“Individuals have been claiming YC fired Sam Altman. That is not true,” Graham wrote on X, previously Twitter.
Altman’s departure, Graham mentioned, was as a result of they wanted somebody who might run Y Combinator full-time.
“For a number of years, he was working each YC and OpenAI, however when OpenAI introduced that it was going to have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO, we (particularly Jessica) informed him that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI, we must always discover another person to run YC, and he agreed,” Graham mentioned, referencing his cofounder and spouse Jessica Livingston.
Altman stepped down as Y Combinator’s president on March 8, 2019, simply three days earlier than OpenAI introduced it was shedding its standing as a typical nonprofit.
The ChatGPT maker mentioned in a weblog put up on March 11, 2019, that it was a “capped-profit” firm with a for-profit arm ruled by a nonprofit.
“If he’d mentioned that he was going to search out another person to be CEO of OpenAI in order that he might focus 100% on YC, we might have been high-quality with that too,” Graham added. “We did not need him to go away, simply to decide on one or the opposite.”
Graham’s remarks contradicted earlier reviews by shops reminiscent of The Wall Road Journal and The Washington Put up final yr. Each shops reported that Altman was requested to go away the group for favoring his private pursuits over Y Combinator’s.
Representatives for Altman and Y Combinator didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark from BI despatched exterior common enterprise hours.
The information surrounding Altman’s time at Y Combinator comes amid heightened curiosity in his management of OpenAI. Altman was briefly fired as CEO in November after OpenAI’s board mentioned he was “not persistently candid in his communications” with it.
Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner mentioned in an interview on “The TED AI Present” this week that Altman was a misleading determine who’d lied to the board “a number of” instances.
“For years, Sam had made it actually tough for the board to truly do this job by withholding data, misrepresenting issues that had been taking place on the firm, in some circumstances outright mendacity to the board,” Toner mentioned.
Toner had made related accusations in an op-ed she’d cowritten with one other former board member, Tasha McCauley. The piece, which The Economist revealed on Sunday, mentioned that OpenAI could not be trusted to control itself with Altman on the helm.
On Thursday, present OpenAI board members Bret Taylor and Larry Summers wrote a rebuttal to Toner and McCauley, which was additionally revealed in The Economist.
“We don’t settle for the claims made by Ms Toner and Ms McCauley concerning occasions at OpenAI,” Taylor and Summers wrote.
“That mentioned, we share Ms Toner’s and Ms McCauley’s view—and the corporate and Mr Altman have frequently said—that the evolution of AI represents a significant growth in human historical past,” the pair added. “In democratic societies, accountability to authorities and authorities regulation is crucial.”
