Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
This is brilliant work, guys. Did you get any pressure to soften or spike the story?
Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
201–210 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Us = me and say /r/codex or wherever Codex users are. I've tried both, liked both, but in my projects one clearly produces better results, more maintainable code and does a better job of debugging and refactoring.
yea Im not in this "us" you speak of.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#203Wow, this is an incredibly detailed piece. Really in depth reporting and the kind of detailed investigation we need more of on important topics like this. > "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence." This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace cro…
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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Us = me and say /r/codex or wherever Codex users are. I've tried both, liked both, but in my projects one clearly produces better results, more maintainable code and does a better job of debugging and refactoring.
That's interesting, I actively use both and usually find it to be a toss up which one performs better at a given task. I generally find Claude to be better with complex tool calls and Codex to be better at reviewing code, but otherwise don't see a significant difference.
If you want to find an advocate for Codex that can give a pretty good answer as to why they think it's better, go ask Eric Provencher. He develops https://repoprompt.com/. He spends a lot of time thinking in this space and prefers Codex over Claude, though I haven't checked recently to see if he still has that opinion. He's pretty reachable on Discord if you poke around a bit.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#205OpenAI 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.
They’re all in the negative excluding subsidies, hard core coders are more valuable than high schoolers cheating on homework.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#206We 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.
It's because we only really know one economic system but we've known many people
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.
Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.
I really doubt the implementation difficulty is the actual reason. It's not hard to have an extra table of specific article permissions.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I've found claude startlingly good at debugging race conditions and other multithreading issues though.
My rule of thumb is that its good for anything "broad", and weaker for anything "deep". Broad tasks are tasks which require working knowledge of lots of random stuff. Its bad at deep work - like implementing a complex, novel algorithm.
LLMs aren't able to achieve 100% correctness of every line of code. But luckily, 100% correctness is not required for debugging. So its better at that sort of thing. Its also (comparatively) good at reading lots and lots of code. Better than I am - I get bogged down in details and I exhaust quickly.
An example of broad work is something like: "Compile this C# code to webassembly, then run it from this go program. Write a set of benchmarks of the result, and compare it to the C# code running natively, and this python implementation. Make a chart of the data add it to this latex code." Each of the steps is simple if you have expertise in the languages and tools. But a lot of work otherwise. But for me to do that, I'd need to figure out C# webassembly compilation and go wasm libraries. I'd need to find a good charting library. And so on.
I think its decent at debugging because debugging requires reading a lot of code. And there's lots of weird tools and approaches you can use to debug something. And its not mission critical that every approach works. Debugging plays to the strengths of LLMs.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#209> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't im…
Sociopaths don't have much going for them in life other than winning status games.
Sociopath is the next word that people seem to want to entirely destroy the meaning of