Altman Returns to YC to Invest Tokens in Exchange for Equity: On the Surface, a Collusion of the Ecosystem; in Reality, a Dimensionality-Reduction “Harvesting” Scheme Targeting Early-Stage Venture Capital

AIMPACT news. On May 20 (UTC+8), according to Beating monitoring, major large-model giants are directly reaping the most upstream AI ecosystem by dumping resources. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, appearing at a Y Combinator event as the “former head,” announced that he would provide each YC incubation project in this batch with a $2 million OpenAI Token allocation, using it directly to exchange for early equity in these startups. This indiscriminate investment has been viewed by outsiders as a historical reenactment of Yuri Milner’s universal benefit investment in 2011, sending shockwaves through the venture capital community. For YC, this collaboration means that startups no longer need to use precious $500,000 in cash to pay their API bills. This kind of backdoor “capital release” directly boosts the teams’ survival rates, allowing YC’s early-held equity to realize value with ease.

But beneath the appearance of a win-win outcome, this is essentially OpenAI’s dimensional-reduction predatory takeover of the early-stage venture capital circle. OpenAI is leveraging its computing power hegemony to exchange virtual tokens with extremely low marginal cost for extremely scarce high-quality startup equity. When computing power is fully “fiat currency–fied,” this disguised “Token minting tax” not only dramatically reduces startups’ cash needs from traditional venture capital, but also fundamentally and physically blocks Anthropic—or the open-source ecosystem—from spreading into next-generation software.

(Source: BlockBeats)