Summary:
Sam Altman is asking society to risk massive infrastructure, public data, and economic stability on OpenAI’s grandiose promises, despite a recurring track record of exaggerated metrics, self-dealing, and questionable business practices.
A Pattern of Misrepresentation
Loopt: Claimed high engagement while hiding metrics. In reality, the app had roughly 500 active users before being sold, shut down, and abandoned, leaving Altman millions richer.
Y Combinator & Hydrazine: Placed up to 75% of his venture capital fund into YC-incubated startups using insider access, despite publicly denying cross-investments.
Reddit Data & Community Deals: Aggressively scraped Reddit content to train AI models while holding a major personal stake in the platform, failing to deliver on an earlier pledge to return 10% of Reddit’s value back to its user community.
Circular Economics and Unsustainable Spend
Revenue Disconnect: OpenAI has committed over $1 trillion to infrastructure over the next eight years, despite generating roughly $13 billion in annual recurring revenue—a fraction of its commitments.
Recycled Capital: Deals with tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon function circularly: big tech invests billions into OpenAI, and OpenAI immediately spends that cash back on those partners’ chips and cloud servers, artificially inflating valuations.
Profiting Off Both Sides of the AI Crisis
Power and Supply Chain: Altman holds personal investments in the networking, rare-earth mining, and nuclear energy startups (such as Oklo and Helion) needed to supply OpenAI’s projected 250GW power demand.
Monetizing the Fallout: While AI disrupts industries, Altman invests in solutions to the problems AI creates—including deepfake verification, scam insurance, and Worldcoin (an eye-scanning crypto project pitched as a UBI and identity verification fix).
Socializing the Risk OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit safety charter to pivot toward commercial expansion. Statements from leadership indicate that if these aggressive, over-leveraged infrastructure bets fail, OpenAI expects government backstops, subsidies, and taxpayer bailouts to rescue the sector.
QUESTIONS:
If an investigative journalist dug into Sam Altman’s background, how many more examples of deception would they find? Does Altman have a reputation for deception with the public that contributes to the backlash against AI?
What would AI look like without cicular revenue deals?
Are AI leaders like Sam Altman able to create a Too Big To Fail system that makes their Bailout likely?