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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#382Two "insure" typos?
The New Yorker prefers insure to ensure. They have a unique house style. I commented on another thread about alternative spellings like vender instead of vendor, too.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#383Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
I know why the cantilevered pool statement is there and why you mentioned it.
I’m sure you don’t know half of the totally fucked up things Sam did to get “revenge” for the slight of a leaking pool.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ". It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin t…
If LLMs can come up with superhumanly intelligent solutions, then they're superhumanly intelligent, period. Whether they do this by magic or by stochastic whatever doesn't make any difference at all.
Like..a calculator?
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what big_toast meant, but we do trust the user base to comment intelligently (which sometimes works and sometimes not), and we don't devalue articles like this. We do tend to devalue titles like this, or more likely change them to something more substantive (preferably using a representative phrase from the article body), but I'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls of protest, since YC is…
I'm sure you're sick of comments about moderation, but I will say, this makes me more sympathetic to the position you're in. It's an interesting dilemma. Many very respected publications use provocative titles because of the attention economy. And I'm sure you have good data that provocative titles lead to drive-by comments and flame wars. But I don't think big_toast was entirely wrong that there is a side effect of…
For us the litmus test isn't the title, it's whether the article itself can support a substantive discussion on HN. If yes, then we'll rewrite the provocative title to something else, as I mentioned. Ironically this often gives the author more of a voice because (1) the headline was often written by somebody else, and (2) we're pretty diligent about searching in the article itself for a representative phrase that can serve as a good title.
If, on the other hand, the title is provocative and the article does not seem like it can support a substantive discussion on HN, we downweight the submission. There are other reasons why we might do that too—for example, if HN had a recent thread about the same topic.
How do we tell whether an article can support a substantive discussion on HN? We guess. Moderation is guesswork. We have a lot of experience so our guesses are pretty good, but we still get it wrong sometimes.
In the current case, the title is baity while the article clearly passes the 'substantive' test, so the standard thing would have been to edit the title. I didn't do that because, when the story intersects with YC or a YC-funded startup, we make a point of moderating less than we normally do.
I know I'm repeating myself but it's pretty random which readers see which comments, and redundancy defends against message loss!
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#386It'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.
I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.
I think you can look at Star Trek as a fairly grounded example of where current LLMs could go: the ship's computer is not autonomous in any way but it does accept fairly vague instructions and you can apparently vibe-code the holodeck.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is “us”? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex for its math capabilities but when it comes to general frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills library. Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems
As a scientist (computational physicist, so plenty of math, but also plenty of code, from Python PoCs to explicit SIMD and GPU code, mostly various subsets of C/C++), I can confirm - Codex is qualitatively better for my usecases than Claude. I keep retesting them (not on benchmarks, I simply use both in parallel for my work and see what happens) after every version update and ever since 5.2 Codex seems further and fu…
>As a scientist (computational physicist,
Is there one that you prefer for, i dunno, physics?
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ac…
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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".
> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ". It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin t…
I can slow down the compute by a factor of a thousand. It would not change the result. But it changes the economics. We only call it intelligent, because we can do the backpropagation, the inference (and training) fast enough and with enough memory for it to appear this way.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whereas X can be trusted?
Yes? It's the data source, not a third-party. How is this even a question?
X restricts what you can view without logging in. Many folks don't want to log in to X, for obvious reasons. Posting an xcancel link is kinda like folks posting various `archive` URLs to bypass paywalls, work around overloaded servers, etc. That's an extremely common practice here that usually goes without comment.