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Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

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321–330 of 734 posts

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#321
post #274

“I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI.” - Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder, co-lead of Superalignment Team , Departed early 2024 - May 15, 2025, The Atlantic Anyway, I concur it's a hard choice as one other comment mentions.

[flagged]

Is that the du jour unit of measurement for morality now?

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#322
An observation: most articles with titles of the form "A SLAMS B" put forward a narrow, one-sided view of the issue they report on. Oftentimes they're shallow attempts to stir outrage for clicks. This one is just giving a CEO a platform to promote how awesome he thinks his company is.

All these articles and videos of people "slamming" each other; it doesn't move the needle, and it's not really news.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#323
post #173
post #15

OpenAI's tight spot: 1) They are far from profitability. 2) Meta is aggressively making their top talent more expensive, and outright draining it. 3) Deepseek/Baidu/etc are dramatically undercutting them. 4) Anthropic and (to a lesser extent?) Google appear to be beating them (or, charitably, matching them) on AI's best use case so far: coding. 5) Altman is becoming less like-able with every unnecessary episode of dr…

The biggest problem OAI has is that they don't own a data source. Meta, Google, and X all have existing platforms for sourcing real time data at global scale. OAI has ChatGPT, which gives them some unique data, but it is tiny and very limited compared to what their competitors have. LLMs trained on open data will regress because there is too much LLM generated slop polluting the corpus now. In order for models to imp…

OAI has a deal with reddits corpus of data to use.

They will either have to acquire a data source or build their own moving forward imo. I could see them buying reddit.

Sam Altman also owns something like ~10% of reddits stock since they went public.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Is that the du jour unit of measurement for morality now?

gestures broadly at every other thing we've known about Mark Zuckerberg since "Dumb Fucks" in college

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#325
post #274

“I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI.” - Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder, co-lead of Superalignment Team , Departed early 2024 - May 15, 2025, The Atlantic Anyway, I concur it's a hard choice as one other comment mentions.

[flagged]

Even if it's zero, he could still be a shitty person who shouldn't have access to that button. If anyone should have such access at all, of course.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#326
post #313
post #259

It says something that he still believes he has "missionaries" after betraying all the core principles that OpenAI was founded on. What exactly is their mission now other than generating big $?

It is a widely accepted definition of AGI that it is something that is either really smart (or generates more than 100B usd in revenue). It is also clear Sam Altman and OpenAI’s core values remain intact.

Lol, I'm sure Sam Altman's ideals haven't changed but you're a fool if you think OpenAI is aiming for anything loftier than a huge pile of money for investors.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#327
post #29

Can someone make an honest argument for how OpenAI staff are missionaries, after the coup? I'd be very happy to be convinced that supporting the coup was the right move for true-believer missionaries. (Edit: It's an honest and obvious question, and I think that the joke responses risk burying or discouraging honest answers.)

Honest answer*: I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing, save maybe OpenAI's defense contract, which I have no details about. Meta will try to buoy this by open-sourcing it, which, good for them, but I don't think it's enough. If Meta wants to save itself,…

> I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing,

OpenAI announced in April they'd build a social network.

I think at this point it barely matters who does it, the ways in which you can make huge amounts of money from this are limited and all the major players after going to make a dash for it.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#328
post #259

It says something that he still believes he has "missionaries" after betraying all the core principles that OpenAI was founded on. What exactly is their mission now other than generating big $?

He claims to be advancing progress. He believes that progress comes from technology plus good governance.

Yet our government is descending into authoritarianism and AI is fueling rising data center energy demands exacerbating the climate crisis. And that is to say nothing of the role that AI is playing in building more effective tools for population control and mass surveillance. All these things are happening because the governance of our future is handled by the ultra-wealthy pursuing their narrow visions at the expense of everyone else.

Thus we have no reason to expect good “governance” at the hands of this wealthy elite and we only see evidence to the opposite. Altman’s skill lies in getting people to believe that serving these narrow interests is the pursuit of a higher purpose. That is the story of OpenAI.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#329
post #274

“I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI.” - Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder, co-lead of Superalignment Team , Departed early 2024 - May 15, 2025, The Atlantic Anyway, I concur it's a hard choice as one other comment mentions.

Is this a button any one person should have their finger on?

Exactly. AGI is something that will significantly affect all of humanity. It should be treated like nuclear weapons.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#330
I don't know, maybe all the big AI companies could come to an agreement not to poach each others employees?[1]

It is always surprising to me when billionaire CEOs are complaining that their own employees are min-maxing their earning potential.

[1] https://www.ere.net/articles/tech-firms-settle-case-admit-se...

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