At least one of the arguments against him, that he cared too much about openai to lead Microsoft effectively, probably helps him more than it hurts. Otherwise, idk how much of this was really about Sam altman as much as it was a staggeringly incompetent board that drove employees and investors to unify and protest en masse to save the organisation from itself. I guess there's a chance there's an AGI in the basement but if it was actually about safety they should fucking say what the hell they were freaking out about. But if they leave the only logical conclusion as this being a power struggle between someone who wants to move fast and make bank and a board that wants to kill the company for ego reasons - uhh yeah that's not a hard choice
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
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
A large contingent of people here (and anywhere) are prone to hero worship, especially if it tends towards trendy topics like generative AI. The natural reaction to criticism of an idol is to shut it down so you can maintain a singular narrative lest you have to deal with cognitive dissonance. Which I find ironic, because I’ll see the same people looking down on non technical people idolizing celebrities, but not rec…
The difference between Elon and Swift, is the scale to which they are able to use capitalism for their means. I think Elon is scarier for that reason. (Not absolving Swift of that, though).
Isn't the scale proportional though as Elon has 6 companies and Taylor has only 1?
Fascinatingly Taylor Swift has convinced her fans to rebuy re-recorded versions of all of her earlier albums. Not just one album either. So far it has been 4 of them with 6 in total. Her justification of this is purely capitalistic. This is kind of unprecedented, and the success of this for her has been quite spectacular.
See:
https://time.com/5949979/why-taylor-swift-is-rerecording-old...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/arts/music/taylor-swift-1...
https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swift-taylors-version...
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole saga whiffs of Machiavellianism
On just Sam’s part or all around? Seems like there might be quite a lot of it. Sam gives me a manipulative vibe but the way he was booted with knives out was also pretty gross. No clue what else was going on behind the scenes. Edit: if the people who booted him were really doing it in the name of safety paranoia, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t Machiavellian. The motive can be whatever but conspiring to boot someone like…
I have interacted with him a few times and when he decides to help, he will help you all the way with an almost maniacal focus and drive. For what it's worth I have never heard bad things about him from individual interactions.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#284I don’t have a strong opinion on the events of the past several days. But a lot of the behavior I’ve seen on twitter from Open AI employees, some led by Sam, feels very cult like: posting in all lower case, the heart emojis, rumors of employees calling each other in the middle of the night to pressure people to sign letters supporting Sam. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like yo…
I think I'm out of the loop on tweet protocol...What's the significance of all lowercase?
It is done to signal solidarity with sama.
Some people wear flags as lapel pins to show their solidarity with a cause, some wave flags in the street, some post black images on social media.
Others remove the captials and punctuation from auto correct and post in lowercase.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#285I'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…
Remember BillG sold an OS to IBM for the Intel 8086 that was not even owned or written by Microsoft at the time.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is quite different though, in that biometric-as-a-device-authenticator features keep your biometric data on your device. The plan with worldcoin is to create a central database of this data.
Supposedly Worldcoin deletes your biometric data after it's done generating a hash of it. If you don't believe that, then why would you believe that Google and Apple don't secretly send your fingerprints and facial scans off device?
For one, those entities operate in the US, and are subject to US law - it may not be great at times, but that's a start.
Worldcoin on the other hand went to the third world and went through Africa offering people almost a month's wages to give up their biometrics. That, to me, should merit a deeper dive into what they are doing and why.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#287I don’t have a strong opinion on the events of the past several days. But a lot of the behavior I’ve seen on twitter from Open AI employees, some led by Sam, feels very cult like: posting in all lower case, the heart emojis, rumors of employees calling each other in the middle of the night to pressure people to sign letters supporting Sam. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like yo…
maybe they all remapped their shift keys
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121980&page=1
Many aides in the new administration assigned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, discovered Monday that their computer keyboards were missing the "W" key — a critical problem given their boss' name is George W. Bush, and he is often referred to simply as "W," to distinguish him from his presidential dad.
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#288I can't believe someone that created Worldcoin could not be trustworthy.
"but he looks like such a nice boy"
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is sort of par for the course in the world of early stage startups. No one wants to be your first customer as it is risky, but you need that first customer. So you "fake it until you make it." It is similar to dressing the part you want - at least when that mattered. You buy more expensive clothes than you should be able to afford so that people think you are more successful than you are, and then they are more…
I believe such behaviour is harmful and that we shouldn't be rewarding those that engage in it.
The bad behaviour is predicating the purchase on seeing the office.
Having an office doesn't make a company real, nor any more or less likely to execute on the project
Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worldcoin alone is so, so damning of his character. Cartoon villain shit. It's hard to square that whole thing with the way people talk about him here. But every once in a while it hits; this is the guy who wanted to collect everyone's bloody retina pattern, all for a crypto so obviously bad in nearly every fundamental aspect.
How so? A universal and tamper-proof ID system sounds like a good idea. In my country we have a pretty rock solid digital ID but the problem is that it's national, so the utility is limited. I want to build global apps where I know every user is real and limited to one account but currently that's impossible. I don't know enough about Worldcoin to know if that's it though.
So if it's a great idea, and Worldcoin is a US company, why did they not start in the US?
Why instead did they go to some of the least wealthy parts of Africa and ask people to give them their biometrics for sometimes as much as one month's salary? To seed their database? It doesn't really pass the smell test.