The Ticking OpenAI Bomb

How Sam Altman Will Leave With A Minute Left On The Doomsday Clock

There is an old expression, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” I have already been fooled once by Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz when he was the CEO of Netscape. Marc Andreesen now runs the venture capital firm of Andreesen Horowitz, which was the first major investor in OpenAI.

https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/a16z-targets-ai-as-part-of-new-6-billion-fund.html

Is Sam Altman of OpenAI going to launch startups out of OpenAI with Marc Andreessen, leaving OpenAI in the dust after all the intellectual property is brokered off?

Sam Altman was running an Open AI Startup Fund without the knowledge of the Board of Directors or major investors, including Elon Musk.

Initially, OpenAI was a non-profit foundation, but after Elon Musk’s money ($100 Million) was gone from training the AI engine over a four-year period, Sam Altman began parlaying the intellectual property with the OpenAI Startup Fund.

https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over/

I was the Director of Information Technology at In Focus Systems near Portland, Oregon, and we used Netscape’s server technology for our web presence. I was tasked with the decision to move forward with either Netscape or Microsoft for our new web presence and electronic storefront.

I traveled to Silicon Valley from Oregon to listen to Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark describe Netscape's bright future after its record-breaking 1995 IPO. There is nothing like hearing the future product plans and commitments from the horses’ mouths, I thought. Andreesen, like Steve Jobs before him, was one of a new generation of high-tech millionaires that Silicon Valley would produce.

AOL was the big competitor in Internet browsing at the time, and Andreesen joked that you could solve world hunger if you could eat the diskette that AOL sent out with every computer magazine imaginable. All of the Netscape customers gathered in a large conference room to hear from the gurus of Silicon Valley tell us about their future plans for the products.

After presentations by the Netscape product managers which stressed how they would dominate Microsoft and AOL for the future of the internet, the customers got to ask questions. “So, you guys are going to sell out to AOL and drop your product?” someone asked. “Oh no, no,” we were reassured. The code was in escrow.

There would always be a “foundation” to carry on with it in that very unlikely event. “Microsoft is giving you guys a run for your money. They have a lot of cash for the browser wars,” another customer added.

According to the Netscape managers, Microsoft’s gaining market share was a novel market bump. Microsoft’s entry into the market only validated all their brilliant leadership and product development at Netscape.

https://archive.ph/ChC37

So much for venture capital promises. A year later, Netscape sold out to AOL, and the “Foundation” was allowed to let the code die a quiet death. Andreesen formed what would become the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz as the escape vehicle from Netscape while all the customers were left stranded on the deserted island with their worthless software.

Will Open AI become the next Netscape with X-AI, Amazon, Anthropic, and Deep Seek moving into the market? When I visited the murder scene of Open AI expert, Suchir Balaji, I began to have my doubts about Open AI.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/openai-copyright-law.html

Open AI expert, Suchir Balaji, was scheduled to testify against Open AI in a copyright lawsuit brought by the New York Times. A critical “training drive” for AI was missing at his murder scene. He had just finished a three-day hike that ended in his 24th birthday celebration, and now he was making a critical backup of the “AI training drive”, the secret sauce to the magic of AI.

That’s when the metadata of what was happening at OpenAI was crystallized in my mind. Suchir’s death as a patsy would mean no one could be held responsible for stealing the secrets contained on the OpenAI “training drive.” The “training drive” that Suchir Balaji had, was missing and our researchers believe it contained the invaluable trade secrets of OpenAI.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/05/elon-musk-openai-lawsuit

Now that $100 Billion dollars’ worth of intellectual property (that’s what OpenAI spent over four years creating the AI engine), was up for grabs to anyone who had the code. China’s Deep Seek immediately eclipsed all the high-tech billionaires who owned AI products at the same time we were investigating the death of Suchir Balaji.

I heard insider rumors in Silicon Valley that Kai-Fu Lee, a former Google Deep Mind executive, had done a deal with Deep Seek, a firm run by venture capitalists in China, with Andreesen Horowitz. Also, the two key executives who worked with Suchir Balaji left OpenAI rapidly after his departure from OpenAI - Jon Schulman to Amazon’s Anthropic, and Ilya Sutskever to Safe SuperIntelligence. Suchir Balaji’s death was just the last shoe to drop to clear any claims on the intellectual property.

Sam Altman’s background in Silicon Valley included running a venture capital incubator called Y Combinator. Was Altman farming out the AI “training drive” and code to all comers? Now we find out my suspicions were correct. In November 2023, Sam Altman was temporarily fired for starting a startup fund inside OpenAI. Suchir Balaji knew all about it, as did Ilya Sutskever and Jon Schulman. Schulman, who is now at Thinking Machines.

We will continue following this story, but it looks very much like Sam Altman was running another Y Combinator startup fund out of OpenAI, just like Marc Andreessen was working on his with his escape vehicle at Netscape. Maybe Sam Altman should have called his venture firm inside of OpenAI BetScape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape