Eric Schmidt is also the person that said Google's old "do no evil" slogan was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Given that there's apparent tension at OpenAI over non profit vs for profit goals I'd not draw any particular conclusions from Schmidt's statement.

And of course he gives credit to the CEO and not the 400 people under him who actually built the thing, nor the other 10 people who actually founded the company. Nor those who gave initial funding. From wikipedia:

> 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.

I'm of the firm opinion that the heavy lifting at open ai is doing by the scientists but of courses ceos like to applaud themselves on the back for doing the "tough" job.

Lots of companies are funded every year. Those without solid leadership and clear mission are bound to fail.

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.

*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.*

This is true in the sense that being a CEO is also easy, you just fill out some paperwork that says you are CEO.

Are you saying the founders of OpenAI just filled out some paperwork and did nothing more?

What adversity and setbacks did Sam personally overcome?

> Lots of companies are funded every year. Those without solid leadership and clear mission are bound to fail.

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.

No they don't. Leadership can make or break a company, that is why they are paid so much.

Leadership without talented employees can break a company. That's why they are paid so...

He was also against the creation of Chrome to the point where it had to be done in secret, according to him.

From a total outsider/uninformed pov, he really seems like a fail upward story.

lol! Um, do you remember who the main champion of Chrome was?

No

Big daddy sundar

But that was fair. Page wanted to do a browser super early, like years before the IPO, and Schmidt was brought in specifically to try and bring some focus to the company and balance out the founder's ambition with more "adult" execution. Yes eventually Chrome became a successful project and Schmidt wisely didn't pick a fight over it, but he wasn't wrong to insist the company try to avoid getting distracted with that so early in its life.

Again, I am an outsider and uniformed. But the established money printer was already going brrrrr...

I would imagine that it's arguable that a pheasant could have ridden that rocket to the moon.

My bias and stupidity may be showing here, but I just don't think that he is very smart. Maybe that was the point of his position: to keep the company from going beyond the imagination of Wall Street normies.

I was an insider at that time and I didn't disagree with that decision, especially as Google were funnelling money to Firefox and at that time Firefox was executing well and had a lot of support across the community. Part of why the money printer was going brrr was a relentless effort on optimizing it and growing it, which did benefit from the executives actually focussing on it. The idea it all just happened automatically just isn't so.

Ok, thanks for the insight!

Tons of high profile people spoke like this about Adam Neumann or Elizabeth Holmes too

And Sam Bankman-Fried

Tons of high profile people spoke like that about a large number of individuals in the past. Here I think it's clear that OpenAI has indeed delivered something serious.

I'm starting to think what people say reflect their own thought about other people, and not facts we should accept depending on their net worth

Not everyone that you don't like is a fraudster. Just say that you don't like Sam, no need to make an obviously absurd comparison. The reason those were bad CEOs were that they swindled investors and lied about what their corporation is doing. I have absolutely no opinion on Sam Altman (didn't know about him before openai) btw, it's just that the comparison is completely nonsensical.

(It reminds me of comparing AI to crypto because both have hype behind them.)

I like that you have no opinion about this guy that got fired for “not [being] consistently candid in his communications with the board” other than it is plainly obvious that he isn’t a liar.

No that's not my point. I'm not saying he's a liar or not, I'm saying that they are not similar regardless. He could be a liar without being a fraud. Openai is already not Theranos no matter what happens next.

This is a good point. There is no possible room for the general artificial intelligence company to disappoint investors or other stakeholders in a big way

Well with the info currently available, that’s just like, the board’s opinion, man.

Why “obviously absurd”? They had spotless reputations, until they didn’t. So did the FTX guy, for instance. Just because you don’t understand, doesn’t mean something is nonsensical

> Not everyone that you don't like is a fraudster.

Sam Altman in particular has precedent, with Worldcoin, that should make you wary of defending him on that particular point.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

They're not comparing them to those people, they're pointing out that (tech) celebrity endorsements don't mean much.

> Not everyone that you don't like is a fraudster

Maybe not. Perhaps it seems that everyone you do like is

Oh please, you're going to put Altman together with those clowns? He has a proven record of extreme accomplishment, in various domains, moreso than 99.9999% of people in the tech industry.

This type of comment doesn't really help.

And for my two cents, he always seemed like a disingenuous hype salesman more than a technical person.

He's an Elon Musk or a Lex Friedman.

>He has a proven record of extreme accomplishment, in various domains, moreso than 99.9999% of people in the tech industry.

I don't really see anything[1] that suggests that this sentence is true. Now, I'm not saying that he hasn't been successful, but there's "successful" and then there's your hyperbole.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman

what did he do before open ai? (Which was founded by a lot more people than Sam). A genius in my opinion needs to have a track record of incredible things, key point being "track".

> what did he do before open ai?

Worldcoin. Which is, to put it mildly, not positive.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

It's possible for our heroes to fall from grace. There's nothing wrong with Eric saying this without knowing the full story.

Your use of the word "our" is too liberally applied, he was no hero of mine. I believe history will have a very different view of Altman, "Open"AI, and AI in general.

That’s the rhetorical “our”.

> rhetorical

Plural generic first-person possessive pronoun.

Is English not your first language? They were making a rhetorical argument about our heroes, whoever they may be.

It’s clear from context that they’re talking about how Sam is a hero of Eric’s and Sam has fallen which is a thing that can happen.

> They were making a rhetorical argument about our heroes, whoever they may be.

Yes? That's what "plural generic first-person possessive pronoun" means. I was agreeing with you, mate.

Note I said "heroes", not "hero". I'm making a general statement about how the views people can have about others can evolve over time.

idk, it seems a lot smarter to me to keep one's mouth shut or express a general level of surprise without making a public endorsement until facts become clearer.

Why? If something bad comes out about Sam Altman, no one is going to criticise Eric Schmidt for not having foresight of it.

Because getting fired like this (both so abruptly, and with the unusually frank statement from OpenAI) suggests some sort of ethical issue. There's plenty of amicable divorces in the business world where teams just diverge on vision, goals, or methods, but they're the sort of thing people generally see coming. This HN post has collected thousands of votes precisely because it's such an unusual and surprising development, so it seems to me there's at least a 50% probability that it is something bad.

I don't expect Eric Schmidt to have general foresight about Sam Altman, but as a former CEO himself he must understand its not a decision a board would make lightly.

I think it's logical in these scenarios if you don't know what happened to presume something forgivable and maintain that relationship (cynically, opportunity to invest), and if something truly unforgivable comes out post another tweet.

This sounds celebratory to me. Bad news for OpenAI is good news for google.

Or maybe Eric Schmidt is worse than we think. ;-) (half joking)

I think OpenAI built something amazing with ChatGPT, but building a company from nothing is a little bit different from being

> initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised $1 billion. (Wikipedia)

He's mega rich. Doesn't matter what other people think about him at this point.

True. He's certainly wealthy enough that no amount of "additional" money to his name would change his life in any notable manner.

These types support each other. Imagine thinking stealing people’s property at scale and reselling it will benefit society. These folks are sociopaths.

Here is what's wrong about that statement: Sam Altman did not "build" Open AI from nothing to $90Bn. Open AI raised $1bn from several investors and had top talents. Sam managed the company through that. But I am certain other people given the same circumstances will be able to do more or less the same.