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

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

#111

Am I the only one that feels like Claude is clearly winning code generation, and Gemini in general LLM? I just don’t feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning any of the AI battles. Therefore, I feel like “Sam Altman may control our future” is a far stretch.

how is gemini winning in general llm. what is general llm .

General LLM is what Apple is paying Google for.

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

#112
Hi @ronanfarrow — I have only had one interaction with Sam Altman in person, and I was advised to keep it to myself. I know this crowd may not care, but Altman is absolutely terrified of Black people — not in any contextual sense, but in a visceral, instinctive way. For someone who, as you put it, "controls our future," this should matter.

FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts hiring and other decisions at OpenAI.

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

#113

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

Hi Ronan, I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate. However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in. I'm sure you…

You could buy a physical copy (and this isn't meant to sound sarcastic).

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

#114

Am I the only one that feels like Claude is clearly winning code generation, and Gemini in general LLM? I just don’t feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning any of the AI battles. Therefore, I feel like “Sam Altman may control our future” is a far stretch.

Well I just canceled my Claude Pro subscription because of the mysterious limits that I don't experience with codex, even after paying for "extra usage". If Anthropic can't figure out their capacity problems they are in trouble.

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

#115
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a better product. No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.

Who is “us”? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex for its math capabilities but when it comes to general frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills library. Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems

I'm in that camp -- I have the max-tier subscription to pretty much all the services, and for now Codex seems to win. Primarily because 1) long horizon development tasks are much more reliable with codex, and 2) OpenAI is far more generous with the token limits.

Gemini seems to be the worst of the three, and some open-weight models are not too bad (like Kimi k2.5). Cursor is still pretty good, and copilot just really really sucks.

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

#116
This anecdote is so absurd it sounds like satire. This is the guy with the $23M mansion?

> Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied.

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

#117
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Throughout my life, what colleagues/friends are unwilling to remark plainly on has been the most telling factor of someone’s character to me.

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

#118

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and others continue to do journalism like this? (including commenting on HN?)

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

#119
post #51

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

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…

[flagged]

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

#120
>"Sam Altman may control our future"

TLDR but just the heading is already ugly. No single person no matter how nice they're should be able to control our future. Power corrupts, what fucking trust. We are supposed to be democratic society (well looking at what is going on around this is becoming laughable)

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