Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
Just wanted to say what an incredible person you are! Catch and Kill and the related reporting was awesome too!
Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response. The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.
Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much about that. I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors. If you have an opinion about that, everyone here…
Ronan Farrow's expertise is investigations into elite amorality, not evaluating technical products. Why are you asking this question?
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#263Does the article ever actually answer the title question?
I think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Nevertheless, the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altman recalls the exchange differently/does not remember.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that people working in such influential positions find them appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that lowest common denominator audience. The people shaping the future have no taste.
When things reach a certain level of popularity they constitute "mental real estate". Your audience has heard of Groundhog Day, so there is an opening for a movie with that title to make money -- your film will start out already having name recognition and some understanding of what the movie is about. Thus it is a writer's job not to make references they find appealing to reveal their good taste, but to know what re…
The writers of this piece didn't make the reference.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#265I am in 40s and going to be made redundant this June. In future only people who can afford to keep things like Claude, OpenAI and most importantly create value using them more than what others can do be able to survive. Otherwise, game is more or less over, and I question what's next for my own future while I learn to use Claude in FOMO. I cannot trust Sam or others if they will have any interest to keep this tech affordable for common people like me.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#266No. Next question.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#267I wonder if Sam might abandon the ship soon. Other co-founders already did. The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't. If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already. This is probably one of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with relatively low reward.
IMHO, nobody is remotely worth $1B, period. The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows that the system is flawed. The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is very flawed. We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their money.
If someone founds a company, grows it and owns $1bn of its stock, they don’t have $1bn in cash to distribute. They have a degree of control over the economic activity of that company. Should that control be taken away from them? Who should it be given to?
I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I’m not clear how that should work without creating really weird incentives. Some sort of special tax?
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that people working in such influential positions find them appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that lowest common denominator audience. The people shaping the future have no taste.
There's a time and a place for everything, and rejecting popular media as "lowest common denominator" is the most uninspired form of cultural elitism. Is it cynical to want your to make a profit? Or for it to make enough profit to subsidize other projects? Is it cynical to make something accessible so more people who watch it are able to enjoy it? I agree that it's embarrassing and feels crass when movies both try to…
> There's a time and a place for everything
Yeah, I'm saying professional communication isn't the place for Marvel references, and that those who choose to include references to those movies in their professional communications are revealing something about their media tastes.
If I'm at a Michelin star restaurant I don't want to be served a ballpark hotdog.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#269The number of "Altman doesn’t remember this" or "Altman denies this" is hilarious
Life would be so much easier if I was that forgetful
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#270I haven't read it yet. The answer is no.