it is absolutely fascinating how in all the threads about him, there's all these huge fans, and some people who are apparently highly connected, but no one ever seems to discuss why he has these fancy jobs, why he left others, and why is apparently so well regarded?
Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
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Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#22The bit about PG and Altman parting ways is interesting I wonder if anyone wants to share more :).
Hadn't seen the tweet from Geoffrey Irving before: https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397... > 1. He was always nice to me. > 2. He lied to me on various occasions > 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons)
This is the kind of person we have controlling the future of AI. He and Elon Musk. Between these two we are assured complete destruction.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#23I can't believe someone that created Worldcoin could not be trustworthy.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#24> One of those people whose career Altman helped propel was Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and board member at OpenAI — the person who ultimately fired him.
Ilya was plenty successful before OpenAI and would've been just fine without Altman helping to "propel" his career.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#25Based on the article and the loyalty shown by openai employees, he appears to be the "difficult to manage" type, rather than the "difficult to work for" type.
That's not necessarily a bad thing in employees. I was once told that it is easier to round off the corners of a cube than to develop corners on a sphere.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#26> "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."
Ahhh now I get that, all humanity, exclude noone :D
> pointed to Altman’s aggressive fundraising efforts for a chips venture with autocratic regimes in the Middle East, which raised concerns about the use of AI to facilitate state surveillance and human rights abuses.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#27Yeah, the craziest thing for me to come out of this was how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent". Poor poor sam altman, he's a victim. He comes across as a sleazebag to me.
"how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent"."
My impression was rather a overwhelmingly "wtf is going on?"
edit: I still don't know enough, to judge anyone involved
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know people are innocent until proven guilty but it does seem rather bizarre also that he's had literally 0 media scrutiny / never been asked about (to my knowledge) the fact his own sister claims he abused her for years when they were young.
People are innocent until proven guilty in the legal system, where we have is a strict process for assigning a binary guilt outcome. In real life I use all available evidence for scoring outcome likelihoods. I score this guy high on sleazebag, and this article just increased this score.
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Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#29Yeah, the craziest thing for me to come out of this was how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent". Poor poor sam altman, he's a victim. He comes across as a sleazebag to me.
While I am certain there were people on both sides of that camp, I never saw a overwhelming outpour of people framing him as a victim. Most of what I read was people confused as heck, including myself.
What I did see is lots of people wondering how he lied to the board. Almost a week later and we still don't know how he lied to the board. We can all speculate away but there has been zero evidence of wrong doing, what else are we supposed to do? I guess we can just call him a sleaze-bag like you do.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#30I've had the 'chance' to work with some deeply manipulative persons in the past, the kind who goes to your desk and say 'Hey, I noticed you started to speak to X again, and your performance seems to suffer as a result", where X is a friendly colleague that opposed some plan of that person. It is incredibly difficult to keep those people in check as all that behaviour is off the record and impossible to prove. When pe…
This endorsement of Sam from 2011 is actually pretty damning, though it is so long ago if it were the only thing it wouldn't be a huge red flag:
>I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this:
> "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.
> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.
> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."
> I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944
I think the article mentions what may be this same incident, without saying how it was done:
> Rabois noted that Altman, as a Stanford dropout, persuaded a major telecommunications company to do business with his start-up Loopt — the same quality, he said, that enabled Altman to persuade Microsoft to invest in OpenAI.
From the earlier comment, it seems he persuaded the telecom essentially through fraud though maybe not legally so.