“I get paid enough for health insurance. I have no equity in OpenAI. I’m doing this because I love it.”
That was the response to a question about compensation given last year during the Senate testimony of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the billionaire boy king whose co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman are now all gone; whose CTO Mira Murati just announced today that she, too, is leaving; who thinks that there’s such a thing as a “median human“; who’s been described by a former OpenAI board member as basically a toxic bullshit artist; and who now himself stands to make billions from his first equity stake in OpenAI after it finishes transitioning from a nonprofit to a for-profit model.
Away from the same nonprofit model, mind you, which supposedly proved that Altman is impartial and pure of heart in his leadership of an AI startup that’s working toward a digital superintelligence so powerful that it wipes out white-collar work. The news probably surprised you — unless you were paying attention when OpenAI’s CEO (who’s always sounded to me like a platitude-spouting clone of Gary Vee) said things like: “AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies.”
Setting aside the flurry of OpenAI headlines today, once you get past the circus around Altman — like the idea that this non-technical Silicon Valley wunderkind who’s consistently failed upward is somehow the “Oppenheimer of our Age” — I’m of the opinion that he’s actually not all that hard to understand. In fact, I think he’s mostly a kind of Rorschach test.
If you have an office on Sand Hill Road, I suppose you’re the kind of person who gets a tingle in your leg whenever you listen to him talk. What I see, though, is the most overhyped CEO of the century cosplaying as a visionary — specifically, a CEO and founder whose top leaders are all gone, whose company had an operating loss last year in the billions, and whose rivals like Meta are just giving similar software away. Oh, and the signature product of which is still somehow both amazing and incredibly dumb.
For example, a question I asked ChatGPT just now:
Yep, seems like the product of a $150 billion company to me.
I’ll grant you that I sound like a total shitposter here, and as someone whose work has a greater than zero percent chance of being killed off by AI I’m also about as far from impartial on this as one could get. So, ignore me if you want, but you would do well to listen to people like computer scientist Grady Booch, who wrote in response to Altman’s latest bluster on X/Twitter: “I am so freaking tired of all the AI hype: it has no basis in reality and serves only to inflate valuations, inflame the public, (garner) headlines, and distract from the real work going on in computing.”
Some people are going even more hardcore than that, like Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel who blasted Altman as a “con man” a few months ago.
For myself, I’ll simply say that Altman being at the vanguard of all this makes me question whether any of it really is to our collective benefit. I say this, however, with complete sincerity: I very much hope I’m wrong.
