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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

#171

Post by dbingham »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #80
dbingham wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that if you ask the average person on the street who the leadership behind Apple was, they would name Jobs, not Woz. I'm not sure, but I think the financial compensation also carried that discrepancy. And that's a really common case. It is absolutely true that you need both technical and non-technical people to make a business work. There are lots of jobs to be done, hats to be worn, and they are all val…

> who the leadership behind Apple was, they would name Jobs, not Woz Woz was critical to early Apple. He was not involved in its modern iteration. Also, plenty of important and influential people are unknown in the popular imagination.

Yeah, I should have added a line clarifying that I'm unsure about the exact case of Apple, but even so, Jobs definitely had collaborators on the modern iteration who - again - do not get appropriate credit or financial compensation.

The point is that this is a general problem that falls out of the structure of our economy and business enterprises. And it's one that's fixable with a little societal refactoring (changing the laws around business structures and how they're formed).

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

#172

Post by BeefDinnerPurge »

Vecr wrote: post #144
BeefDinnerPurge wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you don't understand conditional probability without telling me you don't understand conditional probability. CEO of Reddit, how'd that go? Project Covalence, how'd that go? Andrew Yang? Our next president, right? 2018, The year Sam Altman became the governor of California, no? And of course: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a b…

Getting IDF gas masks is not a sign he really knows what he's doing, why not MSA or Avon Rubber?

So that's totally on brand for sama, no? He runs with the herd because he has a great nose for where the herd is heading. But it's the crazy outliers who dig into stuff like this and find the best options. I suspect he doesn't have time for that nor would he make the time. Wonder what choices Zuck made for his $100M apocalypse man cave.

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

#173

Post by dang »

boucher wrote: post #70

100+ upvotes in an hour and this story is falling off the front page already?

It set off the flamewar detector. We eventually turned that off.

It was also downweighted as a follow-up [1] because there had been a similar profile article / megathread the day before:

"King of the Cannibals": How Sam Altman Took over Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38744021 - Dec 2023 (162 comments)

In the absence of significant new information [2] people mostly just repeat what has already been said, and the more reptition there is in a thread, the dumber and nastier it gets.

(Edit: I double checked that by skimming through the comments in this thread and I think it was the right call—they're generic, i.e. could just as easily have appeared in any similar thread, and range from ok-but-repetitive to outright-bad.)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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

#174

Post by kortilla »

gamblor956 wrote: post #74
kortilla wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as Altman goes, I put him firmly in the same camp as Musk. They haven't done jack shit. What Musk did with SpaceX is in no way comparable to just paying an architect to build a building. Unless the entire biography from Isaacson was fabricated, he was extremely hands on in design decisions, company direction, and hiring. If you think none of those were relevant to the success of spacex, you’re completely del…

Per dozens of engineers at SpaceX...the biography from Isaacson contains numerous exaggerations and outright fabrications. Elon Musk's involvement in design decisions was limited to the typical executive level involvement in hardware design, in the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with. Indeed, with SpaceX it's usually immediately obvious…

This is just made up shit though. None of what you are stating is backed by any sources.

>Per dozens of engineers at SpaceX...the biography from Isaacson contains numerous exaggerations and outright fabrications.

Which ones, specifically?

>the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.

Even if this were the only level of involvement, do you realize how important these are? Do you know how it would have worked out for the company if they focused on payload instead of reusability?

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

#175

Post by tim333 »

Apreche wrote: post #23
gkoberger wrote: post #7

You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way. If he fol…

My question is, what do you count as "doing"? Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever? In the words of Urkel, "Did I do that?" There are some leaders in the tech world who have…

The guy's who fund these things deserve some credit for that at least. Take the Medici's for example, bankers who:

>claimed to have funded the invention of the piano and opera, financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore, and were patrons of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Francesco Redi, among many others in the arts and sciences.

Sure they didn't do the paintings but a lot of that stuff probably wouldn't have happened without them.

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

#176

Post by Nevermark »

akira2501 wrote: post #110
wslh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question that could be asked is the long term ROI here actually going to be worth it for Sam? Don't you think most entrepreneurs would call Sam if they have a chance?

I don't think being overly connected to the "silicon valley social graph" is particularly useful. I actually think it's probably going to be a negative drain on your time, or sacrificing that, a negative drain on your reputation.

At the level of corporate creation and management, your network (graph) doesn't drain you.

It amplifies you. Speeds up big moves, acquisition of resources, hiring key people, etc. These are not loner (atom), team (list), or even top-down (tree), type activities.

A network of powerful people is like a collection of other threads, each with their own resources, that you can call. Literally. And put any number of those threads and resources to work on your problems (your coroutines) concurrently.

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

#177

Post by tim333 »

darkwraithcov wrote: post #147
adventured wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unfair in the case of Jobs & Woz. Wozniak represented a few years of Apple's earliest history. His contribution was similar to Paul Allen's contribution to Microsoft. Extraordinarily important in the first few years, and that was the end of that. The reality is, people broadly like Woz, and particularly among the HN crowd Steve Jobs is disliked; that's the explanation, it's purely emotional; so they want to…

What makes you think Musk is technical? I’ve seen tons of interviews and podcasts. He’s not as stupid as he comes across on Twitter, but he absolutely is not an engineer and couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. He has an above average understanding of tech, but whenever seriously pressed —- rare because the media is absolutely terrified of pressing him and losing access —- he demonstrates a rudimentary understan…

>couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag

He sold a game he programed at age 12, and wrote at least the initial code for zip2 which Compaq acquired for $307 million.

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

#178

Post by tim333 »

bmitc wrote: post #50
hutzlibu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also this other bit was news to me: "Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” "

Why are these people so sycophantic, especially to such an inexperienced person?

Is firing someone being sycophantic?

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

#179

Post by catlover76 »

gkoberger wrote: post #7

You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way. If he fol…

[dead]

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

#180

Post by paulryanrogers »

wslh wrote: post #106
BeefDinnerPurge wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you don't understand conditional probability without telling me you don't understand conditional probability. CEO of Reddit, how'd that go? Project Covalence, how'd that go? Andrew Yang? Our next president, right? 2018, The year Sam Altman became the governor of California, no? And of course: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a b…

Your answer is very rude. You don't differentiate power from business success.

Why don't you?
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