Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal vendettas between the world's most powerful psychopaths playing out in the stock market while everyone else suffers does seem like the current meta. So it makes sense.
God why do people frame things in such extremes? Neither person is a psychopath. If anyone is closer to a psychopath it’s Altman, but he doesn’t completely fit the monicker.
Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
141–150 of 171 posts
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#142The thesis is as follows: OpenAI receives funds as a non-profit. Some of those funds are redirected to for profit ventures. Critically, the GM (Altman) of the nonprofit owns shares of the for-profit ventures, that OpenAI funds were redirected into. A regular company could and does invest in any company even when there's a conflict, as long as the conflict is disclosed and the Board votes in favor of it. There's no cr…
Doesn't Sam Altman famously not own OpenAI? His whole arrangement is so shady.
So to say that he owns no part of OpenAI is silly.
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
So a non-profit can absolute invest in or own a for-profit subsidary. This is extremely common. The idea is that the for-profit returns will flow back to the non-profit and remain dedicated to the non-profit mission. Where things get really shady and run the risk of IRS violations is when the leadership of the non-profit has a seperate for profit stake in the subsidary.
When your public position is that you don't own equity in the company it implies that you aren't making money off of it. However if you have all sorts of side deals through intermediaries and you are making money off the entity it looks quite bad.
I dont think it looks bad. The devil is always in the details: Were helion and reddit deals fair market value or self dealing?
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you complaining that government is not corrupt enough?
He's saying "hey, maybe stop donating to Republicans expecting them to help you out when in reality they will screw over anyone but themselves and especially don't donate to them when the GOP is aggressively homophobic and wants to get rid of your existence entirely"
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
and famously this executive doesn't over-reach to protect "its own"?
Your original comment implied that this is a signal that Sam’s influence over the admin hasn’t protected his interests, when that’s still to be seen. The protection racket could still very well benefit him if the SEC ends up taking the case and the admin then tries to interfere with SEC’s independence.
OpenAI and Brockman are getting scammed by this administration and the GOP. I just really hope tech remembers it next time they want to play this "both sides are bad" game come election time.
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like his tactic of talking to everyone individually to be able to tell each person exactly what they want to hear. I now use that one all the time.
Beware that there exist people who will cut you out of their lives—professional, personal, whatever—completely, likely with no warning, and possibly loudly, publicly, and with-receipts (if they’ve seen this kind of thing before or have thought through what your next steps will be after they cut you out) if they find out you do this. All it takes is for a few of them to start comparing notes behind your back. Shit goe…
This is one of the reasons that startups prefer the young, they often haven't been exposed to the grift and the manipulation. As a tech bro sociopath, I'd be wary of joining a startup with a mixture of ages, genders, experiences across the spectrum of ICs and management. They probably have experienced too much to be griftable in the same ways as an org stacked with young ICs. You also want to make sure that there are other people in the management chain that are more emotionally unstable. It takes much of the focus off of ones own pathologies.
Happy Hacking!
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#147The thesis is as follows: OpenAI receives funds as a non-profit. Some of those funds are redirected to for profit ventures. Critically, the GM (Altman) of the nonprofit owns shares of the for-profit ventures, that OpenAI funds were redirected into. A regular company could and does invest in any company even when there's a conflict, as long as the conflict is disclosed and the Board votes in favor of it. There's no cr…
Remember when Altman was going around saying he doesn't take a salary, he's just doing the job for the good of humanity? It kind of blew my mind how many people believed him. Even on HN, where much of the community knew something about his pre-OpenAI days, there were plenty of credulous posts defending him as some sort of altruist. I guess this is why we keep seeing transparent lies and scams from leading tech and bu…
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh sure, the trial is maybe 5% a Hail Mary and 95% about distracting and disrupting OpenAI. I read "behind this" to mean more-clandestine moves, e.g. planting stories, conducting and leaking oppo, amplifying negative media on X, et cetera .
It does seem like there is a ton of negative PR and sentiment on social media (including HN) about anything Altman and even Dario do. Like, way more than warranted. It looks more and more like a coordinated campaign, a la https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html Elon even explicitly threatened the OpenAI guys that they would be "the most hated" people on earth, and given what we've seen him do with Twitter, I strongly s…
It would be fair to argue that in a just world Elon would suffer more consequences for being more of a scumbag than Sam but we all know justice doesn't apply to the rich in the US (occasionally this seems untrue but only because other rich people are pissed off at the rich person and they want them tarred and feathered).
Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a more benign explanation for these things? Altman is undeniably famously cagey and political but despite most of the tech and non-tech worlds at this point seeing him as some kind of con artist, I still kind of want to try to believe he's not. No doubt some of OpenAI's founding principles like "stop + assist if a competitor gets to AGI first" are likely flying out the window, perhaps in part due to him and…
His own sister accused him of sexual assault. He was fired from his first startup. He was abruptly fired from ycombinator in shady circumstances. He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control. He took OpenAI from being a non-profit to a for-profit, with obvious benefits to whoever controls it. He was massively misleading about the capabilities of his product and pr…
He, at worst, finds him to have been (at some point) incompetent, which is very different from finding him immoral. Paul keeps replying to tweets to clarify this when people continue to misportray his stance.
"He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control." is the only thing you wrote which is plainly true and valid to state.
I am sure there may exist good, strong criticisms, but your argument is so tendentiously gish-gallopy that it will if anything just make people more likely to disbelieve his critics. (Not that I would do that, since that'd be just as fallacious.)
Why would OpenAI employees all still be happily working for him and publicly supporting him? Why is the company still so successful, and the leader? Why wouldn't most of them have left in droves to Anthropic or elsewhere, by now? Especially given most technical employees at OpenAI (justifiably) share the eschatological views of AI shared' by Anthropic staff and other TESCREALists, in which case they really really try to be careful about who will be responsible for potential future superintelligence. The board and some executives disliked and distrusted him but it's unclear many other people there did or do now. And I'm not just talking about the petition but the people who have continued working there for years afterwards.