Sam Altman – Credit Chen Galili
Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, admitted he was wrong about antisemitism. At the same time, allegations against him are surfacing about psychological abuse.
This latter is related to Sam Altman’s recent firing and the surprisingly quick rehiring.
According to a report in the Washington Post, senior people at OpenAI, the company Altman founded, were concerned with what was described as a sense of “chaos” that he created at the company.
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The newspaper also reported that Sam Altman allegedly was also charged with “pitting employees against each other in unhealthy ways,” whatever that means.
All this comes after Reuters a few weeks reported that Sam Altman’s ouster from OpenAI came after a group of OpenAI researchers had written to the company’s board to express concerns over its developments in artificial intelligence. Apparently, the board was concerned over what it felt was a lack of concern on the part of Sam Altman as to the possible consequences related to the expansion of the abilities of AI.
In what has got to be one of the strangest business stories of 2023, in late November Sam Altman was fired from his own company and then brought back just a few days later. And his comeback came after the OpenAI board claimed he would not be returning, hiring former Twitch chief Emmett Shear as interim CEO. And Sam Altman had also already taken a new job with Microsoft.
Not only that, but Sam Altman seemed to get what he wanted all along as there will be an almost complete turnover on the company’s board, with Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, to be the only remaining member. Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever – who was in favor of Altman’s ouster – are now gone.
As for anti-semitism, it seems that Sam Altman has now had the same “rude awakening” that so many American Jews had after the barbaric massacre enacted by Hamas terrorists on innocent Israeli civilians on October 7.
“For a long time I said that antisemitism, particularly on the American left, was not as bad as people claimed,” Altman wrote on Twitter. “I’d like to just state that I was totally wrong.”
“I still don’t understand it, really. Or know what to do about it. But it is so f–ked,” he added.
It is not clear what prompted Sam Altman to make these comments. It may have been related to the absurd testimonies given by the presidents of elite American universities such as Harvard in which they would not even say they condemned calls for the destruction of Israel. Or it could just be the totality of the attacks on Jews around the world since the Hamas attack.
