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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

newyorker.com

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#61

Seems this got buried from the front page very quickly

There is dwindling space for sincere independent accountability reporting on big tech like this to a) be created, since it's incredibly resource-intensive and so many resources flow from Silicon Valley, and b) actually reach people, since more platforms are now owned or otherwise influenced by interested parties. Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting in your communities, and subscribe to inve…

You can see the vote history here[1]. It's always hard to know exactly why something gets buried. I was a little sad to see the story down-ranked when I saw that you were here in the comments.

But the discussion is generally pretty low quality with these sort of posts. People react without having read the story, or with whatever was on their mind already, or are insubstantive, or simply low effort. I don't think you'll lose k-factor not having a bigger post here.

Sometimes if you talk to the mods, they'll let you know their perspective. I generally find they're correct that people are much better at contributing/disseminating new knowledge to the world on more technical topics here.

[1]: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47659135

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#63
post #48

Gobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone's wondering. Fantastic reporting.

As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.

One of the decidedly eerier parts of this story as you keep reading are all the gaps between what people are saying about Altman, and what they clearly want to say about Altman but can't.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#65
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a] This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world. OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI ra…

He’s replying on this twitter thread - perhaps someone with an account can ask there and link his comment here? https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m

Here is the actual link, not a link to some weird third-party site that can't be trusted.

https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#67

Why is the story so downranked? Folks at HackerNews have something to do with it ?

HN generally downvotes and/or flags anything that paints ycombinator in a bad light. As Altman was president of yc from 2014 to 2019 that could be why this is getting downvoted.

Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#69
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated? Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It…

All fair points on trauma and memory. As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman's partners and what we found and didn't is as described.

Thanks for the response! Cheers just fully reread the piece and appreciate your reporting.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#70
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a] This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world. OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI ra…

Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response. The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.

Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much about that.

I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors.

If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love to hear about it.

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