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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?

#161

Post by gambiting »

jader201 wrote: post #103

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.

>>and Gemini in general LLM?

You might be. Or at least I feel like Gemini is actually dumber than a house of bricks - I have multiple examples, just from last week, where following its advice would have lead to damage to equipment and could have hurt someone. That's just trying to work on an electronics project and askin Gemini for advice based on pictures and schematics - it just confidently states stuff that is 100000% bullshit, and I'm so glad that I have at least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would have easily hurt myself.

It's somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me every week, but it just doesn't follow instructions and keeps repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now, like it's some kind of giant joke that all these companies are playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that don't seem that intelligent.

I also use claude at work, and for C++ programming it behaves like someone who read a C++ book once and knows all the keywords, but has never actually written anything in C++ - the code it produces is barely usable, and only in very very small portions.

Edit: I just remembered another one that made me incredibly angry. I've been reading the Neuromancer on and off, and I got back into it, but to remind myself of the plot I asked Gemini to summarise the plot only up to chapter 14, and I specifically included the instruction that it should double check it's not spoiling anything from the rest of the book. Lo and behold, it just printed out the summary of the ending and how the characters actions up to chapter 14 relate to it. And that was in the "Pro" setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real life person did that I'd stop being friends with them, but somehow I'm paying money for this. Maybe I'm the clown here.

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

#162

Post by giwook »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

Any plans to tackle any of the other folks who might be mentioned in the same sentence as Altman, like Darius Amodei?

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

#163

Post by xg15 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #87
game_the0ry wrote: post #75

For those curious about how sama got to where he got and stayed on top for so long, I recommend you read the book: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting. Some concepts from the book: > Core trait: The defining characteristic…

I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have a good definition for. We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they're in that third category we haven't named, where they're very good at manipulating people, but also can feel conscience, guilt, remorse, etc, perhaps just muted or easier to justify against. E.g. if you think you're do…

That's not a third category, that's just a sociopath as seen by themself.

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

#164

Post by steve_adams_86 »

> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.”

I can't imagine having such uninspired thoughts and actually writing them down while in a role of such diverse and worthwhile opportunities. I'd like to ask "how the hell do these people find themselves in these positions", but I think the answer is literally what he wrote in his diary. What a boring answer. We need to filter these people out at every turn, but instead they're elevated to the highest peaks of power.

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

#165

Post by 0x3f »

ergocoder wrote: post #139

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.

But nobody is going to just gift him the same valuation on the next company. It's not like his execution is OpenAI's moat right now. So where would he be going that's a better deal for him?

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

#166

Post by morleytj »

Wow, this is an incredibly detailed piece. Really in depth reporting and the kind of detailed investigation we need more of on important topics like this.

> "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence."

This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace crosses my face at the thought of these sort of Marvel references and I'm not entirely sure why.

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

#167

Post by arionhardison »

edbaskerville wrote: post #131
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.

Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things.

1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim.

2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer.

3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs

I was working for a company called NationBuilder and I had the opportunity to go on a work trip. Outside of a talk he had just given I was waiting for my ride and I looked over like...damn thats the speaker. I wanted to say Hi; he damn near flagged down the police. I apologized and just decided to move on.

Note: It was in Reno, and no I don't want to go into details; the others are not hard to find because I happened upon them via blog posts so i'm sure if someone with the accumen of RF wants to know, he will find.

I have heard similar stores from several people in the years since. I AM NOT CALLING THIS PERSON RACIST. I am saying; he is observably scared of black people and that is not someone I want making descions about how the world moves foward.

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

#169

Post by dugidugout »

devmor wrote: post #117
kmfrk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critical element to their broader character.

Perhaps you mean to distinguish social groups without much intimacy? To which I'm sure we could provide some convincing cases, but this seems like a silly heuristic generally.

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

#170

Post by mathisfun123 »

giwook wrote: post #162
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

Any plans to tackle any of the other folks who might be mentioned in the same sentence as Altman, like Darius Amodei?

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