Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

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

#541

Post by ilamont »

mplanchard wrote: post #368
fblp wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it! Any recommendations on who to subscribe to? Any personal links for you? In developer communities often you can support individual developers or groups through a monthly subscription / donation on their github page or similar.

Well, this piece was in The New Yorker, which is reasonably priced and regularly includes excellent investigative journalism. I get the physical copies, which can be too much to keep up with if you try to read everything, but it’s easy enough if you skim and just read the things that stick out as being of particular interest.

The New Yorker also comes with Apple News+ subscriptions (part of an Apple One plan that many people get for extra iCloud storage) which further includes a number of top-tier and local news orgs such as the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Times of London, etc.

The Sam Altman piece can be read here: https://apple.news/APTX4OkywRWeJXIL7b8a7zQ

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

#542

Post by fgfarben »

stonyrubbish wrote: post #288
shruggedatlas wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many pa…

I love reading posts like this. When you were a child, learning math or grammar, do you not remember bouncing off the walls of incorrect answers, eventually landing on a trajectory down the corridor of the right answer? Or were you always instantly zero-shotting everything?

In my experience, this is exactly how language models solve hard new problems, and largely how I solve them too. Propose a new idea, see if it works, iterate if not, keep going until it works.

Of course you can see how to solve a problem that you've seen before, like a visual puzzle about balanced parentheses. We're hyper specialized to visually identify asymmetries. LMs don't have eyes. Your mockery proves nothing.

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

#543

Post by azan_ »

ggregoire wrote: post #337
chromacity wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary That's actually the difference, most people don't want a billion

Yeah, sure…

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

#544

Post by tastyface »

arionhardison wrote: post #255
arionhardison wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: To all the downvotes; I did this publicly and not anon for a reason, if you will do the same I am more than willing to provide evidence for all of these claims as long as its done publicly and in the open.

PG said something along the lines of: "There should be no truth that is increasingly unpopular to speak." If you don't believe what I shared is true, address that directly. But seeing my post sitting at 1 point and [flagged] after 2 hours is not OK. Just as DJT can't flag away his issues, you shouldn't be able to do so on HN. One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability,…

I tried to respond to your comment with some personal observations on racist currents in this community, but my comment immediately got flagged. So yeah! This site ain't what it used to be. Best for the good folks to seek community elsewhere, I reckon. I miss the old days as well, but I don't think they're coming back.

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

#545

Post by OhioMan2943 »

fblp wrote: post #339
ronanfarrow wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Got it! Any recommendations on who to subscribe to? Any personal links for you? In developer communities often you can support individual developers or groups through a monthly subscription / donation on their github page or similar.

Drop Site News, 404 Media, Boston Review, The Intercept, and Atavist are all very worth supporting.

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

#547

Post by OhioMan2943 »

palmotea wrote: post #514
stingraycharles wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not difficult to find these, Aaron always said that Sam was not to be trusted.

Apparently Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman were classmates at the original 2005 Y Combinator class. This article has a picture of them literally standing next to each other: https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/throwback-photo-of-f... The OP says this: > The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word “sociopathic.” One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz,…

[flagged]

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

#548

Post by gpt5 »

red369 wrote: post #356
stavros wrote: post #239

I found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need humans any more. Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.

I also find that interesting. And not intending to defend the motives of anyone involved, but I'm hoping we can not worry about literally all jobs being destroyed, and AI companies amassing all the wealth in the world. Don't we need at least some humans working and earning to buy these AI services? Am I not being imaginative enough? Is it possible for the whole economy to consist just of AI selling services to each o…

Do you need ants buying services from humans for the world economy to function?

If AI will indeed become superintelligent, we won't matter.

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

#549

Post by rhubarbtree »

stevenwoo wrote: post #410
nafey wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope ronan farrow doesn't mind his article being shared like this

It’s also available via public libraries in USA via Libby if your local library system pays for a subscription, so it’s a way to support the magazine indirectly, since your local taxes pays for your library. The downside for weekly is you have to read it that week, no archive access.

Which edition? I looked at April 6th and can’t see the article.

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

#550

Post by physicsguy »

keldaris wrote: post #281
mliker wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

I've tried both against similar and haven't found it such a clear cut difference. I still find neither are able to fully implement a complex algorithm I worked on in the past correctly with the same inputs. Not sharing exactly the benchmark I'm using but think about something for improving performance of N^2 operations that are common in physics and you can probably guess the train of thought.
Post reply on HN