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

newyorker.com

231–240 of 1001 posts

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

#231

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

Damn, just wanted to say reporters are scary... The amount of detail here is huge. You think of hackers as the ones good at doxing... Nah, its reporters.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, I actively use both and usually find it to be a toss up which one performs better at a given task. I generally find Claude to be better with complex tool calls and Codex to be better at reviewing code, but otherwise don't see a significant difference.

Any difference in performance on mobile development?

For that I'm not so sure. I tried both early 2025 and was disappointed in their ability to deal with a TCA based app (iOS) and Jetpack compose stuff on Android, but I assume Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 are much better.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Whereas X can be trusted?

Yes? It's the data source, not a third-party. How is this even a question?

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

#236
post #188

Great piece. And a good excuse to read up on the use of diaeresis in English (eg. coördination, reëlection) to distinguish repeated vowels - I hadn't seen the New Yorker's usage before.

It isn’t for all repeated vowels; only for when the 2 vowels don’t make a single sound. So “chicken coop” wouldn’t have a dieresis

It would if the chickens formed a business structure that was owned and democratically controlled by its member-owners.

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

#237

I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of…

> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning'

If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".

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

#238

> 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…

it is disappointing, but is it shocking that people most driven by gaining money/power are the ones the most successful at achieving it?

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

#239
I found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need humans any more.

Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.

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

#240
post #213

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.

IMHO, nobody is remotely worth $1B, period. The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows that the system is flawed. The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is very flawed. We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their money.

Well, redistributing their money is (in some cases disingenuously) exactly how they are able to pitch investors. "Sure, value my company at $10B and my shares make me $2B, but we're alllllll gonna make money when hit AGI!!!" That kind of thing.
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