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Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

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Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#481

Post by jokethrowaway »

loeg wrote: post #461
nerbert wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being the best in the world to deal with a situation is a neutral statement. Putin is the best in the world to deal with the situation he’s in right now, if you need a negative angle on this.

> Putin is the best in the world to deal with the situation he’s in right now, if you need a negative angle on this. Probably not true? It seems like Russia could use another Yeltsin (or Gorbachev) more than Putin for its current situation.

I think they spent decades growing their economy and preparing to be independent of the west and now our sanctions are useless.

It feels like this situation is exactly what they want (and likely an historical inflection point, where we pit east vs west again). Dropping the cold war was needed because they had no resources (surprise, socialism doesn't work!).

I'm waiting for Taiwan next and then I'd say we are completely *** (especially looking at our reliance on the east for manufacturing / energy and how useless our governments are).

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#482

Post by seanthemon »

saiya-jin wrote: post #139
seanthemon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have evidence to back this up?

I don't think its necessary to prove anything he says, the keyword is 'could'. We don't know, and people who actually do don't spill it on HN just because we would like them to. These are generic statements about cult-like leaders, Musk is a prime example. Its hard won affection, not just smooth BS, we here all know that. That being said, people generally don't change, just situations (barring some catastrophic accid…

"OpenAI is more religion than company" sounds like a factual statement to me.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#483

Post by fredgrott »

My read not knowing PG and only having dealt with Sam once is that the firing was to push Sam into AI which he already was involved with before the firing...a GaryVee mercy firing to be sure...

BTW, Sam was wrong about GPS-powered dating at Loopt. He was not wrong about pushing teleco's to free up GPS instead of hidding behind some wall of forbidden access.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#484

Post by jzb »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #469
QuadrupleA wrote: post #376

From Paul Graham's Twitter, three days ago: "No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation." Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back." Also from a sibling comment: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg…

I sometimes think that at this level of the game everyone hates everyone else and its all politics. You don't "come out" for or against anyone publicly, you leave all of that under cover. It makes knowing who your friends and enemies are more difficult and it restricts your ability to maneuver. Another quote from my grandfather was "Mutual respect does not require that you like someone."

I'm sure there's some genuine friendships, but it's always interesting to see what people say publicly vs. privately. Also fair to say that there are people I've worked with that I did not, at the time, appreciate but grew to appreciate later on.

Years ago I was at an event talking to a colleague who was absolutely bashing someone (with good reason) and then another colleague walked up. Same person came up and my first colleague changed tone to "yeah, so-and-so is an interesting character."

Because I knew that the other colleague also hated the person, I called him on it. I wonder, though, how often that dynamic plays out where nobody will voice a negative opinion publicly - so people slide by without being called on behavior that shouldn't get ignored.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#485

Post by colecut »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #469
QuadrupleA wrote: post #376

From Paul Graham's Twitter, three days ago: "No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation." Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back." Also from a sibling comment: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg…

I sometimes think that at this level of the game everyone hates everyone else and its all politics. You don't "come out" for or against anyone publicly, you leave all of that under cover. It makes knowing who your friends and enemies are more difficult and it restricts your ability to maneuver. Another quote from my grandfather was "Mutual respect does not require that you like someone."

The comment you are responding to has quotes of people definitely coming out "for" Sam.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#486

Post by haltist »

personjerry wrote: post #474
QuadrupleA wrote: post #376

From Paul Graham's Twitter, three days ago: "No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation." Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back." Also from a sibling comment: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg…

Doesn't this show a vested interest from pg and jessica in OpenAI? So it's hard for them to say anything negative.

As a matter of good policy they wouldn't publicly denounce anyone that was associated with YC.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#487

Post by Cacti »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #266

CEOs are professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft, they use their communications to achieve an end, expressing their inner selves is not the point. You might know a great kind person who is a car salesman, when they are at work a good one comes off as genuine and friendly, the things they're saying include many truths, but their words and actions are primarily designed to sell cars.…

Good CEOs are good communicators. Most CEOs, like literally any other profession, are not. People like Jobs are exceptions, and for every one of them there are a hundred shitty CEOs who are neither talented nor intelligent, even among the companies that are still alive, but they don’t get discussed here because this is a site about making money first, and tech second, and the crowd here doesn’t like hearing it’s all bullshit. For every Apple there are a hundred Shitty Integrated, Inc. companies that no one talks about, and every one has a CEO.

There are no qualifications to be a CEO, ultimately, except the board happens to want you as CEO.

It’s just a title.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#488

Post by epicureanideal »

loeg wrote: post #461
nerbert wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being the best in the world to deal with a situation is a neutral statement. Putin is the best in the world to deal with the situation he’s in right now, if you need a negative angle on this.

> Putin is the best in the world to deal with the situation he’s in right now, if you need a negative angle on this. Probably not true? It seems like Russia could use another Yeltsin (or Gorbachev) more than Putin for its current situation.

I don’t think most Russians would agree that either of the other gentlemen would be preferable. The 80s and 90s were not a time of great happiness, prosperity, calm, and order.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#489

Post by theschmed »

twoodfin wrote: post #431
greatNespresso wrote: post #270

It came as a surprise for me to learn that PG fired Sam. It's the first time that I read this actually, and if that's true, I find it kind of mysterious that it remained a secret for so long. Or maybe I missed the news somehow but I could not find any other mention of that event on Google.

Weird: The most relevant hn post on Altman’s departure from YC is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342184 But despite comments to the effect that the YC post indicated Sam’s departure, it doesn’t seem to say anything about it right now?

Nor in 2022 when it was first archived by Wayback (unless archives from previous have been removed)

https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.ycom...

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#490

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

""Ninety plus percent of the employees of OpenAI are saying they would be willing to move to Microsoft because they feel Sam's been mistreated by a rogue board of directors," said Ron Conway, a prominent venture capitalist who became friendly with Altman shortly after he founded Loopt, a location-based social networking start-up, in 2005. "I've never seen this kind of loyalty anywhere.""

Perhaps this looks like "loyalty" when viewed with the narrow mindset of Silicon Valley and so-called "tech" venture capitalism. But it also looks like disloyalty to OpenAI and its stated mission when viewed more broadly.

"A former OpenAI employee, machine learning researcher Geoffrey Irving, who now works at competitor Google DeepMind, wrote that he was disinclined to support Altman after working for him for two years. "1. He was always nice to me. 2. He lied to me on various occasions 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons)," Irving posted Monday on X."

One could see similarities with the way so-called "tech" companies treat computer users.

It's no surprise people working for so-called "tech" companies are trying to hide behind labels such as "Effective Altruism". These are not altruistic people. They need a cover.

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