Looks like he was originally "co-chair" which sounds pretty foundery. https://web.archive.org/web/20170729172845/https://blog.open...

He also committed a chunk of the initial funding. And it's not rare for capital providers who are there on day #1 to call themselves and be referred to as co-founders.

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.

> And it's not rare for capital providers who are there on day #1 to call themselves and be referred to as co-founders.

I believe the opposite, never heard of any hands-off investors calling themselves co-founders.

They may not be hands off but they may be there from day #1. It's usually a matter of how much time they can commit. If it is only a little bit then it is usually in an oversight role, but it is also possible that they are instrumental in raising the first round of funding. Or in the case of a medical start-up the person who allows their name to be used by the venture because they believe in the concept or maybe even because they contributed the idea. Essentially: co-founders are those that were there on day #1 or that the rest of the founders allowed to call themselves co-founder even though they joined later (but they have made an outside contributions).

So it's a term with a strict definition but also one with plenty of exceptions.

So there's different scenarios.

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

Sounds like a funder rather than a founder. "chairman" is a hands-off role usually.

From the caption right underneath his picture on this page:

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.

Your history is wrong. He is the original co-founder of openai as you can review from the publicly available legal data.

In a way it is interesting that people would wade into this discussion without even the most basic facts.

yeah, I wonder where this type of miss-information comes from. Do people simply make things up out of thin air to suit their biases and then proclaim them to be true?

You are totally right. Why would anyone be trying to claim Sam is a founder when he’s clearly not.

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.

Im not sure what the distinction you are drawing is.

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....

In SV parlance "founder" is a hands-on, full-on role to take the company from 0 to 1.

Sure, the convention in SV is also that the person created the company and is not an employee of someone else. The founder is there at the Inception of the company and it is their idea.

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

I’m sorry but none of that says that Sam or elon are founders. Your big long wired blog for lack of a better term said nothing of the sort.

facts like Altman claiming he’s got a successful coup goin eh

I think you're letting your personal feelings about Sam Altman cloud your judgment as to what facts you will accept and which you won't.

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.

I have no personal feelings to Altman what so ever. What I dislike is the worship and rewriting of history to appease the business tycoons in the tech industry who are little more than parasites in many cases and I believe this one could be one of those cases.

On the flip side I think your blind worship of these tech business leeches may be clouding your judgement.

He was one of the founders and initial financers in 2015 along with Greg, Musk, Theil, and Bezos.