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Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

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Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#491

Post by robocat »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #266

CEOs are professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft, they use their communications to achieve an end, expressing their inner selves is not the point. You might know a great kind person who is a car salesman, when they are at work a good one comes off as genuine and friendly, the things they're saying include many truths, but their words and actions are primarily designed to sell cars.…

> CEOs are professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft

But Sam the CEO has totally failed to manage the narrative throughout this episode. [A CEO needs to communicate better]

Surely he could have stated it was a disagreement in direction? Instead he left it open to rumours: rumours which mostly assumed the board had good reason to sack him (everyone presumed the board couldn't be that stupid plus he didn't defend himself). : Many of those rumours were extremely damaging to Sam. Even if he couldn't say a thing, he could have got other third parties to endorse him.

Nadella and Eric came out looking pretty good.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#492

Post by Waterluvian »

snickerbockers wrote: post #463
Waterluvian wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a really good example of not being explicitly supportive. It’s an objective statement. If I said “Roy Sullivan is the best in the world at being struck by lightning” it may implicitly feel like I’m rooting for him. But I’m just stating a fact. What would count? “I think Roy Sullivan is the man to be struck an eighth time. He’s the best at it. I hope he succeeds.”

So the statement is that Sam Altman is the best person in the world at getting fired?

Not sure. But it’s different from saying they support Altman’s endeavour in being the best at it.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#493

Post by twoodfin »

theschmed wrote: post #489
twoodfin wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird: The most relevant hn post on Altman’s departure from YC is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342184 But despite comments to the effect that the YC post indicated Sam’s departure, it doesn’t seem to say anything about it right now?

Nor in 2022 when it was first archived by Wayback (unless archives from previous have been removed) https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.ycom...

But this contemporaneous TechCrunch article—which is clearly talking about the same blog post—says it did!

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/y-combinator-president-sam...

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#494

Post by paulcole »

imjonse wrote: post #398
QuadrupleA wrote: post #376

From Paul Graham's Twitter, three days ago: "No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation." Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back." Also from a sibling comment: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg…

Paul's tweet is an objective statement, it does not say anything about character or values and is not explicitly supportive.

> No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation

This is clearly entirely subjective. To prove otherwise, feel free to show me the list ranking how people in the world would deal with this kind of situation and explain why Sam Altman ends up on top of that list.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#495

Post by tsavo »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #469
QuadrupleA wrote: post #376

From Paul Graham's Twitter, three days ago: "No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation." Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back." Also from a sibling comment: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg…

I sometimes think that at this level of the game everyone hates everyone else and its all politics. You don't "come out" for or against anyone publicly, you leave all of that under cover. It makes knowing who your friends and enemies are more difficult and it restricts your ability to maneuver. Another quote from my grandfather was "Mutual respect does not require that you like someone."

A similar saying that I learned from a business mentor years ago, "Just because someone is nice to you doesn't make them your friend, just because someone is mean to you doesn't make them your enemy."

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#496

Post by [deleted] »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #477
ketzo wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…you think calling someone “the best in the world” is a) purely factual b) not supportive Uh, what on earth would count as explicitly supportive language?

Any person that gets to this position must be good at some things. Acknowledging it does not mean supporting the person. It is just a factual statement. Even Adolf Hitler was good at certain things like manipulating masses of people. Saying this absolutely does not mean I support Hitler. It is just a factual statement.

[deleted]

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#497

Post by klik99 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #469
QuadrupleA wrote: post #376

From Paul Graham's Twitter, three days ago: "No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation." Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back." Also from a sibling comment: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg…

I sometimes think that at this level of the game everyone hates everyone else and its all politics. You don't "come out" for or against anyone publicly, you leave all of that under cover. It makes knowing who your friends and enemies are more difficult and it restricts your ability to maneuver. Another quote from my grandfather was "Mutual respect does not require that you like someone."

Def not true. People who operate at this level can separate business and friendship. But occasionally when big enough deals fall through it can damage long term friendships, but it's not common. PG firing sama and keeping it secret sounds like PG likes and respects sama but didn't think he should run YC. If he didn't like sama he could have done a lot more damage by making it more public.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#498

Post by adrr »

jstarfish wrote: post #406
adrr wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he miss? Sam was fired.

This subthread isn't about the article; we're on a tangent about OpenAI. He was fired [at] and didn't die. Now he's back, and looking for revenge.

Board hired him back. They could have said no and stuck to their guns. No shareholders to give them the boot.

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#499

Post by civilitty »

lordfrito wrote: post #334
fevangelou wrote: post #96

It's oh so weird the article does not mention any of these though... - https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232... (SA's sister - also have a look at her recent posts) - Also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman... (utterly distressing) - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1727096607752282485 (check the comment with snapshots of the letter - "strangely" that Gist was dele…

Also he does seem to have "crazy eyes" [1].... Yeah it's not entirely scientific but a lot of manipulative exec types have them. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind... [1] https://www.insider.com/you-can-spot-psychopaths-by-looking-...

Paging your friendly neighborhood phrenologist! Have you measured the shape of Altman's head yet?

Re: Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor

#500

Post by mandevil »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #317
selimthegrim wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I objected to his choice of Rickover as a role model in a FB comment thread and apparently he had a mutual friend with me so he jumped in complaining that the reporter hadn’t captured everything accurately (not quite to the point of “did me dirty”)

What's wrong with Rickover as a role model? If he'd been able to do for the civilian nuclear power sector what he did for the Navy, a lot of things would be a lot better now.

Rickover effectively seized control of the entire USN submarine arm and ran it as a personal fief for three decades. I don't think that could possibly work with civilian power in the US, because it's NOT a military organization and can't be changed by top-down mandate.

A 1978 USNI Proceedings essay on NR and leadership[1], which won a bunch of prizes, had this great description of Rickover's micromanagement: "Each nuclear submarine is commanded by two people: its captain and the Di­rector, Division of Naval Reactors [Rickover]. The captain has full responsibility for the military operations of his ship as well as for power plant safety. He also has full authority over the military op­erations. NR has much of the authority over the power plant; its Director has been known to place a call to a sub­marine’s engineering space telephone and then personally direct the com­manding officer how to organize his watch bill."

That level of micromanagement wasn't great inside the US Navy, a military organization (hence the essay) and would have spectacularly bombed and flamed out in the civil power world and is also not a great idea for the commercial world at large. This is why taking Rickover as a model is something that you should do very very carefully. He did some things right, but a whole lot of things can't be brought over to your company, in a way that suggests using him as a baseline takes you further away from a good answer.

I wrote a paper decades ago comparing Rickover and Jackie Fisher- of HMS Dreadnought/HMS Invincible fame- as technological entrepreneur's introducing new technology into their respective fleets. And one lesson I took away was that both of them took a whole lot of advantage of being in a military service where they could issue orders and have them be legally obeyed in a way that commercial people just can't get away with. Employees will just leave your company if you tried a bunch of the crap that Rickover did.

[1]: A badly OCR'd version of the essay is available here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1978/july/leaders... The author, then Lt Ralph Chatham, would go on to have the first ever novel published by the US Naval Institute Press dedicated to him. "To Ralph Chatham, a sub driver who spoke the truth" is how Tom Clancy's _Hunt for Red October_ begins.

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