Sam Altman Tries Bending the World to OpenAI’s Will

Unpacking the $500 billion Stargate project as another OpenAI plan falls short

From Tom Dotan, our new senior correspondent, fresh off two years covering Microsoft for the Wall Street Journal

It’s still unclear what the exact ramifications will be in the AI world after OpenAI abandoned its effort to transfer control of the company away from its non-profit parent. CEO Sam Altman says a new plan to make the subsidiary a public benefit corporation and remove profit caps for investors will accomplish the same goals, though critics aren’t so sure.

One thing is clear: this is a retreat from what the company publicly proposed in December.

The company’s transparency through the conversion process is admirable in its way. After privately telling some investors it planned to essentially convert the non-profit into a corporation, OpenAI decided to proclaim that intention loudly. After that process became uncertain and contentious, most visibly in a lawsuit by Elon Musk, Altman broadcasted the abrupt change even before the new plan was done.

From another point of view, the sequence of events was very Sam Altman. Willing something into being by making an announcement with the pesky details to be sorted out later is a strategy he has used more than once, and so far to good effect.

Back in 2019 he posted on his blog that a “big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time.” That was a few months before he stepped down as president of Y Combinator and declared himself its chairman, which he did through a pre-emptive blog post. The firm’s partners had reportedly never agreed to the switch.

Stargate’s Fuzziness

All of this has been very relevant to me as I spent some time over the past week digging into Stargate, announced in late January at the White House with Altman, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, and Donald Trump all on stage together. The tech moguls described Stargate as a joint venture, also including the UAE’s MGX, that would invest as much as $500 billion to build data center infrastructure for OpenAI in the U.S.