Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Contradictions of Sam Altman

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 564 posts

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#31

Post by ftxbro »

m3kw9 wrote: post #8

OpenAI getting rich now everyone wants a piece and everyone fighting over it like a billion dollar inheretence fight. In a round about way, if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt swoop in under national security guise

They've already swooped in.

I mean the conspiracy argument would be that the $10B isn't a normal investment. It's a special government project investment facilitated by OpenAI board member and former clandestine CIA operative and cybersecurity executive Will Hurd through his role on the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the investment arm of the CIA. It's funneled through Microsoft instead of through Google in part because of Google's No-Military-AI pledge in 2018 demanded by its employees, after which Microsoft took over its military contracts including project Maven. The new special government project, the Sydney project, is the most urgent and ambitious since the project to develop nuclear weapons in the mid twentieth century.

Of course I don't necessarily believe any of that but it can be fun to think about.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#32

Post by tomlue »

version_five wrote: post #29
tomlue wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of OpenAI, but this is nonsense. All of human existence is mostly other people's ideas. Among a ridiculously huge list of other things, OpenAI benefits from the mountains of labor that made scalable neural networks possible. Have they had their own good ideas? Definitely. Are they benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere? Also Definitely, just like everybody else.

I'm not really a fan of openAI, but I think we're seeing the classic mistake of confusing product with technology. Steve Jobs / Apple didn't anything you'd call new ideas either (obvious cliche but so is the criticism). It's execution and design once the tech reaches a certain level

mostly agree. Though I wouldn't underestimate the tech and engineering work behind OpenAI. That microsoft partnership is no joke.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#33

Post by marginalia_nu »

eternalban wrote: post #24
gardenfelder wrote: post #2

https://archive.ph/YTOeD

None of archive.* are working for me - cloudflare dns issues. Anyone else has access issues? [thanks to those who replied. strangely stopped working for me since yesterday [US]. can you post the ip you see? Cloudflare returns a 1001 error: "Ray ID: 7b128f151e4b0c90 • 2023-04-01 17:30:15 UTC" ]

Works for me

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#34

Post by xenospn »

ftxbro wrote: post #31
m3kw9 wrote: post #8

OpenAI getting rich now everyone wants a piece and everyone fighting over it like a billion dollar inheretence fight. In a round about way, if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt swoop in under national security guise

They've already swooped in. I mean the conspiracy argument would be that the $10B isn't a normal investment. It's a special government project investment facilitated by OpenAI board member and former clandestine CIA operative and cybersecurity executive Will Hurd through his role on the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the investment arm of the CIA. It's funneled through Microsoft instead of through Google in part becau…

Who has time to come with this stuff?!

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#36

Post by lubesGordi »

schiffern wrote: post #13
greyman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would make him "socially-awkward"?

Sam or Elon? I'll assume you meant Sam. IMO Sam is mostly just shy and cerebral, but to many people that will come off as awkward and robotic. Watch his recent Lex Fridman interview. Personally I thought it was great, but I'm aware enough to realize that (sadly) many low-knowledge people will judge such demeanor harshly. Mark my words: the media will, 10 times out of 10, exploit that misconception , not correct it. "…

I don't know, it seemed to me his responses on Lex were very measured and carefully restrained in a lot of places, calculated and vague in others. He doesn't come off as genuine to me at all.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#38

Post by eternalban »

schiffern wrote: post #3

Looks like the media has chosen Sam Altman as the next Elon Musk. This makes sense. He perfectly fits their cliche of a socially-awkward technologist, and he's trusting (foolish?) enough to make complex nuanced statements in public, which they can easily mine for out-of-context clickbait and vilification fodder.

2014: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president/

2015: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/sam-altman...

2016: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

..

That last link, Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny, is worth the read. However the last time I posted that link HN went down for an hour right afterwards. (of course correlation is not causation :/)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35334023

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#39

Post by sampo »

efficientsticks wrote: post #28

> The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize the safety of humanity. > “You want to be there first and you want to be setting the norms,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why speed is a moral and ethical thing here.” Clearly having either not learned or ignored the lessons from Black Mirror and 1984, which is that others will co…

> lessons from Black Mirror and 1984

Those are works of fiction.

Post reply on HN