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

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

#661

Post by bombcar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #413
root_axis wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good... Until they find themselves working somewhere else, then suddenly they have a lot to say about the unacceptable things going on there. From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice fol…

> every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good This isn't remotely true in my experience. The senior folks I know at Meta, for example, pretty much concede they're ersatz drug dealers.

It should perhaps be generalized as "employees usually match the general consensus of their peer-group". Before everyone considered Meta to be ersatz drug dealers, they'd report that they feel what everyone feels.

Google was "do no evil" until they had to choose between that and making the money. The culture has to be not only professed but tested.

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

#662

Post by Hikikomori »

jedberg wrote: post #612
Hikikomori wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palantir was using anthropic and its use is being replaced by openai.

Yes but not for the system that decided to bomb a school. That was a Palanter in house system.

Afaik the palantir system utilized ai.

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

#664

Post by AdamN »

throwaway132448 wrote: post #646
laylower wrote: post #627

Reading this makes me even happier to pay for Anthropic. Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out. " “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amod…

If you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.

I can go with the thesis that individuals need community control (boards, regulations, laws) in order to be accountable but is there some specific evidence that Amodei is the same? It seems like a "both sides" argument.

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

#665

Post by sunkeeh »

throwaway132448 wrote: post #646
laylower wrote: post #627

Reading this makes me even happier to pay for Anthropic. Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out. " “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amod…

If you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.

The only foundation model CEOs I trust are Demis and Yann

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

#667

Post by kasey_junk »

lhl wrote: post #495
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 some other people mentioned, using both/multiple is the way to go if it's within your means. I've been working on a wide range of relatively projects and I find that the latest GPT-5.2+ models seem to be generally better coders than Opus 4.6, however the latter tends to be better at big picture thinking, structuring, and communicating so I tend to iterate through Opus 4.6 max -> GPT-5.2 xhigh -> GPT-5.3-Codex xhig…

Codex won me over with one simple thing. Reliability. It crashed less, had less load shedding and its configuration is well designed.

I do regular evaluation of both codex and Claude (though not to statistical significance) and I’m of the opinion there is more in group variance on outcome performance than between them.

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

#668

Post by palata »

simonh wrote: post #648
palata wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some sort of special tax? Well yeah. After some amount, you get 100% taxes. So that instead of having billionaires who compete against each other on how rich they are or on the first one to go contaminate the surface of Mars or simply on power, maybe we would end up with people trying to compete on something actually constructive :-). Who knows, maybe even philanthropy!

So, who owns and runs the companies? How do new companies get formed? I'm not against higher taxation of the wealthy. I think inequality is a serious problem. The issue is what the wealth of these people isn't a big pile of cash they are wallowing in, it's ownership of the companies they build and operate. Is that what we want to take away? How, and what would we do with it? I think it makes more sense to tax it as t…

> I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is converted into cash

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And those are all good questions of course :-).

> So, who owns and runs the companies?

I guess ownership stays the same, we just need to prevent the companies from growing too big. Because the bigger they are, the more powerful their leaders get, for once (aside from all the problems coming from monopolies). But by taxing them, we prevent the people owning those companies from owning 15 yachts and going to space for breakfast :D.

> How do new companies get formed?

I don't know if that's what you mean, but I often hear "if you prevent those visionaries from becoming crazy rich, nobody will build anything, ever". And I disagree. A ton of people like to build stuff knowing they won't get rich. Usually those people have better incentives (it's hard to have a worse incentive than "becoming rich and powerful", right?).

Some people say "we need to pay so much for this CEO, because otherwise he will go somewhere else and we won't have a competent CEO". I think this is completely flawed. You will always find someone competent to be the CEO of a company with a reasonable salary. Maybe that person will not work 23h a day, maybe they won't harass their workers, sure. But will it be worse in the end? The current situation is that such tech companies are "part of the problem, not of the solution" (the problem being, currently, that we are failing to just survive on Earth).

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

#670

Post by VladVladikoff »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

Please ask The New Yorker to extend some of their very generous subscription sale prices to Canada, I would subscribe to print if even a single sale applied to us, but all the sales are always USA only.
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