Comment by ergocoder
3 hours ago
I wonder if Sam might abandon the ship soon. Other co-founders already did.
The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't. If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already.
This is probably one of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with relatively low reward.
But nobody is going to just gift him the same valuation on the next company. It's not like his execution is OpenAI's moat right now. So where would he be going that's a better deal for him?
Founding his own company would be one alternative. Full control. No stigma on the non-profit part. Probably get the same paper money as he got now at OpenAI.
And OpenAI's influence is hugely exaggerated compared to, say, Google.
Yes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-founders, for example.
All the downsides without much upside...
> Yes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-founders, for example.
Sergey Brin is trying to change that lately, but Altman still has a sizable head start.
IMHO, nobody is remotely worth $1B, period.
The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows that the system is flawed.
The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is very flawed.
We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their money.
If someone founds a company, grows it and owns $1bn of its stock, they don’t have $1bn in cash to distribute. They have a degree of control over the economic activity of that company. Should that control be taken away from them? Who should it be given to?
I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I’m not clear how that should work without creating really weird incentives. Some sort of special tax?
Big agree, at a certain point a company is big enough that their impact has to be managed democratically. I don't have an issue with effective leaders, the problem is that we reward a certain kind of success with transferable credits that don't necessarily align with people's actual talents or skills.
I want skilled institutional investors who have a track records of making smart bets. I don't want a random person who happened to get lucky in business dictating investment policy for substantial parts of the economy. I want accountability for abuses and mismanagement.
I know China gets a bad rep, but their bird cage market economy seems a lot more stable and predictable than this wild west pyramid scheme stuff we do in the US. Maybe there are advantages for some people in our model, but I really dislike the part where we consistently reward amoral grifters.
Well, redistributing their money is (in some cases disingenuously) exactly how they are able to pitch investors. "Sure, value my company at $10B and my shares make me $2B, but we're alllllll gonna make money when hit AGI!!!" That kind of thing.