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

newyorker.com

181–190 of 1001 posts

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

#181

> 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 im…

Sociopaths don't have much going for them in life other than winning status games.

Or, some fraction of otherwise good/normal people who “win” are turned into sociopaths by the power and sycophancy.

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

#182
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

I think the comment was out of legitimate interest rather than weighing one against the other

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

#183
post #130

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.

OpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.

Around the same revenue due to Anthropics strong enterprise strategy

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.

Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.

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

#189

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.

And OpenAI's influence is hugely exaggerated compared to, say, Google.

Yes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-founders, for example.

All the downsides without much upside...

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