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.
“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.
He's saying the attempt to virtue signal, via the low salary, is invalidated by these deals. The virtues would be mostly altruism I guess, that the AGI mission was important enough to humanity for him to sacrifice opportunities to build personal wealth and so on. I think that's overblown personally, but certainly Altman would often repeat the line about having low salary and no equity.
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.
Comments
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
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.
I’m struggling to understand what backfired
He's saying the attempt to virtue signal, via the low salary, is invalidated by these deals. The virtues would be mostly altruism I guess, that the AGI mission was important enough to humanity for him to sacrifice opportunities to build personal wealth and so on. I think that's overblown personally, but certainly Altman would often repeat the line about having low salary and no equity.
And it's a lot easy to even fake virtue signal your low salary when in the last three years you've bought:
a $27M home in San Francisco,
a $16M "weekend ranch" in Napa,
and a $43M estate in Hawaii.
Altruism?
Altman isn't an Effective Altruist.
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.
Did they edit their comment? Or did you assume altruism meant Effective Altruism?
Yes.