The bit you quoted from https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ goes on to s...

hbarka · on Feb 9, 2023

So? It's not unusual for large donors to become an honorary chair of a company. VCs get this privilege oftentimes.

There is literally nothing in the OpenAI announcement that he's a founder. Websites like Wired and Buzzfeed ran with it because people would shrug if the story went that the founders are Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Who? No it can't be them, it's Elon Elon!#

codeulike · on Feb 9, 2023

How do you define founder exactly? Does being there for the initial discussions, helping get the team together, being on the board and being a co-chair and helping fund the whole thing count?

hbarka · on Feb 11, 2023

Did you also not read that far where it explicitly says who the founders are? I hope you are not confusing founders with funders.

codeulike · on Feb 11, 2023

If you really want to split hairs, https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ actually says 'founding members', which is not necessarily the same thing as 'founder'. You are focussing too much on that one sentence from the one announcment. You need to look at what actually happened at the time.

Founder is not a legal term. There is a central registry where you can go and look up who the directors of a company are, but there is no such official place to record founders. Founder is a vernacular term that simply means one who is instrumental in the origination of an organization (or other initiative). For all intents and purposes, if you look at how OpenAI got founded, Musk was one of the founders.

Just my opinion: To me, it sounds like Sam Altman wanted Elons name attached to the project in order to attract talent. Read the wired article I linked above. Fair game, thats an important part of getting the thing started. In return Elon got to embed some of his ideas (e.g. I'm pretty sure the Open bit of OpenAI was partially his influence, back in 2015 he talked a lot about the dangers of AI being developed behind closed doors). Maybe he wasnt very involved once it got started; that would hardly be suprising. But still, he was involved in the founding for very specific reasons.