> Alongside rifts over strategy, board members also contended with Altman’s entrepreneurial ambitions. Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp., according to a person with knowledge of the investment proposal. Altman was courting SoftBank Group Corp. chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new company to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive. Sutskever and his allies on the OpenAI board chafed at Altman’s efforts to raise funds off of OpenAI’s name, and they harbored concerns that the new businesses might not share the same governance model as OpenAI, the person said.
Maybe if Altman bought every datacenter and then nudged OpenAI toward renting them out, or if Altman bought the "Open" trademark and licensed it to OpenAI for a million dollars or whatever.
I was not aware that the Arab states were such a Mecca (pun very much intended) for AI, but there must be something there… why pass over any number of American partnerships?
Especially in today’s geopolitical climate.
That, and despite a lot of really bad PR (and a lot of very real human rights abuses) the Saudi's are not as black as they're painted.
If you don't want your knowledge to be used by machines or man, then you should bottle them up and hide them from both.
I understand that we easily get confused when dealing with fantasy money numbers, but the higher the number, the more the exact number of zeroes actually matters.
Neuman's still at it with Flow? In line with that, more impetus (not that he needs any) for Sam to go ahead and do it anyway.
You can't argue that the company has not been impressively run and not just because of the quality of the models.
If Sama feels the current players are not doing enough, it seems entirely in line with his publicly stated and often repeated goal of advancing AI, that he would try and move things along. That's just extremely consequential execution.
Why wouldn't they? The Arab world loves science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...
Really? Altman advertised and marketed himself as someone with no vested financial interest in OpenAI, but then he's going around creating companies with foreign states and companies that will then sell to the non-profit he's CEO of?
At the end of the day he is responsible for building a $100b business, with a product users love, that has attracted developers in droves and built a highly successful partnership with Microsoft.
And pretty sure the direction of the company is what the issue was. Not any side projects.
Pretty sure that’s the crux of the problem here.
The sort of interesting part of all these comment threads is the unstated assumption that a very fast growing multi billion dollar for profit tech company is an unmitigated “good thing” and anyone getting in the way of that is wrong.
Not everyone thinks that or has that as a goal.
This would most likely have been a pure grift play, finding some stupid money and using his position at OpenAI to convince them to invest in a doomed proposition.
Be supportive of countries wanting to be interested in science instead of being so negative
I just think it’s far short of the completely indefensible, totally unambiguous, and obviously fraudulent behavior of Neumann.
There are gradations of conflict and malfeasance.
Best time to start was 10 years ago…
Would you say something similar about Italy if they were to be interested about AI (no tech, no space, no chip industries), but couldn't because the last time they were interested in mathematics was during the Renaissance period?
I'm the heretic one
Starting from scratch would make sense if Altman personally were some kind of chip design savant with unique insight to the problem domain, and he definitely isn't that. Alternatively it makes sense if had nothing to do with saving OpenAI from the compute bottleneck, and was another one of Altman's Worldcoin-like grifter schemes.
I would be very surprised if high profile AI figures and companies started making ties with them.
What are you getting at?
Have you really made it as a SV CEO if you're not at least a 3-ring Tres Commas Club member?
Popular picks seem to be any 3 of ad scaffolds, money processing, rent/gig vigs, energy, digital ledgers, big statistics, profit|altruism mashups, and, of course, the final frontier.
You either assume transformers are here to stay and somehow get an edge over Nvidia and others trying to do the same or you make a huge variety of bets on whats next.
when has he "executed"?
he seems to have had four jobs:
1. a failed startup founder 1. a YC person handing out other people's money 1. openai ceo 1. a horrific cryptocurrency grift
which do you feel he "executed" so impressively on?