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

newyorker.com

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

#151

Post by aduffy »

0x3f wrote: post #130
ninjahawk1 wrote: post #125

OpenAI is like #3 or #4 of the AI companies right now in terms of power, and last place in the court of public opinion. I’d be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good graces of the public and having access to all of our computers indirectly with Claude Code.

OpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.

I'm not sure how much of that converts to revenue. If it's free plan users, that's just cost. You can say what you want about "creating a training data moat" but that doesn't seem like it's prevented the other labs from putting out excellent models.

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

#153

Post by pharos92 »

We focus these critiques far too much on the face rather than the underlying mechanics. Just like in politics, we critique the personality/politician yet the underlying system architecture evades it.

Sam Altman clearly has a long history of nefarious activity. But the underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and human freedom persists with or without his presence.

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

#154

Post by jzymbaluk »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

Hi Ronan, thanks for the article and for answering questions.

My question is, how do you know when an enormous project like this, conducted over an 18-month time span is "done"? I assume you get a lot of leeway from editors and publishers on this matter. How do you make the decision to finally pull the trigger on publishing?

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

#155

Post by 7thpower »

mliker wrote: post #91
unsupp0rted wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a better product. No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.

Who is “us”? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex for its math capabilities but when it comes to general frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills library. Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems

Not a scientist and use codex for anything complex.

I enjoy using CC more and use it for non coding tasks primarily, but for anything complex (honestly most of what I do is not that complex), I feel like I am trading future toil for a dopamine hit.

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

#156

Post by jzymbaluk »

FloorEgg wrote: post #84
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

Hi Ronan, I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate. However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in. I'm sure you…

You can walk down to a bookstore or anywhere that sells magazines and buy a physical copy

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

#158

Post by raincole »

ergocoder wrote: post #139

I wonder if Sam might abandon the ship soon. Other co-founders already did. The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't. If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already. This is probably one of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with relatively low reward.

And OpenAI's influence is hugely exaggerated compared to, say, Google.

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

#159

Post by 0x3f »

aduffy wrote: post #151
0x3f wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.

I'm not sure how much of that converts to revenue. If it's free plan users, that's just cost. You can say what you want about "creating a training data moat" but that doesn't seem like it's prevented the other labs from putting out excellent models.

Well we were talking about power and reputation and being well-known and all that. Being more ubiquitous is surely a big part of that. GP seems to think Anthropic is doing better because of the DoD thing. In my estimation, 90% of people do not care about that at all.
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