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The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#21

Post by palmotea »

submeta wrote: post #7

The man brought us LLMs and ever more capable models. I don’t know about the critics, but my work life completely changed from Dec 2022 on. Ever since chatgpt was released. I cannot imagine working without LLMs and agents anymore. They make me literally 10-100x more productive, transforming text, generating text, doing research, writing code, documenting systems, doing web search and so much more. And for that I am f…

> The man brought us LLMs and ever more capable models. ... And for that I am forever thankful to Sam Altman and all the people who made this possible.

Why thank Altman and not thank Joe Biden? He was running the country when these models you praise were released, and they both had about as much real involvement in their actual construction.

The CEO didn't do the work, he shouldn't get all (or even most) of the credit.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#23

Post by EA-3167 »

fairity wrote: post #14

Words are cheap. I really wish there was a way to incentivize authors like this to put their money where their mouth is, before seeking attention for their ideas.

It's possible to notice a trend while still having the wit to realize you can't precisely time that trend well enough to profit from it. Another example might be, "Trump is increasingly old, feeble, and incapable of doing his job... but I'm not sure how that will translate into how long he's able to keep the job. It's possible that he could be a vegetable at some point and still POTUS."

Demanding that people gamble with their often limited finances to prove a point orthogonal to the one they're actually making feels disingenuous and dismissive to me.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#24

Post by vld_chk »

While general vibe of Sam and OpenAI losing steam is correct for me; I genially disagree with all “hate” of GPT-5. It was indeed not a crazy breakthrough, but, honestly, 5.2 model at extended thinking path in Pro version is utterly scary to me. I can give it some complicated multi-tier question which requires modeling, abstract thinking, computation, and rationality; it can walk away for 45 minutes, produce CoT with a length of Empire State Building and give me fairly good and well written response. I can’t speak for all industries, but 5.2-Pro-extended is really scarce when it comes to math and reasoning. Here I am a bit on Sam side when he said that most of people severely underutilize modern AI by using it same as in 2023. The capability of recent models sounds to me way beyond current typical use cases.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#25

Post by submeta »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #13
submeta wrote: post #7

The man brought us LLMs and ever more capable models. I don’t know about the critics, but my work life completely changed from Dec 2022 on. Ever since chatgpt was released. I cannot imagine working without LLMs and agents anymore. They make me literally 10-100x more productive, transforming text, generating text, doing research, writing code, documenting systems, doing web search and so much more. And for that I am f…

It can be a bit tricky to attribute the product of an entire company to the CEO... even if the CEO is a founder!

Computers existed before Steve Jobs made them usable. Sam Altman created a company that created a product that millions of people started to use witin days.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#26

Post by everly »

fairity wrote: post #14

Words are cheap. I really wish there was a way to incentivize authors like this to put their money where their mouth is, before seeking attention for their ideas.

Gary is an insufferable blowhard but he's had skin the AI game for awhile. I believe he sold an AI startup to Uber back in the 2010s.

Many of his criticisms of OpenAI and LLMs have been apt.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#27

Post by cadamsdotcom »

submeta wrote: post #7

The man brought us LLMs and ever more capable models. I don’t know about the critics, but my work life completely changed from Dec 2022 on. Ever since chatgpt was released. I cannot imagine working without LLMs and agents anymore. They make me literally 10-100x more productive, transforming text, generating text, doing research, writing code, documenting systems, doing web search and so much more. And for that I am f…

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Sam Altman despite his flaws played a key role in kickstarting the capital war that’s led to the insane investment in infrastructure that’ll carry us to a new age once the hype dies down.

He created and continues to create an atmosphere for innovation inside OpenAI that showed the way for the fast-followers.

He lit a fire under the ass of Google for gods sake.

Whatever he did or didn’t invent, he made a ton of invention possible.

Where to from here is uncertain but without sama maybe ChatGPT didn’t happen the same way - or maybe it crashed and people shrugged. Maybe in the other timeline that leads to another AI winter. But one thing is for certain, without sama the whole thing would’ve been a lot smaller.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#28

Post by CodingJeebus »

twoodfin wrote: post #17
fairity wrote: post #14

Words are cheap. I really wish there was a way to incentivize authors like this to put their money where their mouth is, before seeking attention for their ideas.

I’m guessing it’s hard to go short OpenAI without also going short a bunch of other companies riding the AI wave that aren’t led by Sam Altman? Would love to hear how that could work.

Shorting a security means risking exponential losses if the stock you're shorting continues to increase in value. As the saying goes: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#29

Post by gizajob »

codyklimdev wrote: post #3

I've been wondering for a while if Sam is going to become an Elizabeth Holmes style figure with all of his talk about "a magic intelligence in the sky" and that in 5 years AI will replace 95% of marketing work. It seems like he's set up impossible promises, it'll be interesting to see what comes from their non-delivery.

He’s the next SBF.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#30

Post by gizajob »

twoodfin wrote: post #17
fairity wrote: post #14

Words are cheap. I really wish there was a way to incentivize authors like this to put their money where their mouth is, before seeking attention for their ideas.

I’m guessing it’s hard to go short OpenAI without also going short a bunch of other companies riding the AI wave that aren’t led by Sam Altman? Would love to hear how that could work.

Just short Nvidia. If the thing goes bang then that’ll be one of the big losers.
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