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

newyorker.com

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

#821

Post by globalnode »

embedding-shape wrote: post #656
globalnode wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at this point even googles ai search results are better than gpt - obv. this is not for full programs but if you know what youre doing and just want a snippet, thats all you need.

Wild how different experience people can have. Both Google's models and Anthrophic's hallucinate a lot for me, even when I try the expensive plans and with web searches, for some reason, and none of them come close to the accuracy and hallucination-free responses of ChatGPT Pro, which to me still is SOTA and has been since it was made available. But people keep having opposite experiences apparently, I just can't mak…

oh thats probably because im a cheap-skate and just use the free garbo models. im sure the pro version is quite good.

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

#822

Post by empath75 »

rglullis wrote: post #639
Lerc wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> what information would significantly change your views Quite simple: show me any single action took by Sam Altman which can not be construed as an attempt to get him more power/money/influence. You can't find it. The difference between what he claims to believe and what he actually does is a textbook example of sociopathy.

When people are described as sociopathic it’s not about any particular lie, but the relationship that the person has with the truth, which is that they will lie when it suits them and tell the truth when it suits them and they don’t seem to distinguish morally between them. And more than that, they treat people the same way, and will use them while it suits them and then dispose of them when they are inconvenient.

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

#823

Post by batshit_beaver »

olalonde wrote: post #735
locust101 wrote: post #605

It’s hard to know what’s the new information here. Altman’s history has been reported on exhaustively. Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments, non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners, saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But as…

I still don't understand how the transformation from non-profit to for-profit was possible legally.

Anything is possible with a big enough bank account.

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

#824

Post by Arch-TK »

dns_snek wrote: post #554
throwway120385 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if your motivation is some utopian vision of the future, you should not be trusted. Utopia is a thought experiment in a philosophy of living taken too far, not something to be reached for earnestly.

Why is it that criticism of people's insatiable greed for wealth and power often gets dismissed with this thought-terminating cliche about utopias? Desire to live in a society that's less greedy, that rewards compassion and punishes sociopathy is completely valid. We should be pursuing that earnestly because survival of our species depends on it. The people in charge are so drunk on wealth and power that they would r…

The criticism is not of the idea that the world has problems, and that we should look at those problems with the aim of fixing them.

The criticism is of the assumption that a world without problems theoretically could exist.

You may disagree, but you will not find a definition of such a world that everyone can agree on.

Regardless, of whether you agree (that such a definition doesn't exist) or not, if you do plan on bringing about such a utopia, and you begin to meet resistance, the question you will inevitably need to answer is: How do those who resist fit into this utopia?

The historical answer for this question, which by all appearances seems like an inevitable answer, is the reason why people criticise utopian thinking.

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

#825

Post by interstice »

profdevloper wrote: post #780
interstice wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also mentioned was that more evidence is not hard to find

If this is noteworthy, the burden of proof should be on the poster, not the reader to substantiate these claims.

I don't really like this take, as it tries to make being informed somehow not the readers responsibility.

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

#826

Post by 4k93n2 »

arionhardison wrote: post #112

Hi @ronanfarrow — I have only had one interaction with Sam Altman in person, and I was advised to keep it to myself. I know this crowd may not care, but Altman is absolutely terrified of Black people — not in any contextual sense, but in a visceral, instinctive way. For someone who, as you put it, "controls our future," this should matter. FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts…

well, just based off that group photo of the openclaw developer and the staff at openai, i wouldnt be surprised if there was some truth to this

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

#828

Post by tyleo »

cm2012 wrote: post #764
strgrd wrote: post #688

I remember reading these direct quotes from SA in 2016 from the New Yorker and thinking, yeah, this guy is just miserable: > “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N…

This doesn't seem like someone who's miserable at all to me. They seem like someone who has a wide variety of hobbies and is and is intellectually interested in futurism

Yeah, I have an half baked thought about billionaires like this that they truly want the best for this world even if they have to seek it by immoral means.

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

#829

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

ricksunny wrote: post #436
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…

Treating quality investigative reporting like the scarce resource that it is, as one of the most well-known can you shed any light on why Reuters would delegate resources to commission investigative reporters to unmask Banksy (in a world where all-things-Epstein represents an unending source of investigative opportunities in the public interest)?

Because "the public interest" is more widely defined than you think.

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

#830

Post by eieio »

next_xibalba wrote: post #819
ronanfarrow wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ... where every word is chosen carefully... In light of that... > "Texts from this period show Altman coördinating closely with Nadella" Why did you make the odd choice of a diaresis on this word?

if this isn’t a joke - new yorker style uses a diaresis when a word has a repeated vowel where the second vowel is part of a different syllable. coördinate, coöperate, and reëlect are probably the most common places where this comes up

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

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