In a series of posts on X on Thursday, Paul Graham, the co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, dismissed claims that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was once harassed to renounce as president of Y Combinator in 2019 because of possible conflicts of passion.
“People have been claiming [Y Combinator] fired Sam Altman,” Graham writes. “That’s not true.”
Altman changed into a spouse at Y Combinator in 2011, first of all running there on a part-time foundation. In February 2014, Graham named him president of Y Combinator.
Altman — along side Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Y Combinator creation spouse Jessica Livingston and others — co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, elevating $1 billion.
Altman for a number of years crack his moment between Y Combinator and OpenAI, successfully operating each. However — consistent with Graham — when OpenAI introduced in 2019 that it could identify a for-profit subsidiary of which Altman can be CEO, Livingston advised Altman that he had to make a choice one or the alternative: OpenAI or Y Combinator.
They advised him “if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI, we should find someone else to run YC, and he agreed,” Graham writes. “If he’d said that he was going to find someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could focus 100% on YC, we’d have been fine with that too.”
Graham’s retelling of occasions contradicts reporting that Altman was once pressured to renounce from Y Combinator then the accelerator’s companions alleged he’d put non-public initiatives, together with OpenAI, forward of his tasks as president. According to a Washington Put up tale utmost November, Graham shorten an out of the country travel cut to individually give Altman the boot.
Helen Toner, certainly one of a number of ex-OpenAI board contributors who moved to take away Altman as OpenAI’s CEO over allegations of misleading conduct ahead of Altman controlled to claw the position again, additionally claimed in an look at the Ted AI Display podcast that the actual causes for Altman’s leaving from Y Combinator had been “hushed up at the time.”
Reportedly, some Y Combinator companions took particular factor with the oblique stake in OpenAI Altman held year Y Combinator’s president. Y Combinator’s late-stage investmrent invested $10 million in OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary.
However Graham says that the funding was once made ahead of Altman was once full-time at OpenAI — and that Graham himself wasn’t conscious about it.
“This was not a very big investment for those funds,” Graham wrote. “And obviously it wasn’t influencing me, since I found out about it 5 minutes ago.”
Graham’s posts appear conspicuously timed with an op-ed in The Economist penned through OpenAI board contributors Bret Taylor and Larry Summers that pushes again towards assertions made through Toner and Tasha McCauley, any other former OpenAI board member, that Altman can’t be depended on to “reliably withstand the pressure of profit incentives.”
Toner and McCauley may have some extent. The Data experiences that Altman is considering turning OpenAI right into a for-profit company as buyers, particularly Microsoft, push the company to prioritize industrial initiatives.
