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Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

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Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#121

Post by gwern »

odyssey7 wrote: post #65

I have to wonder, why is this criticism showing up now? Who would benefit from taking him down a peg at this current point in time, and how?

It takes time to report these things, you can't just bang it out overnight. In addition, breaking a preference falsification cascade can take a lot of hits: a lot of people didn't want to talk about Altman, but with every article in WSJ/NYT/WaPo revealing some more, that reluctance fades a little bit. That is how you go from a few months ago, there being nothing but a whisper here or there that Altman had been fired from YC as one of the crown jewel secrets of YC known to a handful of people, to now Paul Graham casually confirming it to the WSJ.

As for what the benefit is, the ongoing report is one benefit. If the law firm (named here for the first time, I believe) didn't know about, say, Sutskever's list of 20 incidents, well, they do now.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#122

Post by kevinventullo »

GCA10 wrote: post #60

I've seen variants of this in finance, where the strategy is called "outrunning your mistakes." There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation. Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming thei…

does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem?

I think this is akin to asking if anyone in the software engineering community has the patience and humility to try to solve the software bugs problem.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#123

Post by alternative_a »

CPLX wrote: post #17
gumballindie wrote: post #6

The more we learn about this person the more we understand how dubious he is. I am not entirely sure what the end game is for those protecting and promoting him. He’s clearly not steve jobs. Behaves and talks more like a cheap imitation.

His values are completely aligned with the ruling class. Billionaires need on the ground types like him to actually do stuff. It’s hard to find people who are young and ambitious and effective, and yet fundamentally and ruthlessly aligned with corporate hegemony. And I suspect he must be spectacularly good at flattery.

> [elite’s HR issues]

We share this thought.

My pet theory regarding the recruitment efforts of this class: two broad fronts, one to drive the herd and the other to pick candidates.

The first front permeates our head space in form of content in the full spectrum of the bandwidth of this class: entertainment, news, organizations. Here the message is insistently that “Only suckers play straight”, “crime pays”, “winners and losers”. This is a consistent message.

The second front is more selective and here I am speculating (unlike the former which one gets to experience first hand, whether one likes it or not.) Here I suspect a more ‘direct’ sales pitch is used, and likely references the former.

Imagine you are a bright young thing from ‘not money’ raised in that “cultural” environment just mentioned. Now you open your favorite “journal of record”. You read barely disguised lies, note how these lies lead designated demographics by the NOSE with them not even aware of this fact, and finally your mentor has a conversation with you:

“Do you really think that the general population, these same people we were discussing being led by the nose with lies, are actually capable of self-governance and should have a say in “important” matters?”

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#125

Post by Geisterde »

MicolashKyoka wrote: post #116
Geisterde wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could there be a more dangerous version of reality where we allow the government and a chosen monopoly to collude in controlling AI for the rest of society? Because that is precicely what he was/is attempting to do.

I may not personally like it, but it's the pragmatist thing to do if you're leading openai. The gov will eventually get involved, better to get in front of it. However, there won't be a monopoly or anything of the sort that will form, our society's institutions wouldn't be able to properly enforce it and it's too easy for weights to leak, too much alpha for people to not fight back against it. Not worried. The ai saf…

I appreciate your attitude around the infesability of monopolizing software, and agree with you on that and on how hysterical people are acting about AI.

I cant picture a case where charges need to be brought under a novel framework that couldnt be captured by existing laws. If you deploy a computer virus, thats a crime, if you hack someones bank account, thats a crime, if you slander someone, thats a crime.

Im personally not convinced that any of the public efforts made around AI safety have been honest. If these people were serious then like you say, they wouldnt be chasing evil scifi ai overlords. I can think of some wonderful use cases to counter things like AI generated fakes; I am actually uncomfortably suprised that every social media company hasnt added a banner below every picture that says whether scans indicate a picture was deepfaked, twitter could scan a picture when you post it and show what a variety of algorithms think. That would have a real shot at improving information asymmetry at the social level.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#126

Post by psswrd12345 »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #54

> “The senior leadership team was unanimous in asking for Sam’s return as CEO and for the board’s resignation, actions backed by an open letter signed by over 95% of our employees. The strong support from his team underscores that he is an effective CEO,” said an OpenAI spokeswoman. This is where I stopped reading. At the risk of sounding defensive of Sam Altman. If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him,…

> "If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support?"

Stock options and a carefully built cult of personality, my friend

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#127

Post by voxl »

kevinventullo wrote: post #122
GCA10 wrote: post #60

I've seen variants of this in finance, where the strategy is called "outrunning your mistakes." There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation. Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming thei…

does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? I think this is akin to asking if anyone in the software engineering community has the patience and humility to try to solve the software bugs problem.

So more expressive type systems? Rust has made entire classes of bugs impossible, and you can do even better in Idris or some other dependent type theory. People don't do it because it's expensive and they're not trained it.

No it never eliminated all bugs, but if we're conflating the two problems you don't need to eliminate all hallucinations either, you just need to make them very unlikely, or a consequence of your bad specifications.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#128

Post by voxl »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #54

> “The senior leadership team was unanimous in asking for Sam’s return as CEO and for the board’s resignation, actions backed by an open letter signed by over 95% of our employees. The strong support from his team underscores that he is an effective CEO,” said an OpenAI spokeswoman. This is where I stopped reading. At the risk of sounding defensive of Sam Altman. If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him,…

Many years ago I once tried to share a History channel documentary on the JFK assassination with a friend. They watched up until the first part, the documentary dramaticized the assassination and talked about how the shot seemed impossible based off the shape of the car.

See I had already watched this documentary in full, and knew that this was just a cliffhanger for the second part that explained the car was modified, making the seemingly impossible shot very possible. Yet, my friend said "See? That's enough evidence." and walked away.

I asked, "don't you want to hear the rest?" the response: "nope."

Your comment reminds me of this experience

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#129

Post by jstummbillig »

amazingman wrote: post #108
bmitc wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> said Chung, now managing general partner of Xfund, a venture-capital firm . Emphasis mine. I mean, that's just backs up my original question. These people will say anything to garner favor, perceived or otherwise. I've seen Altman speak. At what point should I expect to see a representative example of this focus and insight?

His keynote at this year's OpenAI DevDay is an example of his focus. Have you watched it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9mJuUkhUzk His pacing, clarity, and proficiency with the product are impressive; regardless of how one might feel about him.

But of course, as with these things, nobody needs to admit to anything and any claim can easily be rejected.

The more polarising the figure, the more polarising the assessment of anything concerning them. Disconnecting different facets of a figure is not our strong suite.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#130

Post by jokethrowaway »

asfgkadnhiok wrote: post #87
foobaw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're implying that you knew how to hire and identify smart architects and provided them the right vision to build a good building. There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic. Money can only get you so far.

That's extremely easy. There are awards and magazines and Wikipedia. Smart architects are smart because they're able to come up with the "right vision" all on their own. We know it's possible for someone with no technical ability to look like genius just by having lots of money. I knew people who believed Musk was going to bring about an AI revolution all on his own because of his very special brain, but his tenure a…

> but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101

Honest question: why? Just because your bubble denounces him and he's doing things differently than other big tech, in a way that upset developers / managers that doesn't mean he's automatically wrong.

Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great). Probably if we didn't have a board of do-nothing for years twitter could have turned into the Line of the west. Maybe it could have captured all the profits which ended up on patreon and onlyfans.

If it wasn't for his anti remote stance and general disregard for life-work balance I'd love to work for him. Finally, an organisation when things get done with few hard working people, and not hundreds of drones collecting a paycheck and slowing me down and complaining all the time.

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