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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?

#131

Post by edbaskerville »

arionhardison wrote: post #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…

Can you give more details?

It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.

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

#132

Post by 0x3f »

swingboy wrote: post #123

It's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.

It's because they're really good at the kind of busywork the average white collar job requires. Most people are out there writing documents and making presentations. Only when you use them for actual complexity does the shortfall become clear.

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

#133

Post by lovich »

dang wrote: post #100
randycupertino wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure whether you meant this about moderator interventions or not, but our actual practice is the opposite: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN moderation from the beginning. See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... .

I don’t think the poster you responded to was claiming that moderators directly did this. The flagging system is open to bias from the community at large and certain types of articles(ex. Anything critical of the current admin) get a bunch of real users organically flagging them.

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

#134

Post by estearum »

ninjahawk1 wrote: post #125

OpenAI is like #3 or #4 of the AI companies right now in terms of power, and last place in the court of public opinion. I’d be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good graces of the public and having access to all of our computers indirectly with Claude Code.

makes sense if you think the point of journalism is just to take everyone down a notch instead of... um... informing the public of bad actors

"the local drug-dealing pimp is so passe, we need to investigate the most upstanding members of the community just to be sure" is a frankly insane strategy

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

#135

Post by rhlannx »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

I have the feeling that if you write an article in that style, the subject of the story becomes the hero even if you insert a couple of negatives. In the same manner that Michael Corleone becomes the hero of The Godfather.

I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted.

On the positive side, the Kushner ad Abu Dhabi involvements (and threats from Kushner) deserve a wider audience.

My personal opinion is that "who should control AI" is the wrong question. In the current state, it is an IP laundering device and I wonder why publications fall silent on this. For example, the NYT has abandoned their crown witness Suchir Balaji who literally perished for his convictions (murder or not).

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

#136

Post by bijowo1676 »

This article is just another typical New Yorker fluff piece that tries to look deep but misses the actual point.

The biggest flaw is that it spends way too much time on high-school level drama and "he-said-she-said" gossip about Sam Altman’s personal life instead of focusing on the actual technical and corporate capture of OpenAI.

The author treats the "nonprofit mission" like some holy quest that was "betrayed," when anyone with a brain in tech saw the Microsoft deal as the moment the original vision died. Instead of a hard-hitting look at how compute-monopolies are actually forming (MSFT AMZN NVDA and circular debt dealing inflating the AI bubble that could crash the economy), we get 5,000 words of hand-wringing over whether Sam is a "nice guy" or a "liar."

Who cares???????

The board failed because they had no real leverage against billions of dollars, not because they didn't write enough Slack messages. It's a long-winded way of saying "Silicon Valley has internal politics," which isn't news to anyone here.

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

#139

Post by ergocoder »

I wonder if Sam might abandon the ship soon. Other co-founders already did.

The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't. If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already.

This is probably one of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with relatively low reward.

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