The Contradictions of Sam Altman • Hacker News Board

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#41

Post by ftxbro » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

mongol wrote: post #9

How did he become so rich? His Wikipedia page does not have much details on this.

Paul Graham is his Les Wexner.

"Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking 'Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.'"

"Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"

What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want."

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#42

Post by pbw » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

mongol wrote: post #9

How did he become so rich? His Wikipedia page does not have much details on this.

I don't have the source, it was a video interview, but Sam said he has personally invested in around 400 startups. And it says here he employs "a couple of dozen people" to manage his investment and homes. At that scale I think you yourself basically are a venture capital firm.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#43

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #12

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

I think there are some interesting questions: - Sam does not have equity in OpenAI. Does this mean he can potentially be removed at any point in time? - OpenAI's profit arm will funnel excess profit to its non-profit wing. If this is the case, who determines excess profit? - OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If this happens, what hap…

I refuse to believe that Sam doesn't have equity in OpenAI. It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.

[deleted]

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#44

Post by seydor » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

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.

No, the next Zuckerberg. The media sees (rightly) openai as a competitor medium.

Although he s much more prepared to face the next Greta (Yudowksi)

He has to fix his vocal fry however, it is annoying

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#45

Post by poopypoopington » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

xenospn wrote: post #34

ftxbro wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

ChatGPT

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#46

Post by schiffern » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

ninth_ant wrote: post #25

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.

What specifically in that article was vilification of Sam or clickbait, or statements taken out of context?

In these early days of a smear campaign (even an unintentional one that's just about chasing clicks), the game is mostly about plausibly deniable innuendo.

The headline is a great start. Contradictions are bad. Altman has contradictions. Therefore Altman is bad. They don't say it, but they also know they don't need to. They lead the audience to water and trust that enough of them will drink.

The closing paragraph is another great example. It intentionally leaves the reader hanging on the question "so why did Altman do AI if there are moral downsides," without resolving the question by giving Altman's context when he said it.

Trust me or don't, but what you see here is just the beginning. In 6 month's time Altman will be (in the public's eye) evil incarnate.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#47

Post by xiphias2 » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #12

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

I think there are some interesting questions: - Sam does not have equity in OpenAI. Does this mean he can potentially be removed at any point in time? - OpenAI's profit arm will funnel excess profit to its non-profit wing. If this is the case, who determines excess profit? - OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If this happens, what hap…

I refuse to believe that Sam doesn't have equity in OpenAI. It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.

It's nothing special, there's a company under the foundation, he doesn't have share in the company, he's ceo and board member of the foundation.

It's just this one non-important detail is now being repeated over and over.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#48

Post by blihp » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

unshavedyak wrote: post #15

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

> if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt swoop in under national security guise Re: GPT5, are there any .. reasonable/credible sources of information on the subject? I've become deaf from all the speculation and while i am very curious, i'm unsure if anything substantiated has actually come out. Especially when considering speculation from Sam himself.

There's barely any credible information about GPT4 (i.e. OpenAI hasn't said very much about what's going on behind the curtain) and there's absolutely none re: any releases beyond that.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#49

Post by poopypoopington » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

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

I've heard Altman (on the Lex Friedman podcast) and Sundar Pichai (on the Hard Fork podcast) say things to this degree. The thing that OpenAI really managed to crack was building a great product in ChatGPT and finding a good product market fit for LLMs.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#50

Post by version_five » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

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 in western europe