https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648?s=20
Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be simply incredible. Thank you @sama for all you have done for all of us.
Making such a statement before knowing what happened, or, maybe he does know what happened, make this seem it might not be as bad as we think?
> OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.
Founding a company is also fairly easy (if you're in the US). In most US states, you just need to complete some paperwork, pay administrative fees, and you're good to go.
Founding something isn't tough. Leading through adversity and setbacks is.
Finally, if we're praising workers, what about those who came and went between 2015 and today? That probably pushes the number higher than 400 FTEs.
IME companies with solid workers (in engineering and elsewhere) but weak leadership and mission have a much better chance than the converse. Even the best companies rarely end up following the mission or the leader.