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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#301

Post by giwook »

philip1209 wrote: post #285
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

There may be a reason why Altman is talked about a lot. This article in particular surfaces real information and new perspectives we've not heard in this level of detail before on some pretty significant topics that will be impacting you, me, and pretty much everyone we know not only today but well into the future.

You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too and that there are interesting perspectives that we've not heard of on that front either.

But just because that's true doesn't mean this article isn't very much relevant and needed.

Because it is.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#302

Post by ronanfarrow »

cm2012 wrote: post #272
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

I just spent a while reading the article. I really appreciate you writing it. In my case, it made me like Sam Altman a lot more. But I was only able to conclude this because of all the evidence you took the time to put together. It paints the picture of someone trying to do something very difficult in a rapidly changing environment and a lot of pressure, but still making the important choices and not shirking them.

Interesting to hear! While this hasn’t been a commonplace reaction, I think if I do my job right it should allow people to read the facts as they will, exactly like this. It’s strenuously designed to be fair and, where appropriate, even generous.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#304

Post by solenoid0937 »

philip1209 wrote: post #285
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one

FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.

Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is actually genuine which is practically unicorn rarity in corporate America.

We have worked for FAANG so I know where they're coming from; this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this question for myself.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#305

Post by cs702 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #262
cs702 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I didn't asking him to evaluate them. I asked him how customer and partners perceive them.

He's had so many conversations that he likely has a sense of how perceptions of the company and its offerings have changed.

I'm curious.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#306

Post by ronanfarrow »

egonschiele wrote: post #261
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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!

This is so appreciated, thank you! These stories can honestly take a lot out of me so thoughtful reactions mean a lot.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#307

Post by ronanfarrow »

sebmellen wrote: post #211
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

Ronan Farrow on Hacker News. Now I’ve seen everything.

I’ve really appreciated how substantive and polite the discourse here is, overall!

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#308

Post by r14c »

palata wrote: post #213
ergocoder wrote: post #139

I 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.

Big agree, at a certain point a company is big enough that their impact has to be managed democratically. I don't have an issue with effective leaders, the problem is that we reward a certain kind of success with transferable credits that don't necessarily align with people's actual talents or skills.

I want skilled institutional investors who have a track records of making smart bets. I don't want a random person who happened to get lucky in business dictating investment policy for substantial parts of the economy. I want accountability for abuses and mismanagement.

I know China gets a bad rep, but their bird cage market economy seems a lot more stable and predictable than this wild west pyramid scheme stuff we do in the US. Maybe there are advantages for some people in our model, but I really dislike the part where we consistently reward amoral grifters.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#309

Post by chpatrick »

stonyrubbish wrote: post #288
shruggedatlas wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many pa…

This is such a boring cliche by now. "thinking" and "knowing what it's doing" are totally vague statements that we barely understand about the human mind but in every comment section about AI people definitively state that LLMs don't do them, whatever they are.
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