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

Post by easterncalculus » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

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…

Post by crazylogger » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

einrealist wrote: post #198

I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of…

Post by red369 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:43 AM UTC

swingboy wrote: post #123

It's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.

Post by ggregoire » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

chromacity wrote: post #245

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #164

> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't im…

Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth. The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so…

Post by fblp » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:47 AM UTC

ronanfarrow wrote: post #312

fblp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and others continue to do journalism like this? (including commenting on HN?)

This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed individuals and companies essentially buying up the discourse. I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to…