1/21/2024 0 Comments Toyota venture 2021![]() OpenAI announced the latest in a blog post last week: with three board members out, former Salesforce executive Bret Taylor and former U.S. It’s still unclear exactly how things will play out at OpenAI, as changes are still underway. “To be honest I had a close enough relationship with Sam that I figured there wasn’t the risk of something like this. In that profile, Khosla said he realized he’d erred when his firm invested without discussing or considering that the nonprofit board really oversaw the for-profit enterprise, not Altman. If Altman hadn’t returned to OpenAI, under threat of nearly all of its employees quitting in protest of Altman’s termination, VCs could have easily seen their shares of the company become worthless. In a profile of Khosla published on Friday, The Information specified that Khosla Ventures took a 5% stake in the AI developer in 2019, which is now worth billions of dollars with the pending tender offer (which, by the way, is still in the works, someone involved tells me). It’s remarkable that, just weeks ago, all of Khosla’s stake in OpenAI was on the line. “We stay with that conviction,” he said on Friday. “I made the largest bet by a factor of two of any initial investment I’ve made in 40 years,” Khosla said, noting it was because of his initial conviction in how AI would transform everything. ![]() In 2019, Khosla Ventures wrote a $50 million check into OpenAI, he said, though he notes it was “almost impossible to diligence” as OpenAI had such an unusual governance structure. The one question Khosla was asked about OpenAI he readily answered, laying out how big of a bet he made on the GPT creator as its very first VC investor. Khosla didn’t share all that much about the OpenAI saga on stage on Friday, which I attribute to a moderator who asked him all of one question about OpenAI and never brought up anything about Sam Altman over a 36-minute discussion. (If this newsletter makes it to you, Vinod, I’m still hoping we can set up a time to talk!) ![]() “I can’t talk about it,” he told me, though he declined someone’s offer to escort him away from me, allowed me to ride with him down the escalator, and told me to send him an email. I finally got a hold of him for a couple minutes as he slipped through the crowd, hoping I could get some kind of answer to the question that’s been on all of our minds the last two weeks: Had any new information come to light about why OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman in the first place?
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