Does it really matter? If the behavior appears to be in conflict with OpenAI, and the board doesn’t like it, then that’s enough to let him go. It doesn’t need to be a contract violation, he just wasn’t doing the job they wanted him to do.
Essentially it is a short-hand for 'those that were present on the founding day of the company and whose names appear on the founding documents besides the lawyers'.
If you get added later on then you are technically not a co-founder, though even there sometimes (and sometimes rightly) exceptions are made.
I believe the opposite, never heard of any hands-off investors calling themselves co-founders.
So it's a term with a strict definition but also one with plenty of exceptions.
The classic is that a person has an idea, starts working Hands-On, and then goes out and finds capital investment.
In this case, a number of capital holders got together with an idea for a company and then went out and hired several employees to from all over the world to work for them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI
"Co-founder and former CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman" as well as countless news articles repeating this as if it is a well known fact, for which to date I haven't seen any contradicting information.
The organization was founded in December 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.
Greg, Sam and Elon made a company and literally went out and hired researchers like Ilya.
They pulled together funding, created a company, and hired a team of researchers to operate it. If that isnt founding a company, I dont know what is. Sam was there before all of them
It is not like a scrappy team of researchers with a pre-existing company went out, got funding, then gave the VCs board seats.
If you are going to copy and paste from wikipedia, read a little further:
>In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced[15] the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. The actual collected total amount of contributions was only $130 million until 2019.[6] According to an investigation led by TechCrunch, Musk was its largest donor while YC Research did not contribute anything at all.[16] The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.[17][18] OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco.[19][20]
According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field".[21] Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015.
Also good reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20160427162700/http://www.wired....
I feel like the facts are on the table, and if they don't convince someone then they are unlikely to be convinced by more facts
Whether Altman has a successful coup going or not is immaterial, but whether is a founder or not is what you asked and you got a pretty solid answer. You can like the answer, or you don't but it stands unopposed.
On the flip side I think your blind worship of these tech business leeches may be clouding your judgement.
It would be, but: this company hasn't been formed yet and this sketch does not justify the haste with which they kicked him out, there were all kinds of boxes that needed to be checked before they could do that without risking damage to OpenAI, this is a founder and the CEO we're speaking of.
Besides that: stupidly enough the contract that Sam has with OpenAI does not have a non-compete in it (this has been confirmed by multiple sources now I take that as true) and I don't see how it directly would harm OpenAI other than that his attention might be diluted and that it should be clear which cap he is wearing. But until that company formed and Sam named himself CEO of it (or took up some other high profile role) it leaves him so many outs that it only makes the board look like bumbling idiots. Because now he can simply say: "I would only be an investor" and that would be that, just like the rest of the investors in OpenAI (and, notably some members of the board) have conflicts of interest at least as large.
So if this was it they're in even more trouble than they were before because now it is the boards' conflicts of interest that will be held up to the light and those are not necessarily smaller.
What a complete circus.