AI大佬

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman received a modest $76,001 in compensation last year, up slightly from $73,546 in 2022, a newly released tax filing shows.

Altman, who is worth at least $2 billion, has previously said he gets paid “whatever the minimum for health insurance is.” He has also repeatedly said he does not own equity in OpenAI. However, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup has discussed giving him a stake as part of a possible shift to becoming a for-profit business, Bloomberg reported.

Altman’s paycheck was included in a filing that US-based nonprofits are required to submit annually to the Internal Revenue Service. The 2023 disclosure covers a tumultuous period for OpenAI and the nonprofit that oversees it. The year started with the skyrocketing popularity of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and ended with Altman’s brief ouster after clashing with the board.

OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who played a key role in firing Altman and left the company in May, received $322,201 in 2023, making him one of the highest paid officers listed on the form. Emmett Shear, the co-founder of Twitch who served as interim CEO during Altman’s ouster, was paid $3,720, according to the filing. Though Shear’s tenure appeared to last for about three days, the filing said he was paid from Nov. 19 to Nov. 29, which would be $338.18 per day, including weekends.

The total compensation could be much higher for some executives, however. The tax filing does not include any equity-based compensation that OpenAI’s named officers may have received as the company’s valuation has soared. It also doesn’t disclose any outside investment from venture capitalists into OpenAI’s for-profit entities.

There is only limited visibility into OpenAI’s financials given the lag in reporting and the number of companies that are related to its business. The nonprofit lists several partnership companies and related entities, including Aestas LLC, which oversees employee and investor equity.

According to the filing, OpenAI’s nonprofit received $5 million in public contributions in 2023, but the source of the funding wasn’t disclosed. The nonprofit ended 2023 with net assets of more than $21 million — a tiny sum compared to the $6.6 billion the company raised in October to support its efforts to keep building powerful AI products.

Last year, OpenAI expanded its charitable giving beyond universal basic income projects linked to Altman, according to the filing. It funded an ethics and journalism grant at New York University as well as research into AI economic opportunity through Atlanta-based nonprofit Operation Hope.

OpenAI also provided financial support for experiments “in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow,” the company said. The grants went to US institutions such as Harvard College, the University of Washington and the University of Michigan, along with a recipient in East Asia.

“As part of our charter, we’re committed to collaborating globally with research and policy institutions to address AGI’s challenges, and increased grants support this mission,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement.

In China, one of the biggest names in tech is Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwan native and a bestselling author who used to head Google’s operations in the country. When Lee founded an artificial intelligence startup called 01.AI in Beijing in March last year, Chinese investors including Alibaba Group were so eager to back him that the startup became a unicorn just eight months later.

But in the U.S., where Lee is also well known, his success with AI in China has at times proven to be more of a liability than an asset. Lee has also helped create Rhymes AI, an AI startup developing models and apps that target English-speaking users in the U.S. and elsewhere. But when the Singapore-registered startup began fundraising earlier this year, some U.S. investors passed on the pitch partly due to their questions about Rhymes’ relationship with 01.AI, one of China’s major developers of AI foundation models, said three of these investors.

Rhymes over the last few months lowered its fundraising target to $100 million from $300 million, according to a person close to the company. It has received some investment offers from Asia-based investors.

U.S. investors’ concerns epitomize the challenges facing tech leaders, entrepreneurs and investors who straddle both sides of the Pacific, as the world’s two largest economies head toward a collision course. These issues extend to AI startups operating in the U.S., where early backing from a Chinese VC firm or other potential links to China can complicate their future fundraising or business partnerships, U.S. venture capitalists said.

Rhymes, for instance, operates as a separate company from 01.AI: It has a U.S. subsidiary and its own research and development team in the U.S. and Singapore, the person close to the company said. But its origins have contributed to the perception that the two are intertwined. Rhymes was started and backed by Lee’s venture capital firm, Sinovation Ventures. And Lee, who is CEO and chair of China’s 01.AI, has made fundraising pitches for Rhymes in the U.S.

The simmering geopolitical tensions have prompted tech companies and investors to make fundamental changes to their global operations.

Apple has been diversifying its supply chain outside China. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest chipmaker, is building new plants in Arizona and stopped expanding its factories in China. Venture firms Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital in the past year have broken up their U.S. and China operations.

And HeyGen and OpusClip, two California-based AI application startups whose earliest backers were from China, earlier this year removed Chinese investors from their boards and relocated their China-based engineering teams to North America.

As recently as a year ago, Lee, who served as the head of Google’s China business from 2005 to 2009—before Google withdrew its search engine business from the country in 2010—appeared to have chosen to focus on China and forgo opportunities in the U.S. In 2021, Sinovation Ventures sold its U.S. portfolio, consisting of about 30 startups, to a San Francisco Bay Area–based venture capital firm.

Lee previously said it would be hard for 01.AI to expand into the U.S. In an interview with The Information late last year, Lee said: “If we wanted to enter the U.S. market, while there is no regulation that says we can’t, I don’t think we will get a lot of business because of the current—in my opinion unfair—sentiment about Chinese software.”

But that thinking didn’t hold 01.AI back. The company earlier this year started making its Yi-Large AI model available in the U.S. through Fireworks AI, a U.S. startup that helps developers run various AI models, as well as Nvidia Inference Microservices, which gives enterprise customers access to AI models.

Two Intertwined Startups

Lee’s Sinovation Ventures launched the predecessor of Rhymes in spring 2023. Then called In.AI, it began hiring researchers and engineers in the U.S. and Singapore. In the early days, when the startup hadn’t yet figured out the kinds of applications and models it would develop, some of its employees worked on R&D projects with China-based 01.AI. Then, as In.AI readied its model for training, a process that involves the laborious process of cleaning up and labeling data, it used some of the same outsourced Chinese contractors 01.AI relied on.

Such early collaborations soon stopped as the Singapore-registered startup began to focus on the development of its own AI models and applications for markets outside China, according to the person. Its R&D team started developing open-source AI models as well as an AI search app that eventually became BeaGo, the person said.

Earlier this year, In.AI began to pitch investors, sometimes helped by Lee, whose presentations highlighted the advances 01.AI in China had made, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Though it hadn’t used any foundation models from 01.AI, said the person close to the startup, the distinction between the two companies wasn’t clear to potential investors. Venture capitalists who passed on it were worried about whether In.AI was sharing its underlying foundation models, employees and revenue with China-based 01.AI.

Such worries reflected U.S. investors’ concern that any ties between a U.S. startup and China could later attract extra scrutiny from the startup’s potential customers, future investors or regulators.

This summer, the startup changed its name from In.AI to Rhymes to avoid the perception it was an Indian AI company. Two months ago, Rhymes made its AI search app BeaGo available for downloads, in a potential challenge to Perplexity and OpenAI’s SearchGPT.

Lee has remained a big booster of BeaGo. He posted several times about the app to his 1.4 million followers on X and more than 870,000 followers on LinkedIn. In September, he wrote a LinkedIn post calling on everyone to download BeaGo and give it a try. “Don’t wait for SearchGPT! Try BeaGo,” he said in the post.

Crazy https://t.co/HRi5VOg0pK

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2024

The excess government spending is what causes inflation!

ALL government spending is taxation. This is a very important concept to appreciate.

It is either direct taxation, like income tax, or indirect via inflation due to increasing the money supply. https://t.co/ypG9hm940Z

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2024