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

751–760 of 1001 posts

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

#751

Post by cm2012 »

f154hfds wrote: post #404
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

> in 2014, [Graham] had recruited Altman to be his successor as president. > [Graham's] judgment was based not on Altman’s track record, which was modest, but on his will to prevail, which Graham considered almost ungovernable. One thing I don't understand is why Paul Graham offered YC to Altman if he knew how slippery he was..

Paul answers that here: https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353?s=20

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

#752

Post by nickthegreek »

ta8903 wrote: post #649
dang wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a mod here and wanted to let you know 2 things: (1) I've marked your account with a beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page). It might help you keep track of this rather large thread.* (2) I'm sorry the post was downranked off the frontpage for a while this afternoon. A software penalty kicks in when the discussion seems overheated ("flamewar detector"…

>beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page) Can't wait until this is released!

If you don't want to wait, the refined HN extension has had this feature for a long time, but it is device specific.

https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

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

#753

Post by throw4847285 »

geokon wrote: post #442
throw4847285 wrote: post #66

A new Ronan Farrow piece is a rare gift (and Marantz is no slouch). Can't wait to read this in the physical magazine when it arrives!

I hadn't heard of him before. The wiki article is worth a look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Farrow It's got to be one of the most unusual biographies of a living person that I've ever come across. Nearly every sentence is a head-turner. If you made it up no one would believe you

Truly a unique individual on every level.

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

#754

Post by cm2012 »

Lerc wrote: post #395
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

From time to time I have been accused of being an apologist for Sam Altman, but I have always tried to assess information based upon what it says instead of whether it matches an existing narrative. You list a number of distortions in your article which show the problem. If you are a good person, bad stories about you may be fake. If you are a bad person, bad stories about you may still be fake. My prima facie view o…

Paul made a statement today: https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353?s=20

It clarifies he did not fire Sam

I overall agree with your takeaway, but this is not a criticism of the article itself.

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

#755

Post by giwook »

Lerc wrote: post #395
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

From time to time I have been accused of being an apologist for Sam Altman, but I have always tried to assess information based upon what it says instead of whether it matches an existing narrative. You list a number of distortions in your article which show the problem. If you are a good person, bad stories about you may be fake. If you are a bad person, bad stories about you may still be fake. My prima facie view o…

> My prima facie view on Altman has been that he presents as sincere.

That is how pathological liars present.

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

#756

Post by Razengan »

mliker wrote: post #91
unsupp0rted wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a better product. No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.

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

I have been using Codex AND Claude side by side for the same project*, with the same prompts.

Codex has been consistently better on almost every level.

* (an open source framework for 2D games in Godot 4.6 GDScript, mostly using AI to review existing code)

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

#757

Post by elAhmo »

andrewrn wrote: post #407

“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice” You can subtly see residue of this frustration in Dalton and Michael’s…

Quite interesting to see that PG basically indirectly enabled all of this by putting Sam in the position of a president of YC.

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

#758

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

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 don't know if he is a racist or not, but forget HN. Last couple years it has gone on the deep end, not sure if delusion or $ interests, but it is impossible to have a decent conversation here. I think the only reason this article stayed up is because OAI is starting to be a bit 'toxic' now, but if this was published a year ago, it would have been flagged to oblivion.

So just ignore those points and flags. HN *used* to be a nice place for intelectual conversations, even if you disagreed with each other. Now is nothing more than bots, people with financial interests in this bubble or sycophants.

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

#759

Post by MichaelDickens »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #304
philip1209 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe people inside the company think Anthropic behaves ethically, which says something scary about either their ethical standards or their general awareness, considering how much documented unethical behavior we've seen from Anthropic leadership.[1]

[1] "Unless Its Governance Changes, Anthropic Is Untrustworthy" https://anthropic.ml/

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

#760

Post by whamlastxmas »

fontain wrote: post #378
taurath wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated? Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It…

I am very sympathetic to the situation you describe. I certainly think it is possible that Annie is describing something that happened. I think the author did a fair job of representing the allegations, finding the right balance between disclosing that they were unable to corroborate the allegations without dismissing them. That said, "recovering" memories as a therapy does not pass any sort of sniff test and it does…

What's the evidence that Annie is rich?
Post reply on HN