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 tech community is inherently cynical, not because we dwell in basements and fear sunlight, but because we've been around long enough to see the corruptive effects of the big business side of tech.
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.
Honestly its mindboggling how uncritical most of the folks here are about Sam Altman and Paul Graham and somehow giving billionaires who have been caught in multiple lies the benefit of the doubt multiple times.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, please take this as constructive criticism of your writing, and not as a counterargument to your position.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Comments
The author here, just want to clarify:
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 tech community is inherently cynical, not because we dwell in basements and fear sunlight, but because we've been around long enough to see the corruptive effects of the big business side of tech.
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.
Honestly its mindboggling how uncritical most of the folks here are about Sam Altman and Paul Graham and somehow giving billionaires who have been caught in multiple lies the benefit of the doubt multiple times.
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.
Thanks for the open invitation!
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.
Thanks for your reply! Couple thoughts:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, please take this as constructive criticism of your writing, and not as a counterargument to your position.
In your post the comment.
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
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
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
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.
Is clearly false because at the time Altman was YCombinator leadership himself.
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
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.
Thanks for your reply! Couple things:
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.
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.
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.