581–590 of 1001 posts
Without having read the article, reacting on the headline: no single person should be allowed to control our future. Democracy is a thing in large parts of the world, and we should try very hard to keep that functioning and even improve it.
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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…
Gobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone's wondering. Fantastic reporting.
As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.
Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
Long time HN lurker, made an account just to say that :)
Without having read the article, reacting on the headline: no single person should be allowed to control our future. Democracy is a thing in large parts of the world, and we should try very hard to keep that functioning and even improve it.
People are voting with their wallets
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Exactly. They share the cultural sensibilities of the average person on the street, and yet they're making decisions that will shape the world for future generations. I think that's bad. I want those decisions being made by people who have a more extensive cultural education. Snobs, if you want to call them that.
Interestingly, the smartest people I know have the widest range of media consumption and understanding. To assume that because someone uses a marvel reference they might not have a deeper cultural education is rather...limited thinking.
As someone experienced with a privileged elite educational background, I can guarantee that intellectuals love the highbrow and lowbrow, the authentic and the kitsch; rather, it is a sign that someone is not acculturated if they have the stereotypical impression of the intelligentsia, which makes the OC's comment ironic, they are telling on themselves.
It'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.
Which is a shame, as it seems to me that the overwhelming risk of AI is from the latter scenario, and not as a rogue individual entity.
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I think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Nevertheless, the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altma…
> the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem is that it's impossible. There isn't time or space to present all the information; the journalist has to filter. And filtering is never unbiased. Even the attempt to be "balanced" is a bias…
The journalists credibility is doing quite a bit of lifting here as we have to trust that they put in the effort. One such example is the molesting accusations which the reporters say they heavily looked into and were not able to find any corroborating evidence.
> You never actually get a real picture of the facts. Yes, it is a fundamental impossibility in lots of cases. That's why we trust the reporters that they did as good a job as they could to present all pertinent information.
> That title is an editorial ... I do not perceive it to be editorialised. It states an arguably real possibility that Altman may/does have lots of real power. I am guessing that you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an editorialisation that points towards him being untrustworthy. If that is the case, I think those would be your biases knowing that he is probably not trustworthy. I see it just as an objective question.
Imagine a different situation: you have local elections into your small town. There is a new mayor candidate and during the next term, there will be some money to be given to residents for renovations and such, but not enough for everyone. You don't know this candidate. A local reporter, whom you trust, writes an article "New mayor candidate favoured in polls - will he be fair with the renovation money?". It is a piece trying to shed light on who this candidate is as a person, what was his life before moving into your village, etc. so that voters like you can decide whether to give him your vote. It is not editorialised, as it does not point either way.