaterial," he's said. He's made more than 400 investments in nine years in companies across diverse fields such as commercial flights and brain implants.
Earlier this year, Altman seemed to take a subtle dig at his fellow tech executives for amassing too much wealth.
"This concept of having enough money is not something that is easy to get across to other people," Altman said at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco.
But as Altman's wealth has grown, he's become increasingly removed from the daily life of the non-ultra-ultra-rich. His mother told The Wall Street Journal in March that Altman hadn't been to a grocery store in four or five years. In 2021, he hired his cousin to manage his family office.
joins a roster of Silicon Valley titans with Hawaii estates, including Mark Zuckerberg, whose property purchases on the island of Kauai have sparked controversy, and Larry Ellison, who owns most of the island of Lanai. Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel have also scooped up sizable properties on the islands.
Altman has one family connection to Hawaii: His youngest sibling, Annie Altman, has lived on the islands on and off since 2017. Annie Altman, an artist and entertainer who has supported herself through in-person and virtual sex work, lives a much-different life from her brother's. Annie is teetering on financial insolvency after a lengthy stretch of illnesses. She has not spoken with her brother since 2021, when she refused his offer to buy her a home after learning that a lawyer would control the property, she said.
She had been unaware that her oldest brother owned property in Hawaii until BI asked her about it, she said.
Within four days of losing his job as chief executive officer of OpenAI in a surprise boardroom coup, the 38-year-old artificial intelligence phenom won back his position, aided by the support of 730 employees—out of the company’s 770-person workforce—who threatened to quit if the board didn’t bring back Altman.
Anyone who’s ever had a job knows that such overwhelming support for the boss is unusual. “It’s a huge testament to the kind of CEO he is,” says Alfred Lin, an investor at Sequoia Capital, a company that invested both in OpenAI and Altman’s first startup, Loopt. “There are always going to be detractors. But the fact that he got to around 95% of employees signing the statement is pretty remarkable.”
In some ways, Altman has come out of the episode stronger than ever, but the struggle over OpenAI isn’t quite over. Altman didn’t get back his board seat, and neither did a key ally, co-founder and former OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who was kicked off the board and quit his position in protest shortly following Altman’s firing. One of the people who fired Altman, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, remains.
Greg Brockman
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg
Incoming board chair Bret Taylor said in a blog post on Nov. 29 that the board plans to add more “qualified, diverse” members, and “enhance” the governance structure of the company. Any substantial changes to the company or its board over the next few months could determine a lot about Altman’s power within OpenAI over the long term.
Sam Altman confirmed Q* was leaked (meaning it's real). Sam quotes: "No particular comment on that unfortunate leak."
Prior to Altman’s firing, OpenAI was considered a stable company, beating the biggest tech giants in the race to develop AI, with Altman cast as its charismatic, savvy leader. Altman is still a widely respected figure who came out on top of an ill-advised coup, but he’ll likely continue to face questions about his rift with the board and his business dealings more broadly. “We’re just now seeing the whole, complicated, Sam Altman,” says tech historian Margaret O’Mara. “Part of this is the reality check phase of a Silicon Valley leader.”
To regain his job, Altman agreed to an internal investigation, among other conditions. The abrupt nature of his firing and a statement from the board saying that Altman hadn’t been “consistently candid” in his communications set up expectations for the emergence of a smoking gun.
Nothing like that has come out, though there have been revelations of tensions within OpenAI over his fundraising for an outside chip venture, including seeking funding in the Middle East, and a dispute with former board member Helen Toner over a research paper she had co-written that was critical of the company. It was Altman’s pattern of behavior, rather than a single egregious action, that caused the board to lose trust in him, according to a person with direct knowledge of the board’s thinking, who asked not to be named discussing private business matters.
In the wake of Altman’s firing, former OpenAI employee Geoffrey Irving publicly accused Altman of lying to him on several occasions when he worked at the company, but he didn’t give specifics. Irving didn’t respond to a request for comment. Altman’s past has received new scrutiny, as well. Altman’s longtime mentor, Paul Graham, fired Altman from his position as president of startup incubator Y Combinator four years ago for putting his own interests ahead of the organization, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named for fear of professional retaliation, confirming an earlier report in the Washington Post.
In a memo sent to staff the day after Altman’s firing, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said that the board’s decision “was not made in response to malfeasance” and that it was because of a “breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.” The company declined to comment further.
People who know and support Altman say he often argues both sides of a debate, which they see as a useful way of exploring ideas but which they acknowledge could be misinterpreted as making false promises or confusing people. “Sam uses words fairly precisely in my experience. If he tells you what he plans to do, that’s what he plans to do. If he tells you he agrees with you in principle, he does. These are different things from each other. Not everyone groks this,” wrote OpenAI researcher Joshua Achiam, on X.
Immediately after being fired, Altman resigned himself to moving on and potentially starting a new company, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing private matters. Soon after, Brockman and other key employees began resigning and voicing their support for Altman. By Saturday morning, Altman reconsidered after members of the board called him asking if he would consider returning, the person says. OpenAI’s main financial backer, Microsoft Corp., gave employees leverage by offering to hire them if they followed through with their threats to quit.
In part, the employee reaction makes sense in simple financial terms. Many OpenAI employees hold equity in the startup, which was recently valued at $86 billion dollars in a planned tender offer that would give staff a chance to cash out their shares. With Altman no longer CEO, some investors were considering backing out of the deal, giving employees direct financial motivation to urge Altman’s return.
But Altman’s supporters say his reputation within the company is a result of the credibility he’s built among employees for listening to their perspectives, particularly on matters relating to the company’s stated values. OpenAI’s mission is to create artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than human beings—in a way that benefits humanity. Achiam praised Altman for the way he handled internal dissent about AI safety questions. “I remember telling Sam in 2020—in front of other people, at a company office hours—that I thought releasing something was a terrible idea,” Achiam wrote on X. “A normal CEO would (should) have fired me. Instead, Sam took me seriously and asked for my advice.”
Many employees take this mandate seriously. “We have a common mission to basically ‘Build God,’ safely, and for the benefit of all humanity—and have a charismatic leader guiding us there,” says an OpenAI employee, who requested anonymity to protect professional relationships. “It’s really hard to not get wrapped up in that.”
Altman has said he has no equity in OpenAI, establishing the perception that his interest in developing AI is his life’s cause. “How many people do you know who would do that?” says Vinod Khosla, an early OpenAI investor. “He’s very mission-focused … and he’s proven that beyond a shadow of doubt.”
This is particularly notable given the reputation Altman built in his years at Y Combinator as a savvy dealmaker and Silicon Valley superconnector. In the AI frenzy that followed ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022, Altman has turned his charm on world leaders, regulators and the press. Businesspeople often advocate for their industries on the public stage. But Altman has cultivated an image as someone who not only articulates the benefits of AI development but is also clear-eyed about its potential dangers. The OpenAI flap has added a wrinkle to that story, but he retains a sizable fan base in Silicon Valley. “Altman has been embodying a kind of idealism for a lot of people,” O’Mara says, “even though he’s always been a capitalist.”
The Pre-Coup Board
OpenAI is overhauling its board, with only one of its six members staying on as the company moves forward
Sam Altman
Altman was fired from his job as chief executive officer and removed from OpenAI’s board on Nov. 17, with board members alleging that he wasn’t being “consistently candid in his communications.” Although he was quickly reinstated as CEO after a wave of employee protest, he isn’t, for now, returning to the board.
Greg Brockman
Brockman is a co-founder and former president of OpenAI. He was removed from his role as chairman of OpenAI’s board when Altman was fired. He then resigned his job, posting a note online saying, “based on today’s news, I quit.” Staff pressed the board for Brockman’s return along with Altman. He’s since rejoined the company and has been posting cheerful selfies with employees.
Adam D’Angelo
D’Angelo is the co-founder and CEO of Quora, the online Q&A service. An early Facebook executive, he’s also the founder of Poe, a platform that allows people to ask questions from various AI chatbots. D’Angelo, who agreed to Altman’s ouster, is the only board member who’s staying on.
Tasha McCauley
McCauley is an entrepreneur and a robotics engineer. She’s an adjunct senior management scientist at the Rand Corp., according to her LinkedIn profile. McCauley serves on the boards of effective altruist organizations Effective Ventures and 80,000 Hours. She agreed to Altman’s ouster.
Ilya Sutskever
Sutskever, a well-respected researcher whose work has focused on neural networks, is a co-founder of OpenAI, its chief scientist and a key player of the coup to remove Altman. Sutskever, who’s clashed with Altman over how quickly to develop AI, later wrote that he “deeply” regretted helping oust Altman and said he would do “everything I can to reunite the company.”
Helen Toner
Toner is an academic who heads strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security & Emerging Technology. Before joining CSET, she lived in Beijing, studying the Chinese AI ecosystem. Altman and Toner had a dispute over a research paper she recently published that was critical of OpenAI. She agreed to remove Altman.
The Board Newcomers
Larry Summers
Summers, former US Treasury Secretary and former chief economist of the World Bank, is a professor and president emeritus at Harvard University. He has said AI will have serious negative impacts on labor and has warned of economic catastrophe if the US “loses its lead” in biotechnology and AI to China. (Summers is a paid contributor to Bloomberg Television.)
Bret Taylor
Taylor, the incoming chairman, is a prominent leader in Silicon Valley who recently stepped down as co-CEO at Salesforce. Previously, he co-created Google Maps, served as CTO at Facebook and founded productivity app Quip. Taylor has experience acting as a board chair in times of transition, which he did at Twitter prior to its acquisition by Elon Musk.
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please keep talking about Palestine.
Even amid I can writing a lot of issue, up again about this issue. Plestia Bosbos Alaqad, very well known as symbol of Gaza and her tireless reporting about heinous Israel in Gaza, beg to you, to keep talking about Palestine.
I know a lot of high-ranking media, such as New York Times, Guardian, Anadolu, BILD, Spiegel, Financial Times, Strait Times, Washington Post etc subscribed my substack. Plestia ‘Bosbos’ Alaqad ready to be your Stringer inside Gaza under bombing by Israel. Plestiaa2011@gmail.com
Toddler with Plestia, before war, living in Northern Gaza and they evacuated to Southern Gaza. Since Friday, Oct 13, when Israel announced to every Gazans from northern move to southern, more than 5,000 killed in southern, not counting barbaric bombing in northern Gaza. Northern Gaza is being depopulated, while even residents in the south are ordered to evacuate as the israelis implement their ethnic cleansing. Refugee literally fulfilled Israel warning, and still killed with barbaric bombing by Israel. Documentation by Plestia Alaqad
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