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

newyorker.com

321–330 of 1001 posts

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

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

General LLM is what Apple is paying Google for.

I noticed that Apple speech to text has gotten pretty good lately. Is that because they’re paying Google? Not sure I use other AI features from Apple as I have my Siri turned off.

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

#322
“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice”

This statement rings true.

JL, PG has mentioned often, is his weapon to test the “people” integrity aspect of YC / Startups. It’s not lost on me both Altman and Thiel both associated with YC were useful short term only, highlighting how regular “character” evaluations are required at higher levels of responsibility.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Struck a nerve? No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in. I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus visible).

I'm sorry, we did what with the word "racist"?

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

#325

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

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

We should stop talking about potential problems or perpetrators, when we have talked about them “enough”?

That would be irrational.

We should give air time to other problems?

I think everyone agrees with that.

You have managed to distill a surprisingly pure vintage of false dichotomy, from a near Platonic varietal of whataboutism.

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

#326

> 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…

Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth. The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so…

I don't think it's all that hard to avoid working on anything shady. It's not as easy to avoid being associated with anything shady due to widespread cynicism and a tendency to treat tech companies with thousands of projects as a monolith.

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

#327
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

There may be a reason why Altman is talked about a lot. This article in particular surfaces real information and new perspectives we've not heard in this level of detail before on some pretty significant topics that will be impacting you, me, and pretty much everyone we know not only today but well into the future. You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too and that there are interesting perspectiv…

The New Yorker has given plenty of coverage about Anthropic in their past issues earlier this year.

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

#328

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

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

[flagged]

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

#329
post #196

Does the article ever actually answer the title question?

I think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Nevertheless, the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altma…

> the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself.

I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem is that it's impossible.

There isn't time or space to present all the information; the journalist has to filter. And filtering is never unbiased. Even the attempt to be "balanced" is a bias--see next item.

"Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". But what if the two sides really are unbalanced? What if there's a huge pile of information pointing one way, and a few items that might point the other way if you believe them--and then the journalist insists on only showing you a few items from the first pile, so that the presentation is "balanced"? You never actually get a real picture of the facts.

There's a story that I first encountered in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books, about two kids fighting over a piece of cake: Kid A wants all of it for himself, Kid B wants to split it equally. An adult comes along and says, "Why don't you compromise? Kid A gets three-quarters and Kid B gets one-quarter." To me, the author of this article comes off like that adult.

In any case, all that assumes that this article is supposed to be just straight reporting, no opinion. For which, see the next item.

> It can be debated whether the title should be such a question.

Yes, it certainly can. If this article is just supposed to be straight reporting--no editorializing--then that title is definitely out of place. That title is an editorial--and the article either needs to own that and state the conclusion it's trying to argue for, or it shouldn't have had that title in the first place.

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

#330

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

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

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