…Sam Altman is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built [OpenAI LLC], he said—an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity…“Like most other people, I like watching scores go up”, when it comes to financial gains, he said. “And I just like not having that be any factor at all.” (The company said he earns a “modest” salary, but declined to disclose how much.) Mr. Altman said he has a small stake in a venture fund that invested in OpenAI, but that it is “immaterial.” Mr. Altman said he made “more money than I could ever need” early in his career, when he made a fortune investing in young startups. He owns 3 homes, including a mansion in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood and a weekend home in Napa Valley, and employs a couple dozen to manage them and his family office of investments and nonprofits.
…In the long run, he said, he wants to set up a global governance structure that would oversee decisions about the future of AI and gradually reduce the power OpenAI’s executive team has over its technology.
Backers say his brand of social-minded capitalism makes him the ideal person to lead OpenAI. Others, including some who’ve worked for him, say he’s too commercially minded and immersed in Silicon Valley thinking to lead a technological revolution that is already reshaping business and social life. The company signed a $10 billion deal with Microsoft in January 2023 that would allow the tech behemoth to own 49% of the company’s for-profit entity, investor documents show. The corporate partnership, along with Mr. Altman’s push to more aggressively commercialize its technology, have disillusioned key early leaders at OpenAI who felt the decisions violated an initial commitment to develop AI outside the influence of shareholders.
One of OpenAI’s critics has been Elon Musk, who co-founded the nonprofit in 2015 but parted ways in 2018 after a dispute over its control and direction. The Tesla Inc. CEO tweeted in February that OpenAI had been founded as an open-source nonprofit “to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.” Mr. Altman paused when asked about his co-founder’s critique. “I like Elon”, he finally responded. “I pay attention to what he has to say.”
…He instead said OpenAI’s ultimate mission is to build AGI, as it’s called, safely. OpenAI has set profit caps for investors, with any returns beyond certain levels—7–100× what they put in, depending on how early they invested—flowing to the nonprofit parent, according to investor documents. OpenAI and Microsoft also created a joint safety board, which includes Mr. Altman and Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, that has the power to roll back Microsoft and OpenAI product releases if they are deemed too dangerous…In its founding charter, OpenAI pledged to abandon its research efforts if another project came close to building AGI before it did. The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize the safety of humanity.
…[cf. NYer] Mr. Altman grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, the eldest of 4 children born to Connie Gibstine, a dermatologist, and Jerry Altman, who worked various jobs, including as a lawyer, and died 5 years ago. The senior Mr. Altman’s true vocation was running affordable housing nonprofits, his family said, and he spent years trying to revitalize St. Louis’s downtown. Among the lessons his father taught him, Mr. Altman said, was that “you always help people—even if you don’t think you have time, you figure it out.”
Dr. Gibstine said her son was working the family’s VCR at age 2 and rebooking his own plane ticket home from camp at 13. By the time he was in third grade, he was helping teachers at his local public school troubleshoot computer problems, she said. In middle school, he transferred to the private John Burroughs School. “Teachers liked him because he was really, really bright and a hard worker, but he was also super social”, said Andy Abbott, the head of school, who was a principal at the time. “He was funny and had a big personality.”
…OpenAI executives ended up reviving an unusual idea that had been floated earlier in the company’s history: creating a for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, that would report to the nonprofit parent. Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder who advised OpenAI at the time and later served on the board, said the idea was to attract investors eager to make money from the commercial release of some OpenAI technology, accelerating OpenAI’s progress. “You want to be there first and you want to be setting the norms”, he said. “That’s part of the reason why speed is a moral and ethical thing here.” The decision further alienated Musk, the people familiar with the matter said. He parted ways with OpenAI in February 2018.
…A young researcher questioned whether Musk had thought through the safety implications, the former employees said. Musk grew visibly frustrated and called the intern a “jackass”, leaving employees stunned, they said. It was the last time many of them would see Musk in person. Soon after, an OpenAI executive commissioned a “jackass” trophy for the young researcher, which was later presented to him on a pillow. “You’ve got to have a little fun”, Mr. Altman said. “This is the stuff that culture gets made out of.” Musk’s departure marked a turning point. Later that year, OpenAI leaders told employees that Mr. Altman was set to lead the company. He formally became CEO and helped complete the creation of the for-profit subsidiary in early 2019.
… Some employees still saw the deal as a Faustian bargain. OpenAI’s lead safety researcher, Dario Amodei, and his lieutenants feared the deal would allow Microsoft to sell products using powerful OpenAI technology before it was put through enough safety testing, former employees said. They felt that OpenAI’s technology was far from ready for a large release—let alone with one of the world’s largest software companies—worrying it could malfunction or be misused for harm in ways they couldn’t predict. Mr. Amodei also worried the deal would tether OpenAI’s ship to just one company—Microsoft—making it more difficult for OpenAI to stay true to its founding charter’s commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first, the former employees said.
…Mr. Altman disagreed. “The unusual thing about Microsoft as a partner is that it let us keep all the tenets that we think are important to our mission”, he said, including profit caps and the commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first.
…Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei clashed again over the release of the [GPT-3 OA] API, former employees said. Mr. Amodei wanted a more limited and staged release of the product to help reduce publicity and allow the safety team to conduct more testing on a smaller group of users, former employees said. Mr. Amodei left the company a few months later along with several others to found a rival AI lab called Anthropic. “They had a different opinion about how to best get to safe AGI than we did”, Mr. Altman said.
…He has put almost all his liquid wealth into two [other] companies [Helion & Retro Biosciences]…He noted how much easier these problems [like nuclear fusion or longevity research] are, morally, than AI. “If you’re making nuclear fusion, it’s all upside. It’s just good”, he said. “If you’re making AI, it is potentially very good, potentially very terrible.”