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

newyorker.com

951–960 of 1001 posts

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

#951

Reading this makes me even happier to pay for Anthropic. Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out. " “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amod…

Amodei is another Musk/Altman wannabe with their RSF. That randomly changes from 2.0 to 3.0. Where is the research on fighting and identify AI slop?

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

#952
post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can go with the thesis that individuals need community control (boards, regulations, laws) in order to be accountable but is there some specific evidence that Amodei is the same? It seems like a "both sides" argument.

Community control typically doesn't work to constrain great men, a group has more weak points than an individual (look for example how easily Sam dismantled the OpenAI board decision by applying the right pressure). The greatest and often only check on power has always been competition or opposition by other great men.

Not great men. People with "perceived" high networth. Banks will fall over backwards to loan them money. See Chase and Musk. Let's not associate perceived networth with "great"

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

#953

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…

Frankly this is why all these big tech companies need to be broken down to pieces.

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

#955

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't expect an AI to know exactly what happens in every chapter of a book. Knowing the plot of Neuromancer isn't the same as being able to recite a chapter by chapter summary. I tried this Neuromancer query a few times and results greatly vary with each regeneration but "do not include spoilers" seems to make Gemuni give more spoilers, not less.

>>I wouldn't expect an AI to know exactly what happens in every chapter of a book. Cool. I did - and turns out it can do it, just not without giving me some spoilers first. >>vary with each regeneration but "do not include spoilers" seems to make Gemuni give more spoilers, not less. I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this then.

> and turns out it can do it

Not really- if you had examined the output closely you probably would have seen noticed it conflated chapter 13 and 14 or 14 and 15. Or you got very lucky on a generation. It definitely doesn't exactly know what happens in each chapter unless it has a reference to check.

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

#956
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great reporting. Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star behind all this that’s not centered on himself?

The piece is an interrogation of this very question, at great length and with some nuance. I think what it does most usefully is scrutinize an array of different answers to the question. My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he is identifying something of a true north star when he frames this around "winning." There are people in the story who talk about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opp…

"I'm a sophomore and I'm coming!"

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

#957
post #48

Gobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone's wondering. Fantastic reporting.

As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.

There is something disturbing about the idea that 8 hours must be spent by editors deliberating about each sentence in a piece like this. It's almost like you're reinforcing the idea of just how powerful this power-seeking human has become.

We're all here worried about calling the guy liar liar pants on fire, but maybe none of that matters to him as long as he comes away looking even more powerful? That's what he's so successful optimizing for.

How neo-medieval peasant of me to feel this awe - great piece. Insane world we live in.

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

#958

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cow milking tech i mean, in the end, cow-milking is the name of the game isnt it?

Yes if it played that game at the start. That's the name of a different game. OpenAI played the charity, coupled with a powerful altruistic card. It didn't say: we believe a more effective for-profit business shall start as a non-profit in this field, because it would yield innovation which we can then skim money off down the road. That would have been transparent. Not saying it was the intention at the start. But th…

  > But they flipped the game at some point.
yes, agree.

i guess my (too nuance maybe) point was: the system we live in is like water; the urge to swim with the big fish is overwhelming... it was gonna happen eventually at the level they are playing at.

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

#959

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many pa…

FYI, Opus 4.6 had no problem with your arbitrary "cognition" test:

Someone on HN claimed "This is why it [LLMs] can't do things like know how many parenthesis are balanced here ((((()))))) (you can test this), it doesn't have any kind of genuine cognition". So, how many parenthesis are balanced in that quoted text?

● The string from the quote is ((((()))))) — 5 opening parens and 6 closing parens.

  10 parentheses are balanced (5 matched pairs). There is 1 extra unmatched ).

  Walking through it with a stack:

  ( ( ( ( (  ) ) ) ) ) )
  1 2 3 4 5  4 3 2 1 0 -1  ← depth tracker
                ↑ balanced    ↑ unmatched
The depth goes negative on the last ), meaning it has no matching (.

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

#960

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder exactly what he was doing to be considered a snake. I know he was working on other things, but what else was going on?

Read the article?

No. I figured it was almost completely if not completely about OpenAI. These things tend to be quite lengthy and I do not have an hour to devote to reading things that don’t directly impact me or my family of profession these days.
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