Paul Graham Clarifies That Sam Altman Wasn't Fired from Y Combinator
On the afternoon of May 31st Beijing time, Paul Graham, the founder of startup company Y Combinator, said today that as the president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, the current CEO of OpenAI, was not fired by the company back then.
In November last year, Altman was deposed by the OpenAI board. Then there were reports that Altman wasn't the first time being fired. Back in 2019, as the president of Y Combinator, Altman was fired by Y Combinator founder Graham.
Regarding this, Graham said on social platform X on Thursday local time that Altman was not fired at that time, but he needed to operate OpenAI full-time and didn't have extra time to manage Y Combinator.
Graham said: For several years, Altman was running both Y Combinator and OpenAI. But when OpenAI announced that it would set up a for-profit subsidiary and Altman would be the CEO, we said to him that if he wanted to manage OpenAI full-time, we might have to find someone else to manage Y Combinator, and he agreed.
On March 8, 2019, three days before OpenAI announced that it would abandon its non-profit status, Altman resigned as the president of Y Combinator. On March 11, 2019, OpenAI announced in a blog post that it was a capped-profit company, and its for-profit division was managed by a non-profit organization.
Graham also added: If he said he would find someone else to be the CEO of OpenAI so that he could focus 100% on Y Combinator, we wouldn't mind. We didn't want him to leave, but there was no choice.
Obviously, Graham's statement contradicts the reports of media such as The Washington Post last year. At that time, these media reported that Graham flew thousands of miles from the UK to San Francisco and personally deposed Altman. It is worth mentioning that it was Graham who appointed Altman as the president of Y Combinator in 2014 and gave positive evaluations in the following years.
Although Altman was fired by OpenAI last year, but regained power a few days later. Nowadays, Altman's position in OpenAI is increasingly consolidated, and his main enemies inside OpenAI have either resigned or been ousted.