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Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

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Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#151

Post by threethirtytwo »

shimman wrote: post #62
hgoel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, now we need a clinical diagnosis to call evil people psychopaths or we're unhinged? Do you apply the same high standards to any of the garbage these guys spew or to the impacts of their projects?

The people that have made decisions leading to the direct deaths of millions of people AREN'T evil! There's no clinical definition of evil in the DSM, so they can't be evil you see.

Your stupid. They can be evil because it fits the definition. They can’t be psychopaths because it doesn’t fit the definition. Understand?

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#152

Post by meowface »

hx8 wrote: post #136
hluska wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m really struggling to see how Christian apocalyptic ideas are even remotely relevant. We used to be capable of so much.

So much of the AI Hype is religion encoded. It's relevant because the AI companies are invoking the ideas. If you go around telling people that AI is going to cure cancer, bring about global prosperity, and give you an uploaded immortality then you cannot be surprised when some people start thinking of it similarly to the second coming.

I'm consistently amused by the fact that there's still this weird faction of populists on even tech-oriented sites like HN and /r/programming and lobste.rs and Mastodon who have this almost antivax-level stance on AI. I'm not precisely sure what explains it, because many of them actually are smart people and good programmers.

AI very likely will cure many cancers and very possibly (assuming combined with good politicians) will bring about global prosperity. A high percentage of AI company employees and executives and open source developers and researchers sincerely believe it will and so they say they believe it will. They have good reason to believe it, and they will likely be proven correct. If 400 (or 40, or 4) years pass and it's still mostly just creating spreadsheets, I will concede, though.

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#153

Post by meowface »

estearum wrote: post #98
hx8 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's actually super-intelligence and a human aligned visionary is at the helm. The good case is very good.

Uhh literally what is one thing Sam has done or said that demonstrates he's either human-aligned or visionary?

I could write a giant response to this with dozens of quotes from him and others and various sources but you would just say it's all lies/posturing, so it would not be a good use of my time. I will say that him becoming one of the most prominent funders and promoters of UBI research/experiments 6 years before GPT-3 is probably not a coincidence, though. OpenAI releasing a paper a month ago strongly suggesting the US move towards a more socialist economic system to handle massive economic upheaval is also probably not a coincidence. He obviously founded OpenAI with the primary intent of making AI so that they could make it go well instead of poorly, and it going well means properly addressing mass unemployment, biosecurity risks, some degree of widely distributed access so that the very poorest get meaningful use of the exact same intelligence as what the very richest get to use, etc.

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#154

Post by meowface »

latexr wrote: post #95
hx8 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's actually super-intelligence and a human aligned visionary is at the helm. The good case is very good.

Come on… The guy who said he can’t imagine caring for his child without consulting ChatGPT… The guy who said he didn’t know how to make revenue with ChatGPT, and made a “soft promise” to investors they’d somehow achieve AGI then ask it how to make money… The guy who made a cryptocurrency scam that was banned in multiple countries… The guy who everyone around him says he’s a con artist and a sociopath… That guy? Reall…

Really. That guy. I'm afraid you're one side of the coin in https://paulgraham.com/fh.html. Paul himself would agree with me on that if he were to read your post.

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#155

Post by latexr »

meowface wrote: post #154
latexr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on… The guy who said he can’t imagine caring for his child without consulting ChatGPT… The guy who said he didn’t know how to make revenue with ChatGPT, and made a “soft promise” to investors they’d somehow achieve AGI then ask it how to make money… The guy who made a cryptocurrency scam that was banned in multiple countries… The guy who everyone around him says he’s a con artist and a sociopath… That guy? Reall…

Really. That guy. I'm afraid you're one side of the coin in https://paulgraham.com/fh.html . Paul himself would agree with me on that if he were to read your post.

I’ve read enough Paul Graham to know he’s not someone whose opinion I care about or respect. He’s yet another rich guy tech bro out of touch with normal people who unfortunately has an army of wannabe tech and finance bro shills clinging to his every word like he’s some sort of sage. He’s not. He isn’t smarter than anyone else, he just has a bigger platform. I don’t abide by cults of personality, they’re a major reason everything is shit right now. They’re the fuel that perpetuates online and offline toxicity. Bragging that Paul Graham would agree with you is like bragging Will Smith or Kim Kardashian agrees with you: it’s not a badge of honour even if it’s true, and doesn’t make your argument stronger or mean you’re right.

But since you value his opinion so much, perhaps you should inform yourself of what he has said about Altman, including “Sam had been lying to us all the time”.

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#156

Post by typeofhuman »

Henchman21 wrote: post #147
rurp wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not only do lies work , there is also no punishment at all for it .

quite the opposite

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#158

Post by threethirtytwo »

aerhardt wrote: post #86
threethirtytwo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For all his weirdness and moral failings, I don’t see Altman saying things like whites being under apartheid in the US. And worse. Multiple times a day. Every day.

Psychopaths wear a mask of sanity but underneath they have no moral framework. Some people can hate black people or Muslims or anything like that but these qualities are very human. Things like racism has existed across cultures for more than several millennia among many people. A psychopath is a different ballgame.

A psychopath can plunge a knife into a babies face and feel no emotion. The only reason why the psychopath doesn’t plunge a knife into a babies face is because he has nothing to gain from it. The psychopath appears more sane then a racist because the psychopath is usually better at pretending to be sane simply because he is unable to comprehend the passionate yet racial hatred that the racist feels.

What I am saying is musk does not fit that archetype as much. Altman fits that archetype more. Neither actually crosses the threshold to be called a “psychopath” but if psychopathy was a gradient Altman is further down the line then musk. Much further.

That is the literal definition of what a psychopath is. You’re operating from a lack of understanding of the definition.

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#159

Post by estearum »

meowface wrote: post #153
estearum wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh literally what is one thing Sam has done or said that demonstrates he's either human-aligned or visionary?

I could write a giant response to this with dozens of quotes from him and others and various sources but you would just say it's all lies/posturing, so it would not be a good use of my time. I will say that him becoming one of the most prominent funders and promoters of UBI research/experiments 6 years before GPT-3 is probably not a coincidence, though. OpenAI releasing a paper a month ago strongly suggesting the US…

This is what the most midwit milquetoast person in the country would try to do if they were in Sam's shoes and, like Sam, once they had a couple billion dollars dangled in front of them they'd abandon all regard for safety or distribution of wealth or whatever-else-they-thought-they-ought-to-care-about.

Re: Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

#160

Post by grey-area »

meowface wrote: post #149
grey-area wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Paul Graham, founder of the website we're on, still says he likes and trusts him. He just was annoyed he was constantly distracted by AI stuff when he was supposed to be running YC as president (which bears no resemblance to any current events...). 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 peop…

We’ll see in time if your confident trust in Sam Altman’s good nature is justified.

Personally if someone is found to be untrustworthy by multiple people and does weird stuff (like moving from open non-profit to for profit), I trust them a lot less. I don’t know him so don’t pass judgment but wouldn’t trust him and certainly wouldn’t give his statements credence since he’s been so spectacularly wrong on AI outcomes.

As to people at OpenAI and investors in OpenAI, I certainly wouldn’t expect them to denigrate their CEO just before an IPO, the one who fought off the board and installed his own place men and thus has complete control; it is not in their interests to do so.

If there is a bust after this boom I think quite a lot of bad behaviour and circular deals from The main players (nvidia, OpenAI, MS etc) will be revealed at that point. In a financial boom a lot gets hidden.

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