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Why Sam Altman Won't Be on the Hook for OpenAI's Spending Spree
- web3-is-a-scam 1y ago> At an event this week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar seemed to suggest that the government could act as a “backstop” for the company’s commitments She said the quiet part out loud? This was always the play, it is obvious. Too big to fail. National security concerns. China/Russia veer scary. Blah blah blah. Altman’s libertarian pontification is so obviously insincere it’s laughable.
- Polizeiposaune 1y agoAnd David Sacks immediately responded with "there will be no government bailout": https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-ai-sacks-federal-bailout-openai-friar.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-ai-sacks-federal-bailo...
- web3-is-a-scam 1y agoSurely the government would never lie.
- draw_down 1y ago[dead]
- sabatonfan 1y agoI love your username. Offtopic,I have complicated thoughts about crypto but I would genuinely agree that for a normal person like crypto is just scam. I just have money in usdc and I might like monero for privacy sometimes but I guess I am just using it as a bank account right now with usdc I would personally like it if visa/stripe etc. middleman's could be cut preferably, its honestly insane how we still can't figure that issue of middleman taking cuts etc. Maybe the issue isn't technological but regulatory But overall I agree that crypto/ especially the web3 mostly is a scam.
- bgwalter 1y agoYep, he saw the Mamdani win and Vance gave new marching orders on X by pretending to care about jobs, housing etc. Sacks was one of the most prominent whiners on X asking for the bail out the Silicon Valley Bank. He is lying, just as the all-in podcast was lying before Trump's election and then dropped the masks.
- alexashka 1y agoDavid 'Crypto Bail-Out King' Sacks said.
- deaux 1y agoCompletely meaningless.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- coliveira 1y agoYes, the whole play by OpenAI is to raise enormous amounts of money as quickly as possible from as many people and companies as they can. Their only real goal is to put themselves in a position as the "indispensable company" that is too big to fail and will bring every AI investment to its knees if not supported by the government.
- dangus 1y agoYou don’t even have to read the article. There is no such thing as a CEO held accountable. Just look at Elon’s insane pay package, approved in a landslide. The skulls of the average shareholder must echo like a cave. And the rich accuse the poor of their poverty being their own fault, because they are just being irresponsible, making bad decisions, and spending unwisely. They should look in the mirror.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoYeah, a CEO being "held accountable" looks like "we will pay you enormous sums of money to leave the company". Just once I would like to see the CEO of some big corp face actual consequences for running the company badly, but I'm not holding my breath.
- the__alchemist 1y agoAre you sure you can't think of any examples?
- 0_____0 1y agoMay I introduce you to the Enron scandal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling
- dangus 1y agoCan you imagine such a punishment occurring under the current administration? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7ek63e5xyo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7ek63e5xyo One reason of many why I say that the CEO class is no longer accountable for anything. Laws do not exist for them.
- dylan604 1y agoSBF was convicted and sentenced to 25 years.
- coliveira 1y agoInvestors in companies such as Tesla are adept of the greater fool theory. As long as somebody else will pay more for the useless shares, they'll continue to support the company.
- wronglebowski 1y agoAt what point will the massive investments into AI show a respectable return? With the literal Trillion dollars OpenAI is constantly trying to raise what type of revenue would make that type of investment make sense? Even if you're incredibly bullish I don't know how you make that math work anymore.
- rossdavidh 1y agoAs others have said before me: "the hype IS the product".
- shiandow 1y agoThat's just a roundabout way of saying they don't expect their money back they just hope to sell before the bubble bursts.
- lazide 1y agoModern American investing 101.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoWhich is the same thing as a scam.
- coliveira 1y agoIt's gonna be very fun to watch SA being tried for fraud and deceiving investors about the "future profits" of his startup.
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoAu contraire him and associated people (Musk, among others) will be or are being received as heroes in his class for helping to seemingly break the bargaining power of software engineers and middle/upper-middle class information workers and creatives generally.
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- lhoss 1y agohttps://archive.ph/LYVMZ https://archive.ph/LYVMZ
- neilv 1y agoThe article unleashes a burst of expert quotes: > Experts note chief dealmaker Altman doesn’t have anything to lose. He has repeatedly claimed he does not have a stake in the company, and won’t have a stake even after OpenAI has restructured to become a public benefit corporation. “He has the upside, in a sense, in terms of influence, if it all succeeds,” said Ofer Eldar, a corporate governance professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “He's taking all this commitment knowing that he's not going to actually face any consequences because he doesn't have a financial stake.” > That’s not good corporate governance, according to Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. “We allow leaders that we see as being super pioneering to behave idiosyncratically, and when things move in the opposite direction and somebody has to pay, it's unclear that they're the ones that are going to have to pay,” she said. > Luria adds: “He can commit to as much as he wants. He can commit to a trillion dollars, ten trillion, a hundred trillion dollars. It doesn't matter. Either he uses it, he renegotiates it, or he walks away.” There are of course more indirect stakes for Altman, experts said, like the reputational blow he’d take if the deals fall apart. But on paper, he’d seemingly be off the hook, they said. Is an intended takehome message of the article that Altman should invest his own money (with potential loss, or profit), or that he should be given a big compensation deal (maybe like the one Musk just got)?
- chemotaxis 1y agoI've heard it over and over again that the ultimate problem with corporate governance is that the CEOs and the VPs are incentivized to make the stock up at any cost to pad their own coffers. This is basically taken as gospel in many circles. Now you have a company where the leader at least notionally doesn't have that kind of a financial stake... and we think that's bad? I disagree with Altman on almost everything, but it feels like grasping at straws.
- Spivak 1y agoWell if you have absolutely no stake then you're just playing with other people's money. If your entire stake is tied to the stock price then that's also bad for the known reasons. In a somewhat better governance model I would expect "the board" to reward / punish the CEO financially based on tangible growth metrics. This is how my current CEO gets paid at $dayjob.
- layer8 1y ago> “The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it,” [Sam Altman] Taking that at face value, it means we would have to invest exponential resources just to get linear improvements. That’s not exactly an optimistic outlook.
- noir_lord 1y ago"A deep incisive point, it seems like you want to turn the entire mass of the solar system into computronium to run ChatGPT27".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Neywiny 1y agoAnd in his interviews he talks about the near vertical progress they're making. Of course nobody agrees but if those two are true, that's doubly exponential to keep pace.
- djoldman 1y agoWithout knowing the details of these "agreements," everyone is just speculating. OpenAI as an entity is only in trouble if they've bound themselves completely without any way out. These "commitments" may just function as memorandums of understanding.
- rramadass 1y agoBloomberg maps the $8T AI bubble: a closed loop of money and momentum - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michael-lee-4049593_signal-bloomberg-just-mapped-the-8t-ai-activity-7384936270541664256-IUTf https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michael-lee-4049593_signal-bl... See also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857769
- metadope 1y agoAgreed. The speculation is telling and reflects on the speculators more than reflecting a reality we understand. No one knows what will happen next. I remember the days when Facebook and Google and other familiar giants were painted with the same brush-- all negative speculation as to them being overvalued and on the cliff's edge of doom, because no one could imagine how they'd survive their obscene overvaluations. How and when will they monetize? How will they ever bring in enough revenue to justify the insane capital spending?
- danielmarkbruce 1y agoYes, exactly this. No one is releasing the details of the contracts because they aren't real commitments in most cases. They are almost certainly agreements to spend up to x at y pricing mechanism, can be cancelled, etc etc.
- baron816 1y agoI think sama thinks money won’t really exist within the next few years. ASI will take over and create a world of radical abundance. Any revenue OpenAI generates is just to create leverage.
- schmichael 1y agoIf any of the super wealthy people actively promoting this fantasy actually believed it they wouldn’t be so worried about amassing wealth today. "Over abundance" talk happened during previous technological revolutions too: at best it was just silly over optimism, at this point I tend to think they’re just obliquely preparing us for underemployment and lower incomes.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoHere's how this can make sense: 1. OpenAI goes public. 2. Pay off the USA's debts with OpenAI stock. 3. Crash the bubble with no survivors. 4. Finally blockchain is useful.
- marze 1y agoIt will be interesting to see who owns all the compute hardware in a few years, that cost billions now, and what becomes of it. With an expected useful lifetime so short the depreciation rate is insane.
- nullpoint420 1y agoIf the bubble pops, the only upside I’m looking forward to is the cheap liquidated hardware
- f33d5173 1y agoThat will be nice, because right now 64GB of ram is $500
- nutjob2 1y ago> 6 GW of AMD’s chips Rule no of scam flavored hype: make up impressive sounding units that are opaque and meaningless
- Polizeiposaune 1y agoThe big hyperscalers have been measuring aggregate compute power in watts for many years; it's a parameter that drives the size of both power and cooling in the infrastructure required to house the gear.
- crazygringo 1y agoWhat a weird take. Of course he won't be on the hook. No CEO is personally financially liable for a company's potential losses nor should they be. Otherwise why would anyone ever take any risks? He doesn't even have a financial interest in the company, apparently. Obviously, the people who will lose their investments if everything goes south is… the investors. As it's supposed to be. The implied premise of this headline, that somehow there's something wrong with the fact that a CEO won't be personally financially responsible for potential future losses, is truly bizarre.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoHow many actual AI researchers from one of the big AI companies do we have here? I ask because they always seem to be extremely quiet, but I believe there is no way you could be involved in the development of LLMs on a deep level and not understand at this point that the entire thing is a scam. LLMs are very much like a magic trick - they seem truly miraculously to those who don’t understand how the trick is done. But those who designed the trick certainly know it’s deception. They’ve done enough research by this point to see that it’s not intelligent at all, but generates a very good illusion of intelligence by returning text that seems very similar to human output (because that’s what it was trained on). Useful? Yep - it’s like the best autocomplete you could ever imagine. Paradigm-changing even, as we now have a big chunk of human knowledge in a much more easily searchable format. It’s just not intelligent. I have to imagine that just like a magic trick, eventually someone will come up with a way to clearly communicate to the layperson how the trick is done. At that point, the illusion collapses.
- rramadass 1y agoBoth Yann LeCun and Richard Sutton (author of "The Bitter Lesson" essay where he argued scaling of general purpose methods brings about significant returns) have already pointed out that LLMs are a dead end. All that the AI Industry is doing is scaling computation/data in the hope that the result may encompass more of "existing real-world data" and thus give the illusion of thinking. You don't know whether the correct answer is due to reasoning or due to parroting of previously seen answer data. I always tell common folks to think of LLMs as very very large dictionaries eg. with the words from a pocket oxford dictionary you can construct only so many sentences whereas from a multi-volume set of large oxford dictionaries you can construct orders of magnitude more sentences and thus the probability of finding your specific answer sentence is much much higher. Now they can understand the scaling issue, realize its limits and why this approach can never lead to AGI.
- orwin 1y agoTi'm not at all pro-AI, but the argument were that LLM _alone_ were a dead end to reach AGI. I'm pretty sure we're generations away from AGI, but if we manage to build it, LLM would probably the tool it would use to communicate.
- darthvaden 1y agoMake openai a non corporate entity that belongs to the UN. It can't be profit driven. Fuck the economic pundits. This tech is beyond humans it needs to be done right. "All tech have been Enshitified to satisfy investor greed, sufficiently advanced tech can be called magic and these fools will enshitify magic also"
- inemesitaffia 1y agoLimited liability?