It's too easy to mix up cause and effect here. Was he already visible so good that pg put them there, or is pg infatuation so influential?
There's probably more than what meets the eye. Too bad for us that sama doesn't write as much as pg does.
Sam's startup didn't fail miserably, it sold for $40 million, on $30 million raised. You can do worse, but by VC standards, it's not a real success story, let alone what you'd expect from a guy you describe him as one of your top 5 founders.
This doesn't imply an overall assessment of Altman (most startups fail, and so on...). My outsider opinion is Altman's public persona seems ok, it seems like YC did well under his stewardship, etc. But it sure looks like he was annointed. Paul Graham and folks like to talk about how in school, you just try to make the teacher happy. Well, sometimes making Paul Graham happy is really important too.
I would disagree. Seems more prescient to me than ever. Gmail became far more important to the free world which I didn't see coming, and SamA lived up to the hype with OpenAI (before OpenAI he was quite accomplished, but OpenAI put him in the history books).