What in earth are you talking about? PG is clearly saying he was running both for years, everyone knew, everyone was happy, but when openai became a for profit, it was time to choose.
Nothing nefarious, nothing sneaky, no tricks, nada, ziltch.
The immense bias, bull, made up junk, and outright maliciousness in some of these replies is beyond disgusting.
You left out the part where PG wrote that Altman had already been doing two jobs for several years ("For several years he was running both YC and OpenAI").
OpenAI the non-profit was partly funded by YC or at least affiliated with "YC Research." So it is still odd for them to find out about the quasi-conversion to for-profit like that.
CEO isn’t that kind of job. I don’t have any love for Altman but this reasoning doesn’t fly. You can be CEO of multiple companies at once, and apparently he had been for some time.
>PG is clearly saying he was running _both_ for years,
Friendly clarification about "both" because the OpenAI structure is very confusing and muddies up the narrative.
(1) first in 2015, there was the 501c3 non-profit OpenAI entity. From the public statements, this was more of a "idealistic research & development" organization to create truly open and publicized machine learning data & algorithms so humanity wouldn't be beholden to big tech like Google "controlling AI". This is the entity that Elon Musk and others (including YC Jessica Livingston) donated $40+ million to and the one that Sam was "running for years" along with YC. Maybe this non-profit R&D gig seemed more like a "part-time" job to PG.
(2) then in 2019, OpenAI created a new for-profit OpenAI company (a subsidiary) to raise money and build proprietary products. Sam was then tapped to also run this for-profit company. This new entity is not part of the "running both for years". That's where PG said Sam needed to choose where to be full-time. The additional responsibilities of being the CEO for the new for-profit company was a change in circumstances.
> The immense bias, bull, made up junk, and outright maliciousness in some of these replies is beyond disgusting.
Imagine if you were in a classroom and some new students entered the room and all sat together in a group and were wearing walkie talkies, and then started shouting out comments non-stop at the teacher that seemed to have some non-constructive motive.
Nothing nefarious, nothing sneaky, no tricks, nada, ziltch.
The immense bias, bull, made up junk, and outright maliciousness in some of these replies is beyond disgusting.