Some of those funds are redirected to for profit ventures.
Critically, the GM (Altman) of the nonprofit owns shares of the for-profit ventures, that OpenAI funds were redirected into.
A regular company could and does invest in any company even when there's a conflict, as long as the conflict is disclosed and the Board votes in favor of it. There's no criminal element there.
The problem is introduced in Altman's case if
(a) there was no disclosure (red flag) and/or
(b) nonprofit that received the funds, is putting money into things not aligned with the 501(c)(3) mission.
I'm not sure if either (a) or (b) are criminal, but they don't pass the smell test, which is why Altman is being sued in civil court, unrelated to the congressional investigation talked about in the article
JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago [-]
The thesis is Altman ran around saying he was building something that will kill everyone, then backed off to saying he’ll just kill everyone’s jobs.
When data centers and a war of choice pushed inflation to 7+% [1], Republicans in the Congress were left scrambling for a scapegoat. And Sam is a terrific scapegoat. He has no public shareholders like the more hated Zuckerberg and Bezos [2]. Yet he has carved for himself a uniquely-visibly throne for a private-company boss. (His only rival for scapegoatiness is Musk. But he’s inoculated from Republicans by his blatant partisanship.)
Also, doesn't musk hate him? I have to imagine he's behind this.
JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago [-]
> have to imagine he's behind this
Is Musk probably throwing fuel on the fire? Yes, probably. (Though we have no proof of this.)
Is Musk causing this? No. This is mainly Altman’s doing. The hyperbole. The lying. The leverage. The pomp. Even Zuckerberg and Bezos haven’t painted a target on themselves like he has. (To the point that I’m borderline sympathetic.)
> But the thing is, Molo doesn’t actually have to be good at this job, because the point of this trial isn’t to win — though I’m sure Musk wouldn’t mind a win. The point is to punish Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI. Musk has done that pretty thoroughly — reinforcing in the public’s mind that Altman is a liar and a snake. This morning, I read an exclusive in The Wall Street Journal that assorted Republican AGs and the House Oversight committee wanted to look into Sam Altman’s investments. References to the trial are peppered throughout the article.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
Oh sure, the trial is maybe 5% a Hail Mary and 95% about distracting and disrupting OpenAI. I read "behind this" to mean more-clandestine moves, e.g. planting stories, conducting and leaking oppo, amplifying negative media on X, et cetera.
keeda 10 hours ago [-]
It does seem like there is a ton of negative PR and sentiment on social media (including HN) about anything Altman and even Dario do. Like, way more than warranted. It looks more and more like a coordinated campaign, a la https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Elon even explicitly threatened the OpenAI guys that they would be "the most hated" people on earth, and given what we've seen him do with Twitter, I strongly suspect there indeed is a submarine with Elon at the periscope.
Altman may be getting the brunt of the AI backlash, but the impact of AI is still extremely preliminary, and it will happen regardless of anything he does. As you mentioned, it doesn't help that these guys are telling the world AI will disrupt all the jobs but... at this point, I think they're just being honest.
As shifty as Altman is, I wonder how he gets more hate than Elon, who has objectively done way more concrete damage to the world.
greycol 5 hours ago [-]
Everyone knows a lot of the scumbag things Elon has done/does so it's not really worth talking about until he does something novel, people are still shedding light on the scumbag things the Sam has done so naturally it's being discussed more frequently as people share what they just learnt.
It would be fair to argue that in a just world Elon would suffer more consequences for being more of a scumbag than Sam but we all know justice doesn't apply to the rich in the US (occasionally this seems untrue but only because other rich people are pissed off at the rich person and they want them tarred and feathered).
boringg 13 hours ago [-]
Doesn't Sam Altman famously not own OpenAI? His whole arrangement is so shady.
s1artibartfast 10 hours ago [-]
So a non-profit can absolute invest in or own a for-profit subsidary. This is extremely common. The idea is that the for-profit returns will flow back to the non-profit and remain dedicated to the non-profit mission.
Where things get really shady and run the risk of IRS violations is when the leadership of the non-profit has a seperate for profit stake in the subsidary.
boringg 9 hours ago [-]
When your public position is that you don't own equity in the company it implies that you aren't making money off of it. However if you have all sorts of side deals through intermediaries and you are making money off the entity it looks quite bad.
s1artibartfast 7 hours ago [-]
Perhaps to some that don't know what equity means.
I dont think it looks bad. The devil is always in the details: Were helion and reddit deals fair market value or self dealing?
dagamer34 7 hours ago [-]
Sam has stake in Y Combinator from when he was CEO, who also has an ownership stake in OpenAI.
So to say that he owns no part of OpenAI is silly.
meowface 13 hours ago [-]
Is there a more benign explanation for these things? Altman is undeniably famously cagey and political but despite most of the tech and non-tech worlds at this point seeing him as some kind of con artist, I still kind of want to try to believe he's not.
No doubt some of OpenAI's founding principles like "stop + assist if a competitor gets to AGI first" are likely flying out the window, perhaps in part due to him and also as one might anticipate of initial lofty ideals and promises, but even with the recent New Yorker and other articles he seems like someone who maybe regularly placates people to avoid personal problems and lies to get out of trouble rather than a Machiavellian tech baron.
mcmcmc 13 hours ago [-]
> he seems like someone who maybe regularly placates people to avoid personal problems and lies to get out of trouble rather than a Machiavellian tech baron.
This would be more plausible were it not for the staggering amount of wealth he’s amassed through those lies.
mrhottakes 12 hours ago [-]
When someone tells you who they are, you should believe them.
jjulius 12 hours ago [-]
> ... I still kind of want to try to believe he's not.
Asking genuinely - why?
hx8 12 hours ago [-]
What if it's actually super-intelligence and a human aligned visionary is at the helm. The good case is very good.
yifanl 8 hours ago [-]
If you give me a hundred dollars, I promise I'll come back tomorrow and hand you thirty trillion dollars.
deaton 9 hours ago [-]
If he's our representative in the era of superintelligence, we are all screwed.
saulpw 10 hours ago [-]
I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ. We can make up "what if"s all day but it's meaningless to even discuss them if you don't have a shred of evidence to support the claim.
hx8 10 hours ago [-]
Exactly. The second coming of Christ would be a very good case.
Why people want to believe Altman is good is about the same reason people want to believe in the second coming.
hluska 9 hours ago [-]
I’m really struggling to see how Christian apocalyptic ideas are even remotely relevant.
We used to be capable of so much.
hx8 8 hours ago [-]
So much of the AI Hype is religion encoded. It's relevant because the AI companies are invoking the ideas. If you go around telling people that AI is going to cure cancer, bring about global prosperity, and give you an uploaded immortality then you cannot be surprised when some people start thinking of it similarly to the second coming.
meowface 5 hours ago [-]
I'm consistently amused by the fact that there's still this weird faction of populists on even tech-oriented sites like HN and /r/programming and lobste.rs and Mastodon who have this almost antivax-level stance on AI. I'm not precisely sure what explains it, because many of them actually are smart people and good programmers.
AI very likely will cure many cancers and very possibly (assuming combined with good politicians) will bring about global prosperity. A high percentage of AI company employees and executives and open source developers and researchers sincerely believe it will and so they say they believe it will. They have good reason to believe it, and they will likely be proven correct. If 400 (or 40, or 4) years pass and it's still mostly just creating spreadsheets, I will concede, though.
latexr 9 hours ago [-]
> I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ.
Makes sense. Cue Don LaFontaine: In a world, where one man sacrificed himself for all of humanity… And they learned nothing of his lessons… In a country where people lie in his name as an excuse to hate their fellow man… Where they mock him by wearing his moment of death as jewellery¹… He’s back and adopted a new identity to slowly fuck them all and make the world burn… Johnny W Pussyfoot is Jesus in: The Second Coming.
Uhh literally what is one thing Sam has done or said that demonstrates he's either human-aligned or visionary?
meowface 5 hours ago [-]
I could write a giant response to this with dozens of quotes from him and others and various sources but you would just say it's all lies/posturing, so it would not be a good use of my time. I will say that him becoming one of the most prominent funders and promoters of UBI research/experiments 6 years before GPT-3 is probably not a coincidence, though. OpenAI releasing a paper a month ago strongly suggesting the US move towards a more socialist economic system to handle massive economic upheaval is also probably not a coincidence. He obviously founded OpenAI with the primary intent of making AI so that they could make it go well instead of poorly, and it going well means properly addressing mass unemployment, biosecurity risks, some degree of widely distributed access so that the very poorest get meaningful use of the exact same intelligence as what the very richest get to use, etc.
estearum 51 minutes ago [-]
This is what the most midwit milquetoast person in the country would try to do if they were in Sam's shoes and, like Sam, once they had a couple billion dollars dangled in front of them they'd abandon all regard for safety or distribution of wealth or whatever-else-they-thought-they-ought-to-care-about.
latexr 10 hours ago [-]
Come on… The guy who said he can’t imagine caring for his child without consulting ChatGPT… The guy who said he didn’t know how to make revenue with ChatGPT, and made a “soft promise” to investors they’d somehow achieve AGI then ask it how to make money… The guy who made a cryptocurrency scam that was banned in multiple countries… The guy who everyone around him says he’s a con artist and a sociopath… That guy? Really?
meowface 5 hours ago [-]
Really. That guy. I'm afraid you're one side of the coin in https://paulgraham.com/fh.html. Paul himself would agree with me on that if he were to read your post.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve read enough Paul Graham to know he’s not someone whose opinion I care about or respect. He’s yet another rich guy tech bro out of touch with normal people who unfortunately has an army of wannabe tech and finance bro shills clinging to his every word like he’s some sort of sage. He’s not. He isn’t smarter than anyone else, he just has a bigger platform. I don’t abide by cults of personality, they’re a major reason everything is shit right now. They’re the fuel that perpetuates online and offline toxicity. Bragging that Paul Graham would agree with you is like bragging Will Smith or Kim Kardashian agrees with you: it’s not a badge of honour even if it’s true, and doesn’t make your argument stronger or mean you’re right.
But since you value his opinion so much, perhaps you should inform yourself of what he has said about Altman, including “Sam had been lying to us all the time”.
grey-area 10 hours ago [-]
His own sister accused him of sexual assault.
He was fired from his first startup.
He was abruptly fired from ycombinator in shady circumstances.
He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control.
He took OpenAI from being a non-profit to a for-profit, with obvious benefits to whoever controls it.
He was massively misleading about the capabilities of his product and predicted AGI within years.
At some point the pattern of all these events should have some weight in your judgement of him, no?
meowface 5 hours ago [-]
Paul Graham, founder of the website we're on, still says he likes and trusts him. He just was annoyed he was constantly distracted by AI stuff when he was supposed to be running YC as president (which bears no resemblance to any current events...).
He, at worst, finds him to have been (at some point) incompetent, which is very different from finding him immoral. Paul keeps replying to tweets to clarify this when people continue to misportray his stance.
"He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control." is the only thing you wrote which is plainly true and valid to state.
I am sure there may exist good, strong criticisms, but your argument is so tendentiously gish-gallopy that it will if anything just make people more likely to disbelieve his critics. (Not that I would do that, since that'd be just as fallacious.)
Why would OpenAI employees all still be happily working for him and publicly supporting him? Why is the company still so successful, and the leader? Why wouldn't most of them have left in droves to Anthropic or elsewhere, by now? Especially given most technical employees at OpenAI (justifiably) share the eschatological views of AI shared' by Anthropic staff and other TESCREALists, in which case they really really try to be careful about who will be responsible for potential future superintelligence. The board and some executives disliked and distrusted him but it's unclear many other people there did or do now. And I'm not just talking about the petition but the people who have continued working there for years afterwards.
elmomle 12 hours ago [-]
He will say whatever it takes to get the result he wants. That's manipulative and, when pursued as a lifestyle, sociopathic.
Living like that is corrupting. When you treat humans like objects, the question of your starting intentions is really secondary.
genxy 8 hours ago [-]
I like his tactic of talking to everyone individually to be able to tell each person exactly what they want to hear. I now use that one all the time.
funimpoded 8 hours ago [-]
Beware that there exist people who will cut you out of their lives—professional, personal, whatever—completely, likely with no warning, and possibly loudly, publicly, and with-receipts (if they’ve seen this kind of thing before or have thought through what your next steps will be after they cut you out) if they find out you do this.
All it takes is for a few of them to start comparing notes behind your back. Shit goes sideways extremely fast for people pulling this whose victims start talking to each other without them as the intermediary.
genxy 6 hours ago [-]
The secret is to be able to fail up at a rate higher than you burn the ecosystem around you. You are gone before people notice. That and being funny with enough charisma that it doesn't matter. Sam can't actually operate in this environment, everyone already knows his manipulative schticks.
This is one of the reasons that startups prefer the young, they often haven't been exposed to the grift and the manipulation. As a tech bro sociopath, I'd be wary of joining a startup with a mixture of ages, genders, experiences across the spectrum of ICs and management. They probably have experienced too much to be griftable in the same ways as an org stacked with young ICs. You also want to make sure that there are other people in the management chain that are more emotionally unstable. It takes much of the focus off of ones own pathologies.
Happy Hacking!
s1artibartfast 12 hours ago [-]
what did he do to you?
bfivyvysj 12 hours ago [-]
We already reached agi a while ago.
rurp 8 hours ago [-]
Remember when Altman was going around saying he doesn't take a salary, he's just doing the job for the good of humanity? It kind of blew my mind how many people believed him. Even on HN, where much of the community knew something about his pre-OpenAI days, there were plenty of credulous posts defending him as some sort of altruist.
I guess this is why we keep seeing transparent lies and scams from leading tech and business individuals; the lies often work.
Henchman21 6 hours ago [-]
Not only do lies work, there is also no punishment at all for it.
typeofhuman 3 hours ago [-]
quite the opposite
voncheese 9 hours ago [-]
The problem with the current political situation/administration in the US is that there's so much existing conflict of interest going on that anytime the government investigates concerns about conflict of interest, it feels politically motivated because of the uneven investigation.
fauigerzigerk 13 hours ago [-]
>The problem is introduced in Altman's case if (a) there was no disclosure (red flag)
The article says the investments were disclosed:
"OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor defended Altman in a court hearing Monday, testifying that Altman had been “forthright” and “proactive and transparent” about his involvements in other companies. Altman recused himself from recent discussions about a deal between OpenAI and Helion as well, The Wall Street Journal reported."
randerson 13 hours ago [-]
Even if the board votes in favor, wouldn't it be tax evasion to fund a for-profit corporation using a 503(c)(3) - which is tax deductible for donors?
yieldcrv 13 hours ago [-]
No, non profits can invest in anything. Publicly traded stocks are c-corps too, thats how endowments grow. There is nothing that distinguishes liquid vs illiquid c-corp shares.
Regarding founder ownership, the rules are extremely flexible like a non profit director can’t own more than 20 voting or 35% total of the business venture
but if it happens then it just needs to be remedied within 3 years
so for venture style deals that’s plenty of time to dilute down, and the little known secret in the startup space is that the founders non profit steps in as the lead investor, so all the other investors arent just twiddling their thumbs waiting for a founder to convince someone, it just closes. Other investors dilute founder and non profit, everything is compliant, value is created. Both for profit and non profit side will be tax free, due to QSBS
s1artibartfast 12 hours ago [-]
some of the largest for profit investors are non-profits.
It is all about if you can get the money back out.
cyanydeez 13 hours ago [-]
no, the thesis is: can the fascists control sam altman.
ajross 13 hours ago [-]
That is emphatically NOT the thesis of the linked article. That's the argument made by the politicians being quoted and enumerated. What the article is trying to tell you is that these actions are entirely partisan, and reflect the desires and statements of the largest and wealthiest republican donor, who happens to own a competing interest.
You can think Altman is a bad person and OpenAI is something of a scam and still recognize that using the government as a tool to corruptly hobble your competition is a horrifyingly bad thing.
These are awful times we live in, I really fear what we'll have to be telling our grandkids. Will it be just a cautionary tale about the dangers of populism and partisanship or will it be sad, wistful tales about how much better things were... "before"?
SkipperCat 14 hours ago [-]
I can't help but think that this is due to Musk putting pressure on the current administration to help him win his lawsuit and punish Altman.
avaer 14 hours ago [-]
Personal vendettas between the world's most powerful psychopaths playing out in the stock market while everyone else suffers does seem like the current meta. So it makes sense.
shimman 12 hours ago [-]
I'm all for it, let them attack each other and hopefully the backlash will elect a labor President to turn the final screws on knee capping big tech for the next 50 years.
steve_adams_86 10 hours ago [-]
How do you knee cap big tech when other countries continue to push forward with it?
_verandaguy 9 hours ago [-]
IMHO: when an emerging technology threatens the livelihoods of millions, it's responsible and ethical to step away from seeing this stuff through a purely competitive lens.
Out of the three big geographic players, the US and China are jockeying for "most performant" models (whatever that means) with two separate approaches; the EU is trying to develop models that work best within their privacy, human rights and labour rights frameworks and laws.
All of these have have merits, though arguably the US's (de-facto) strategy of market dominance at any cost with as few restraints as possible will be the worst for society at large. The prudent thing to do would be to first determine if this is something that will actually live up to the hype (which IMO is still very much in the air), and then if it does, turns this into an international collaboration rather than a competitive enterprise.
It's not lost on me that this is a terminally naive point of view.
jayd16 9 hours ago [-]
You don't need to cap the technological process. You can simply curb the power of corrupt individuals. If anything it would accelerate progress.
mindslight 10 hours ago [-]
Why did we knee cap CIA/NSA/DOD from nominally operating on Americans when the Soviet Union continued to push forward with it?
For what it's worth, our once-and-(hopefully)-future allies the European Union are already on board with reigning in the surveillance industry (leading by example, even). So your question is more like how can we constrain our domestic technological authoritarians when China continues to embrace theirs. And the answer is that it's not a "how". The "how" is straightforwardly enforcing longstanding concepts like personal information, antitrust bundling, unauthorized access (backdoors in sold products), etc. So your question comes down to more of a why, and the why is because it is in line with our values based around individual liberty.
mindslight 10 hours ago [-]
Democrats being only slightly less beholden to corporate interests and functioning as controlled opposition is exactly how we've gotten to the point we're at. I'd like to be optimistic and say that the backlash from the second Trump catastrophe will be a full 8 years of simmering authoritarianism rather than the current rolling boil, but that wasn't even true after 2020. I think media saturation has gotten so strong that people are just so much easier to lead around by the nose. For example look at how many continuing hardcore Trump supporters there still are, even in the face of appalling abject failures like his choosing to simply give away the Strait of Hormuz of Iran. They've got ever-shifting rationalizations streaming into their brains 24/7.
platevoltage 8 hours ago [-]
Yup. that's why we need new Democrats.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
If you want to help these new Democratic candidates, many are primary challengers that could use your help. I work on several Senate and Congressional campaigns, you wouldn't believe how impactful something as a simple well designed static site can be. There is a dearth of tech skills in these campaigns because they simply don't know alternatives.
Lots of low hanging fruit and very few people in the tech world can say they've worked on projects to improve the material lives of everyone by helping elect people that will implement medicare for all, universal childcare, and free school lunches.
mindslight 8 hours ago [-]
I agree. But Republicans found a new Republican who spoke to their longstanding frustrations and look what it's gotten us. Just sayin'.
ourmandave 11 hours ago [-]
If only there were some way to bet on the outcome...
threethirtytwo 13 hours ago [-]
God why do people frame things in such extremes? Neither person is a psychopath. If anyone is closer to a psychopath it’s Altman, but he doesn’t completely fit the monicker.
aerhardt 11 hours ago [-]
For all his weirdness and moral failings, I don’t see Altman saying things like whites being under apartheid in the US. And worse. Multiple times a day. Every day.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
Outcomes matter, when both people are leading you to undemocratic societies why should I care about their messaging when both result in worse material lives for 100s of millions of people?
threethirtytwo 1 hours ago [-]
Psychopaths wear a mask of sanity but underneath they have no moral framework. Some people can hate black people or Muslims or anything like that but these qualities are very human. Things like racism has existed across cultures for more than several millennia among many people. A psychopath is a different ballgame.
A psychopath can plunge a knife into a babies face and feel no emotion. The only reason why the psychopath doesn’t plunge a knife into a babies face is because he has nothing to gain from it. The psychopath appears more sane then a racist because the psychopath is usually better at pretending to be sane simply because he is unable to comprehend the passionate yet racial hatred that the racist feels.
What I am saying is musk does not fit that archetype as much. Altman fits that archetype more. Neither actually crosses the threshold to be called a “psychopath” but if psychopathy was a gradient Altman is further down the line then musk. Much further.
That is the literal definition of what a psychopath is. You’re operating from a lack of understanding of the definition.
rurp 7 hours ago [-]
Gleefully boasting again and again about ruining tens of thousands of lives is about as clear as it gets for evidence of psychopathy. Along with ~0 instances of empathy.
thinkingtoilet 12 hours ago [-]
They are absolutely psychopaths. These are people that will flagrantly lie to your face and feel no remorse. They cause mass suffering and feel no remorse. They don't have empathy. They don't have normal human emotions.
danaw 11 hours ago [-]
would you prefer sociopath? they're willing to lie to accumulate massive wealth irrespective of the harm.
skeeter2020 13 hours ago [-]
When you're arguing the degree to which such powerful people fit the definition of psychopath, you're at extremes. You've just been in the warming pot too long to see it.
threethirtytwo 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mrhottakes 12 hours ago [-]
Have you asked all the legit clinical psychologists? Or are you just making things up because you're emotional?
threethirtytwo 5 hours ago [-]
I have asked several.
hgoel 12 hours ago [-]
So, now we need a clinical diagnosis to call evil people psychopaths or we're unhinged? Do you apply the same high standards to any of the garbage these guys spew or to the impacts of their projects?
shimman 12 hours ago [-]
The people that have made decisions leading to the direct deaths of millions of people AREN'T evil! There's no clinical definition of evil in the DSM, so they can't be evil you see.
threethirtytwo 5 hours ago [-]
Your stupid. They can be evil because it fits the definition. They can’t be psychopaths because it doesn’t fit the definition. Understand?
Haven't you heard? Psychopath, like Pedophile, is a mere epithet these days, to indicate a person's favoured status with the in-crowd. In contrast to the equally meaningless epithet "woke".
JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago [-]
> like Pedophile
I really wouldn’t conflate these two. People with documented allegations of child rape are in a separate category from diagnosed-over-the-TV types.
danaw 11 hours ago [-]
who's calling people pedos that don't at least have credible allegations against them of that crime (eg trump)?
lawn 9 hours ago [-]
Musk has a history.
tombert 12 hours ago [-]
Outside of Elon Musk's Twitter, I think pedophile is actually used pretty appropriately in most spots.
platevoltage 8 hours ago [-]
Except Psychopath and Pedophile are actual words that weren't lifted straight off of gen-z slang.
MrBuddyCasino 13 hours ago [-]
How does everyone else suffer? We’re getting subsidized compute.
mrhottakes 13 hours ago [-]
Look around at the country right now
boringg 13 hours ago [-]
Nothing to do with Altman v Musk. That would be an AI boom that would be going full steam ahead without either of them.
Arainach 13 hours ago [-]
Almost no one in the country is feeling a boom. Everyone is feeling the consequences of their greed and recklessness.
scottyah 10 hours ago [-]
AI is the only thing keeping the S&P afloat. You don't want to see what it would look like when all pensions numbers start going down. So far it's fake numbers from inflation and the value is decreasing dramatically, but at least they still go up.
Arainach 10 hours ago [-]
I very much do want to see. A necessary step to fix our problems is for people to stop lying to themselves and thinking things are "going fine".
A plurality of American voters are stubborn and stupid and won't change their ways until they feel direct pain, so bring the pain.
platevoltage 8 hours ago [-]
There's no way you think that will be sustainable even in the short term.
boringg 12 hours ago [-]
huh? What are you are referring to is the lasting impacts of multiple years of inflation after living without it for 10 years. Those issues predate Musk v. Altman and would be happening without them.
AI build out / boom would be full bore without them.
Arainach 10 hours ago [-]
There is no boom. There are massive layoffs, massive inflation, and massive cuts to government services - all caused by the actions of Musk, Altman, and those like them.
boringg 9 hours ago [-]
Saying there is no AI boom? You are either lying to yourself or not paying attention to whats whappening.
Are there problems? Absolutely - there have been problems at every single second of humanity. We will always be plagued with problems at some times worse than others. That does not mean that there isn't a boom at the same time.
platevoltage 8 hours ago [-]
There is a boom, but It's a boom for a few thousand people in the country. Everyone else is seeing their energy bills go up, and I can't get a Raspberry Pi for under $100.
ambicapter 12 hours ago [-]
The AI boom started a war with Iran and dismantled American public institutions?
12 hours ago [-]
mrhottakes 12 hours ago [-]
Musk has a lot to do with the state of the country right now. Do you read the news?
boringg 12 hours ago [-]
You are really giving him a lot of credit here. Thats mostly the news cycle doing what it does - focusing on the big stories and loudest speakers.
manphone 12 hours ago [-]
He ran a government institution that recklessly cut public spending and hurt us all. What are you talking about?
swingboy 10 hours ago [-]
DOGE only cut like $7 billion dollars which is nothing in the bigger picture.
kccoder 9 hours ago [-]
Their ineffectiveness at reducing the debt doesn't indicate the changes they made didn't have an outsized effect on many lives. USAID for example.
mrhottakes 10 hours ago [-]
He was the de facto head of an effort to drastically cut the federal government, and he's donated hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump and Trump-adjacent people elected. I ask again: do you read the news?
MrBuddyCasino 10 hours ago [-]
These are the kind of hot takes Bluesky needs to hear. And lets be honest you already have an account there.
solid_fuel 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah good job man, stick your head back in the sand. That'll help.
jayd16 9 hours ago [-]
Would be nice if we could just afford things instead.
> The moves follow an April article in The Wall Street Journal that detailed Altman’s efforts to have OpenAI back companies he personally invested in.
Sounds a bit like Wework.
bombcar 13 hours ago [-]
To be fair, a big part of being in Y Combinator itself is being "heavily encouraged" to use products from other Y Combinators. You just have to do it openly.
graemep 12 hours ago [-]
Networking and relationship building is fine. its when it goes beyond that, and in particular when there are conflicts of interest, it becomes a problem. Altman seems to have had similar issues when he was at YC: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
Doing business with companies connected to the CEO often creates a conflict of interest. it could all be OK, of course, but OpenAI investing in companies that Altman has already invested in does not look great and needs to be investigated.
baggachipz 13 hours ago [-]
Everything about OpenAI sounds like WeWork. Can't wait to see that S1, I'll need a truckload of popcorn.
torlok 8 hours ago [-]
Sounds a lot like what Musk does, except maybe that Musk uses his companies to outright bail himself out.
pj_mukh 13 hours ago [-]
So, the protection racket is not working? [1] Maybe some folks need to re-think whether this administration is worth "donating" to?
and famously this executive doesn't over-reach to protect "its own"?
dmix 13 hours ago [-]
Your original comment implied that this is a signal that Sam’s influence over the admin hasn’t protected his interests, when that’s still to be seen. The protection racket could still very well benefit him if the SEC ends up taking the case and the admin then tries to interfere with SEC’s independence.
pj_mukh 7 hours ago [-]
Greg Brockman has donated more money to Trump than anyone else. Republicans shouldn't even be bringing OpenAI up let alone let something get to the SEC. Meanwhile low-level thugs get blanket pardons from the administration.
OpenAI and Brockman are getting scammed by this administration and the GOP. I just really hope tech remembers it next time they want to play this "both sides are bad" game come election time.
throwaway5752 13 hours ago [-]
Blackmailers and protection rackets aren't known for being satisfied after a single payment, after they've established someone is willing to pay.
That is why public corruption is such as plague and one of the reasons the US dollar was seen as a safe store of value once.
laurels-marts 13 hours ago [-]
Are you complaining that government is not corrupt enough?
mrhottakes 13 hours ago [-]
That seems like a fairly obvious misreading of the comment.
miltonlost 13 hours ago [-]
He's saying "hey, maybe stop donating to Republicans expecting them to help you out when in reality they will screw over anyone but themselves and especially don't donate to them when the GOP is aggressively homophobic and wants to get rid of your existence entirely"
tinfoilhatter 13 hours ago [-]
I didn't see anything related to homophobia in the comment or any replies except yours...
hdndjsbbs 12 hours ago [-]
There's a strand of white neoliberal gays (Sam, Thiel) who have thrown their lot in with the far-right for economic benefit.
If any of them read books I would send them a biography of Ernst Röhm
pj_mukh 7 hours ago [-]
bingo.
voakbasda 14 hours ago [-]
Does anyone really believe this is more than performative? Increasingly the most likely outcome of such scrutiny is… nothing. He hasn’t stolen enough from the rich to earn any sort of punishment, and he’s not doing anything too different from the Congress critters that are “investigating” him.
baggachipz 13 hours ago [-]
When his company goes tits-up and connected investors lose billions, he'll suddenly face punishment.
boringg 13 hours ago [-]
"hasn’t stolen enough from the rich to earn any sort of punishment". Do you truly believe this is how the world works?
bluefirebrand 13 hours ago [-]
Its definitely how America works right now
JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago [-]
> Do you truly believe this is how the world works?
It’s a popular meme in Silicon Valley. Hence all the stealing.
tlogan 12 hours ago [-]
I am sure that nothing illegal was done here.
But the fact that OpenAI was a nonprofit and then suddenly became a for-profit is definitely something that does not feel right. I am 100% sure that it is all legal and such, but we have this mental model that “nonprofits are the good guys, run by people who just want to help humanity and nothing else.”
But that is not true, and probably never was.
keeganpoppen 10 hours ago [-]
could not agree with this take more. it feels like a bait and switch, but not the kind that makes me want to take sharpie to cardboard. it’s just… weird. and i don’t even necessarily think it’s “bad”… it’s just a weird unforced error because openai never “had” to be nonprofit, but they chose that path only to abandon it. just strange. and it makes all their internal docs (especially brockman’s diary, which, as an aside: how the fuck did this shit come up in discovery, and what kind of idiot would say the shit he said in a diary that can come up in discovery like this? i know he is a very smart man, which is what makes it extra hilarious.). but yeah even with how “bad” the various quotes look i’m still mostly on the side of this all being a “nothing-burger”…
Petersipoi 9 hours ago [-]
> I am sure that nothing illegal was done here.
> I am 100% sure that it is all legal and such
Why are you so confident on either of these statements? Seems like such a weird thing to be confident about when we know so little about the deals that went down
an0malous 12 hours ago [-]
The whole idea of a non profit never made any sense, it’s conflating the idea of profitability with altruism. These are completely independent things.
danaw 11 hours ago [-]
they're not independent; a 501c3 is both a nonprofit and is meant to serve a public good (altruism).
1vuio0pswjnm7 12 hours ago [-]
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ghostlyy 11 hours ago [-]
Timing's also worth nothing. the investments piece has been reported on for over a year. It becomes a probe right before liquidity, which makes both sides look opportunistic rather than principled.
bluecheese452 12 hours ago [-]
Ah a shakedown. He will make the required donation and this will go away.
Trouble is, Elon Musk indirectly gave him even more.
ms_anal_tam 14 hours ago [-]
Demand his AI chat history be made public!
bl4kers 3 hours ago [-]
I'm certain that's already been reviewed. There's diaries being read at the trial.
giwook 10 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately whatever scrutiny Sam Altman comes under can be waved away with Trump's magic wand.
13 hours ago [-]
kevmo 11 hours ago [-]
They aren't going to do a thing to Altman except extract more bribes.
noelsusman 13 hours ago [-]
The notion that this GOP Oversight Committee sincerely cares about corruption is obviously laughable, so I can only assume this is all being done at Elon's behest.
righthand 11 hours ago [-]
How can anyone take the GOP seriously when they constantly back one of the biggest frauds of the American people who is also a pedophile rapist? Perhaps Sam should embrace that sexual assault allegation from his sister. That seems to be the type of person the GOP supports.
baggachipz 12 hours ago [-]
> Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny
Is this even a thing anymore?
jqpabc123 15 hours ago [-]
This can easily be resolved by a sustantial purchase of Trump family crypto.
platevoltage 8 hours ago [-]
Or a couple hundred of those phones that definitely exist.
swader999 13 hours ago [-]
With worldcoin lol.
smallmancontrov 13 hours ago [-]
The Khan demands 10,000 eyeballs as tribute!
tithos 11 hours ago [-]
GREAT NEWS!!!
metalliqaz 13 hours ago [-]
Altman is a consummate liar and insatiably greedy. The GOP will welcome him in. The downfall will hurt many.
In the words of Hitchens, "Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife."
emmanuelsemugga 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
andijati2 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fred_is_fred 13 hours ago [-]
Is this why Claude recommended that I use a Trump phone when I use it?
OpenAI receives funds as a non-profit.
Some of those funds are redirected to for profit ventures.
Critically, the GM (Altman) of the nonprofit owns shares of the for-profit ventures, that OpenAI funds were redirected into.
A regular company could and does invest in any company even when there's a conflict, as long as the conflict is disclosed and the Board votes in favor of it. There's no criminal element there.
The problem is introduced in Altman's case if
(a) there was no disclosure (red flag) and/or
(b) nonprofit that received the funds, is putting money into things not aligned with the 501(c)(3) mission.
I'm not sure if either (a) or (b) are criminal, but they don't pass the smell test, which is why Altman is being sued in civil court, unrelated to the congressional investigation talked about in the article
When data centers and a war of choice pushed inflation to 7+% [1], Republicans in the Congress were left scrambling for a scapegoat. And Sam is a terrific scapegoat. He has no public shareholders like the more hated Zuckerberg and Bezos [2]. Yet he has carved for himself a uniquely-visibly throne for a private-company boss. (His only rival for scapegoatiness is Musk. But he’s inoculated from Republicans by his blatant partisanship.)
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm 0.6% MoM in April, 0.9% MoM in March
[2] https://techoversight.org/2025/06/11/tech-ceo-poll-25/
Is Musk probably throwing fuel on the fire? Yes, probably. (Though we have no proof of this.)
Is Musk causing this? No. This is mainly Altman’s doing. The hyperbole. The lying. The leverage. The pomp. Even Zuckerberg and Bezos haven’t painted a target on themselves like he has. (To the point that I’m borderline sympathetic.)
> But the thing is, Molo doesn’t actually have to be good at this job, because the point of this trial isn’t to win — though I’m sure Musk wouldn’t mind a win. The point is to punish Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI. Musk has done that pretty thoroughly — reinforcing in the public’s mind that Altman is a liar and a snake. This morning, I read an exclusive in The Wall Street Journal that assorted Republican AGs and the House Oversight committee wanted to look into Sam Altman’s investments. References to the trial are peppered throughout the article.
Elon even explicitly threatened the OpenAI guys that they would be "the most hated" people on earth, and given what we've seen him do with Twitter, I strongly suspect there indeed is a submarine with Elon at the periscope.
Altman may be getting the brunt of the AI backlash, but the impact of AI is still extremely preliminary, and it will happen regardless of anything he does. As you mentioned, it doesn't help that these guys are telling the world AI will disrupt all the jobs but... at this point, I think they're just being honest.
As shifty as Altman is, I wonder how he gets more hate than Elon, who has objectively done way more concrete damage to the world.
It would be fair to argue that in a just world Elon would suffer more consequences for being more of a scumbag than Sam but we all know justice doesn't apply to the rich in the US (occasionally this seems untrue but only because other rich people are pissed off at the rich person and they want them tarred and feathered).
Where things get really shady and run the risk of IRS violations is when the leadership of the non-profit has a seperate for profit stake in the subsidary.
I dont think it looks bad. The devil is always in the details: Were helion and reddit deals fair market value or self dealing?
So to say that he owns no part of OpenAI is silly.
No doubt some of OpenAI's founding principles like "stop + assist if a competitor gets to AGI first" are likely flying out the window, perhaps in part due to him and also as one might anticipate of initial lofty ideals and promises, but even with the recent New Yorker and other articles he seems like someone who maybe regularly placates people to avoid personal problems and lies to get out of trouble rather than a Machiavellian tech baron.
This would be more plausible were it not for the staggering amount of wealth he’s amassed through those lies.
Asking genuinely - why?
Why people want to believe Altman is good is about the same reason people want to believe in the second coming.
We used to be capable of so much.
AI very likely will cure many cancers and very possibly (assuming combined with good politicians) will bring about global prosperity. A high percentage of AI company employees and executives and open source developers and researchers sincerely believe it will and so they say they believe it will. They have good reason to believe it, and they will likely be proven correct. If 400 (or 40, or 4) years pass and it's still mostly just creating spreadsheets, I will concede, though.
Makes sense. Cue Don LaFontaine: In a world, where one man sacrificed himself for all of humanity… And they learned nothing of his lessons… In a country where people lie in his name as an excuse to hate their fellow man… Where they mock him by wearing his moment of death as jewellery¹… He’s back and adopted a new identity to slowly fuck them all and make the world burn… Johnny W Pussyfoot is Jesus in: The Second Coming.
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJSZcxXe7IQ
But since you value his opinion so much, perhaps you should inform yourself of what he has said about Altman, including “Sam had been lying to us all the time”.
He was fired from his first startup.
He was abruptly fired from ycombinator in shady circumstances.
He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control.
He took OpenAI from being a non-profit to a for-profit, with obvious benefits to whoever controls it.
He was massively misleading about the capabilities of his product and predicted AGI within years.
At some point the pattern of all these events should have some weight in your judgement of him, no?
He, at worst, finds him to have been (at some point) incompetent, which is very different from finding him immoral. Paul keeps replying to tweets to clarify this when people continue to misportray his stance.
"He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control." is the only thing you wrote which is plainly true and valid to state.
I am sure there may exist good, strong criticisms, but your argument is so tendentiously gish-gallopy that it will if anything just make people more likely to disbelieve his critics. (Not that I would do that, since that'd be just as fallacious.)
Why would OpenAI employees all still be happily working for him and publicly supporting him? Why is the company still so successful, and the leader? Why wouldn't most of them have left in droves to Anthropic or elsewhere, by now? Especially given most technical employees at OpenAI (justifiably) share the eschatological views of AI shared' by Anthropic staff and other TESCREALists, in which case they really really try to be careful about who will be responsible for potential future superintelligence. The board and some executives disliked and distrusted him but it's unclear many other people there did or do now. And I'm not just talking about the petition but the people who have continued working there for years afterwards.
Living like that is corrupting. When you treat humans like objects, the question of your starting intentions is really secondary.
All it takes is for a few of them to start comparing notes behind your back. Shit goes sideways extremely fast for people pulling this whose victims start talking to each other without them as the intermediary.
This is one of the reasons that startups prefer the young, they often haven't been exposed to the grift and the manipulation. As a tech bro sociopath, I'd be wary of joining a startup with a mixture of ages, genders, experiences across the spectrum of ICs and management. They probably have experienced too much to be griftable in the same ways as an org stacked with young ICs. You also want to make sure that there are other people in the management chain that are more emotionally unstable. It takes much of the focus off of ones own pathologies.
Happy Hacking!
I guess this is why we keep seeing transparent lies and scams from leading tech and business individuals; the lies often work.
The article says the investments were disclosed:
"OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor defended Altman in a court hearing Monday, testifying that Altman had been “forthright” and “proactive and transparent” about his involvements in other companies. Altman recused himself from recent discussions about a deal between OpenAI and Helion as well, The Wall Street Journal reported."
Regarding founder ownership, the rules are extremely flexible like a non profit director can’t own more than 20 voting or 35% total of the business venture
but if it happens then it just needs to be remedied within 3 years
so for venture style deals that’s plenty of time to dilute down, and the little known secret in the startup space is that the founders non profit steps in as the lead investor, so all the other investors arent just twiddling their thumbs waiting for a founder to convince someone, it just closes. Other investors dilute founder and non profit, everything is compliant, value is created. Both for profit and non profit side will be tax free, due to QSBS
It is all about if you can get the money back out.
You can think Altman is a bad person and OpenAI is something of a scam and still recognize that using the government as a tool to corruptly hobble your competition is a horrifyingly bad thing.
These are awful times we live in, I really fear what we'll have to be telling our grandkids. Will it be just a cautionary tale about the dangers of populism and partisanship or will it be sad, wistful tales about how much better things were... "before"?
Out of the three big geographic players, the US and China are jockeying for "most performant" models (whatever that means) with two separate approaches; the EU is trying to develop models that work best within their privacy, human rights and labour rights frameworks and laws.
All of these have have merits, though arguably the US's (de-facto) strategy of market dominance at any cost with as few restraints as possible will be the worst for society at large. The prudent thing to do would be to first determine if this is something that will actually live up to the hype (which IMO is still very much in the air), and then if it does, turns this into an international collaboration rather than a competitive enterprise.
It's not lost on me that this is a terminally naive point of view.
For what it's worth, our once-and-(hopefully)-future allies the European Union are already on board with reigning in the surveillance industry (leading by example, even). So your question is more like how can we constrain our domestic technological authoritarians when China continues to embrace theirs. And the answer is that it's not a "how". The "how" is straightforwardly enforcing longstanding concepts like personal information, antitrust bundling, unauthorized access (backdoors in sold products), etc. So your question comes down to more of a why, and the why is because it is in line with our values based around individual liberty.
Lots of low hanging fruit and very few people in the tech world can say they've worked on projects to improve the material lives of everyone by helping elect people that will implement medicare for all, universal childcare, and free school lunches.
A psychopath can plunge a knife into a babies face and feel no emotion. The only reason why the psychopath doesn’t plunge a knife into a babies face is because he has nothing to gain from it. The psychopath appears more sane then a racist because the psychopath is usually better at pretending to be sane simply because he is unable to comprehend the passionate yet racial hatred that the racist feels.
What I am saying is musk does not fit that archetype as much. Altman fits that archetype more. Neither actually crosses the threshold to be called a “psychopath” but if psychopathy was a gradient Altman is further down the line then musk. Much further.
That is the literal definition of what a psychopath is. You’re operating from a lack of understanding of the definition.
I really wouldn’t conflate these two. People with documented allegations of child rape are in a separate category from diagnosed-over-the-TV types.
A plurality of American voters are stubborn and stupid and won't change their ways until they feel direct pain, so bring the pain.
AI build out / boom would be full bore without them.
Are there problems? Absolutely - there have been problems at every single second of humanity. We will always be plagued with problems at some times worse than others. That does not mean that there isn't a boom at the same time.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-...
Sounds a bit like Wework.
Doing business with companies connected to the CEO often creates a conflict of interest. it could all be OK, of course, but OpenAI investing in companies that Altman has already invested in does not look great and needs to be investigated.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-exec-becomes-top-trump...
Which was motivated by a WSJ investigation into Sam’s personal dealings https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chatgpt-openai-ipo-altman-029ae6...
OpenAI and Brockman are getting scammed by this administration and the GOP. I just really hope tech remembers it next time they want to play this "both sides are bad" game come election time.
That is why public corruption is such as plague and one of the reasons the US dollar was seen as a safe store of value once.
If any of them read books I would send them a biography of Ernst Röhm
It’s a popular meme in Silicon Valley. Hence all the stealing.
But the fact that OpenAI was a nonprofit and then suddenly became a for-profit is definitely something that does not feel right. I am 100% sure that it is all legal and such, but we have this mental model that “nonprofits are the good guys, run by people who just want to help humanity and nothing else.”
But that is not true, and probably never was.
> I am 100% sure that it is all legal and such
Why are you so confident on either of these statements? Seems like such a weird thing to be confident about when we know so little about the deals that went down
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Trouble is, Elon Musk indirectly gave him even more.
Is this even a thing anymore?
In the words of Hitchens, "Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife."