Draft v3 · · What changed
Sam Altman
Altman is the only major lab CEO whose own board fired him for not being candid and whose industry brought him back within five days because no governance arrangement could survive the loss of him; the institution has since restructured itself around the discovery that the constraint did not exist.
Positions
What $1.4 trillion is supposed to buy
Altman has staked OpenAI on four propositions: compute, capability, cost and demand. Since January 2025 the science has held and the deals have grown harder; the case rests on revenue closing the loop by 2028.
What "we know how to build AGI" is meant to mean
Altman's January 2025 claim that OpenAI knows how to build AGI as traditionally understood asserts a technical position on a definition the field has never agreed on, and it underwrites the financing built around it.
Same belief, different bet
Altman and Amodei agree that scaling continues to work; their disagreement is institutional, and Altman's 2025 conversion to a public benefit corporation partly conceded the argument over structure to his closest…
What the board said and what happened next
The five-day removal and restoration of Sam Altman in November 2023 forced every interested party to choose between governance and execution, and the structural answer was that there was no second OpenAI to defect to.
·Issue 1 · The Scaling Bet
deslop.media editorial. Issue 1, Draft v3, first published October 10, 2026. Reporting current through October 2026. Use the flags on this page to report an error or a disagreement. Changes to the issue are listed on the changes page.
Part of Issue 1 · The Scaling Bet