Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

blog.samaltman.com

371–380 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#371

[flagged]

> Violence like this is not the answer. I know people pretty reflexively downvote questioning this, but I question this. I think some people are afraid that even asking this moral question is somehow inciting violence. I think it's quite believable that the possibility of force is actually essential to keeping institutions in-line. Certainly a lot of civil rights progress was a lot less peaceful than I was taught in…

That's certainly the implied threat when people show up with AR-15's in the Idaho statehouse. Yes it's legal. But what is the point? This is ruby red Idaho.

I've always said when peaceniks start to carry weapons, it's time to worry. Alex Pretti didn't pull his gun, but still got shot. At what point will some escalation tactic end up in a gun fight between the local police and ICE?

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#374

[flagged]

It is not complicated.

Because of the valuations of Open AI and Anthropic, Sam Altman may be credited with one of the all-time most damaging brand decisions when he got in bed with Trump’s department of war crimes.

This should have been SO OBVIOUS. Attempts to paper over the damage with a $100 billion dollar round will crumble after the IPO. Poor decisions generate poor options, and the whole industry smells his desperation.

Decisions at the highest level are indistinguishable from responsibility. All Sam accomplished was showing the world he is structurally unfit for moral leadership.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#375

It's never OK to physically attack someone like this. Full stop. Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.

If only that sentiment was reciprocal! When the job losses hit in earnest and the vague handwaving about making it right all inevitably turns out to be hollow, those on top will be exceedingly comfortable using violence to keep the underclass in line. It has happened before and it will happen again.

Exactly this

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#376

[flagged]

> Violence like this is not the answer. I know people pretty reflexively downvote questioning this, but I question this. I think some people are afraid that even asking this moral question is somehow inciting violence. I think it's quite believable that the possibility of force is actually essential to keeping institutions in-line. Certainly a lot of civil rights progress was a lot less peaceful than I was taught in…

Violence is not the answer if and only if there are non-violent ways to achieve necessary goals.

We seem to go through a cycle where we set up systems that provide non-violent ways of resolving issues, then people get annoyed with the outcomes and break down those systems. They hope that it means they'll always get what they want, but what it actually does is make it so that violence is the only way for others to get what they want.

Like organized labor. We seem to be in a cycle where strong labor organization is seen as inefficient or harmful to business, and it's being suppressed. The people suppressing it seem to think that the end state will be low wages and desperate workers. They've forgotten that collective bargaining didn't spring up from nothing, it's the nicer alternative to descending on the boss's mansion with torches and pitchforks.

All that Civil Rights violence you mention was because those in power did not provide any non-violent way to achieve it. Suppressing votes and legalizing oppression only works up to a point. Eventually people will take by force what they've been denied by law.

Or as JFK said it better than I can: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

The corollary: when peaceful revolution has been made impossible, violent revolution is the answer.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of the open weight models from smaller labs exist if they can't distill from the SoTA models that are throwing billions of dollars of compute into pretraining?

Does it matter? The frontier models stole the whole internet, then the second-level models stole from them… It’s all theft.

Hard agree.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic in particular does this masterfully, you’d think they’d invented Skynet by the way they hand-wring. As always what matters are actions and evidence, not talk.

When a model can tell funny jokes or write good poetry, that's when I'll be concerned.

I mean, I'm sure they can tell you good jokes... they just won't be _new_ jokes.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#379

Historically, was it always so common for powerful or famous people to seem to purposefully garner hatred like he, and others, have been for the past decade? To speak in a petty, self-important, "trolling" manner, to a very broad audience? To embrace traits that are intrinsically negative? Or are we living in a rare time?

We are in a fact still in the tail end of a uniquely measured and peaceful time.

> in the tail end

This implies you have knowledge of future events, which means you could make a lot of money grifting on Polymarket

Post reply on HN