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The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#41

Post by zero_shift »

miltonlost wrote: post #35
fairity wrote: post #14

Words are cheap. I really wish there was a way to incentivize authors like this to put their money where their mouth is, before seeking attention for their ideas.

What's your complaint about this article? I wish there were a way to incentivize comments to put effort into specific criticism, before seeking attention for their ideas.

I'm not aiming this at GP specifically, but there seems to be a culture around gen AI that the burden of proof is on sceptics, not the people claiming we're about to invent God

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#42

Post by lkbm »

zelag wrote: post #9
hiddencost wrote: post #2

Why. Do. We. Keep. Posting. Gary. Marcus. He's been writing variants of this kind of thing for decades and he's always been wrong.

Gary Marcus is not the only one that has been critical of Sam Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0K4XPu3Qhg There's many other people but most of them are independent. It is glaringly obvious now most of the media outlets are afraid to ask the tough questions.

Sure, but why post Gary Marcus then?

That said, MPU has been pretty solidly crazy with their LLM critiques lately (did you know it uses all the drinking water?!?!?). There are plenty of sane, grounded-in-reality critiques. Why not focus on those?

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#44

Post by cadamsdotcom »

hatefulheart wrote: post #32
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Sam Altman despite his flaws played a key role in kickstarting the capital war that’s led to the insane investment in infrastructure that’ll carry us to a new age once the hype dies down. He created and continues to create an atmosphere for innovation inside OpenAI that showed the way for the fast-followers. He lit a fire under the ass of Google for gods sake. Whatever he did or…

“Whatever he did or didn’t invent, he made a ton of invention possible.“ I think it’s time to pony up. Where are your vibe coded databases that take on SQLite and Postgres? Where are your vibe coded Operating Systems? Where are your vibe coded browsers? Where are your vibe coded literally anything?

My pony’s doing just fine.

At a friend’s birthday last year, I wrote in the space of 8 minutes - then performed - a 3-minute long verse about said friend and their puppy. I didn’t get the verse from ChatGPT. I had it help me find rhyming words that fit the rhythm, had it help me find synonyms, and find punchy ends to sentences.

I made a xylophone iphone app way back in mid 2024 by copy pasting code to Claude and errors from Xcode, just to show off what AI can do. Someone asked to make it support dragging your finger across the screen to play lots of notes really fast - Claude did that in one shot. In mid 2024, 6 months before Claude Code.

I made a sorting hat for my sisters’ kids for Christmas a few weeks ago. I found a voice cloning website, had Claude write some fun dialogue, and vibe coded an app with the generated recordings of the sorting hat voice saying various virtues and Harry Potter house names. The cloned voice was so good, it sounded exactly like the actor in the movie. I loaded the app on my phone and hid a Bluetooth speaker in a Santa hat - tapping a button in the app would play a voice recording from the sorting hat AI voice. The kids unwrapped the hat and it declared itself as the sorting hat. Put the hat on a kid’s head, tap a button, hat talks! With a little sleight of hand, the kids really believed it was the hat talking all by itself. Laughing together with my whole family as the hat declared my cheeky niece “Slytherin!!!” was one of the most humanising things I’ve ever seen.

I’ve made event posters for my Burning Man camp. Zillions of dumb memes for group chats. You always have to do some inpainting or touch it up in an image editor, but it’s worth it for the lulz.

And right now I’m using Claude Code for my startup, ApprovIQ. Dario Amodei was right in a way: 99% of the code was written by Claude.

But sorry, no multi million line vibe coded codebases. For that my friend, you’ll be waiting until after the next AI winter.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#45

Post by eyfuh »

vld_chk wrote: post #24

While general vibe of Sam and OpenAI losing steam is correct for me; I genially disagree with all “hate” of GPT-5. It was indeed not a crazy breakthrough, but, honestly, 5.2 model at extended thinking path in Pro version is utterly scary to me. I can give it some complicated multi-tier question which requires modeling, abstract thinking, computation, and rationality; it can walk away for 45 minutes, produce CoT with…

IME it still can’t answer “is the state of Oregon entirely north of New York City” correctly. It’s possible they hard coded it since I posted about it online. How do you reconcile its inability to answer this simple question with your rather optimistic view of its capabilities?

Edit: lmao at downvotes over discussion…well, I use burner accounts. You have no power here.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#46

Post by ctoth »

twoodfin wrote: post #17
fairity wrote: post #14

Words are cheap. I really wish there was a way to incentivize authors like this to put their money where their mouth is, before seeking attention for their ideas.

I’m guessing it’s hard to go short OpenAI without also going short a bunch of other companies riding the AI wave that aren’t led by Sam Altman? Would love to hear how that could work.

Hmm. Maybe he might do... a bet!

And then maybe he might ... change the bet! when he was about to lose?

Maybe!

Who's to say, really? Certainly not me! I'm just a neural network!

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#47

Post by codyklimdev »

dyauspitr wrote: post #39
codyklimdev wrote: post #3

I've been wondering for a while if Sam is going to become an Elizabeth Holmes style figure with all of his talk about "a magic intelligence in the sky" and that in 5 years AI will replace 95% of marketing work. It seems like he's set up impossible promises, it'll be interesting to see what comes from their non-delivery.

Pie in the sky is not the same as fraudulent claims about your product.

True but I think if Pie In The Sky marketing leads to a catastrophic market crash and an economic depression, Sam Altman does deserve to be held accountable in some respect

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#48

Post by orionsbelt »

codyklimdev wrote: post #47
dyauspitr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pie in the sky is not the same as fraudulent claims about your product.

True but I think if Pie In The Sky marketing leads to a catastrophic market crash and an economic depression, Sam Altman does deserve to be held accountable in some respect

I feel like we live in different worlds.

I use AI everyday and it already a magic intelligence in the sky to me.

If anything, the AI labs have been pretty dead on about their predictions so far.

How that will impact the economy and productivity is anyone’s guess, so I don’t think Sam pontificating about that in interviews holds him culpable for a crash.

I am hyped based on using the products, not what Sam says

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#49

Post by tucnak »

lkbm wrote: post #40
tucnak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just short Nvidia" Is this financial advice? :-)

If so, keep in mind that it's contingent advice. The question was how to profit from predicting an AI bubble popping [or something along those lines]. The answer is shorting Nvideo (assuming your prediction also includes a timeline). It's always a way to lose a massive amount of money if you're wrong, so the advice is also contingent on confidence level.

I'm not trying to be facetious here, but I think it's very naive to assume you get to "profit from predicting an AI bubble." In theory, maybe, but in reality you will lose money. Shorting is never the solution... it's a very niche tool for very niche group of investors.

When retail guys talk shorting, it's very hard to take them seriously.

Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

#50

Post by lkbm »

tucnak wrote: post #49
lkbm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, keep in mind that it's contingent advice. The question was how to profit from predicting an AI bubble popping [or something along those lines]. The answer is shorting Nvideo (assuming your prediction also includes a timeline). It's always a way to lose a massive amount of money if you're wrong, so the advice is also contingent on confidence level.

I'm not trying to be facetious here, but I think it's very naive to assume you get to "profit from predicting an AI bubble." In theory, maybe, but in reality you will lose money. Shorting is never the solution... it's a very niche tool for very niche group of investors. When retail guys talk shorting, it's very hard to take them seriously.

Retail guys generally think they can time the market based on vibes, rather than specific insider-y info. But if you (retail investor or not) have that specific insider-y info--something resulting in justified, high probability, time-bounded knowledge about a future change, shorting can be the rational decision.
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