My read is not that Sam is critical for the development of ai at openai, but he is the person pushing for them to get commercial success and also getting them deals to actually have the compute to do things. So he IS critical for making all of the employees have PPUs that are worth anything. I imagine a lot of people are looking at hundreds of thousands or even millions lost if OpenAI decides to just stop commercializing and walk away from being a $100B+ company.