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The 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
by neilv 1y ago
The 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.
- rramadass 1y agoOf course it is bad; he is "selling" other folks AI snake-oil to get them to part with their money which might have been better spent on proper companies which make actual-products/provide-services. The description of a "stupid" person by Carlo Cipolla (recent HN thread The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45829210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45829210) seems to rather fit Sam Altman. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.