Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s excellent interview with Farrow on Decoder, either.
Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator for several years, and left to become the full-time CEO of OpenAI. The New Yorker quotes Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham multiple times, in the context of Altman’s trustworthiness. (Some of those quotes are firsthand, others secondhand.) Graham’s role in the story — particularly his public remarks after publication — comprised an entire section in my own take on the New Yorker piece, wherein I concluded:
I would characterize Graham’s tweets re: Altman this week as
emphasizing only that Altman was not fired or otherwise forced
from YC, and could have stayed as CEO at YC if he’d found another
