[grey-area]

His own sister accused him of sexual assault.

He was fired from his first startup.

He was abruptly fired from ycombinator in shady circumstances.

He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control.

He took OpenAI from being a non-profit to a for-profit, with obvious benefits to whoever controls it.

He was massively misleading about the capabilities of his product and predicted AGI within years.

At some point the pattern of all these events should have some weight in your judgement of him, no?

[meowface]

Paul Graham, founder of the website we're on, still says he likes and trusts him. He just was annoyed he was constantly distracted by AI stuff when he was supposed to be running YC as president (which bears no resemblance to any current events...).

He, at worst, finds him to have been (at some point) incompetent, which is very different from finding him immoral. Paul keeps replying to tweets to clarify this when people continue to misportray his stance.

"He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control." is the only thing you wrote which is plainly true and valid to state.

I am sure there may exist good, strong criticisms, but your argument is so tendentiously gish-gallopy that it will if anything just make people more likely to disbelieve his critics. (Not that I would do that, since that'd be just as fallacious.)

Why would OpenAI employees all still be happily working for him and publicly supporting him? Why is the company still so successful, and the leader? Why wouldn't most of them have left in droves to Anthropic or elsewhere, by now? Especially given most technical employees at OpenAI (justifiably) share the eschatological views of AI shared' by Anthropic staff and other TESCREALists, in which case they really really try to be careful about who will be responsible for potential future superintelligence. The board and some executives disliked and distrusted him but it's unclear many other people there did or do now. And I'm not just talking about the petition but the people who have continued working there for years afterwards.

[grey-area]

We’ll see in time if your confident trust in Sam Altman’s good nature is justified.

Personally if someone is found to be untrustworthy by multiple people and does weird stuff (like moving from open non-profit to for profit), I trust them a lot less. I don’t know him so don’t pass judgment but wouldn’t trust him and certainly wouldn’t give his statements credence since he’s been so spectacularly wrong on AI outcomes.

As to people at OpenAI and investors in OpenAI, I certainly wouldn’t expect them to denigrate their CEO just before an IPO, the one who fought off the board and installed his own place men and thus has complete control; it is not in their interests to do so.

If there is a bust after this boom I think quite a lot of bad behaviour and circular deals from The main players (nvidia, OpenAI, MS etc) will be revealed at that point. In a financial boom a lot gets hidden.