Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted? • Hacker News Board

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

#841

Post by sambuccid » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

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…

I think sometimes you have to look at the patterns rather than at the single claim. If a large amount of people, that are completely unrelated, tell you very similar experiences they had with Altman, you can take that as a good indicator of his general character.

And if this tendency to misunderstand/be misunderstood always results it Altman gaining more power, even if we give him the reason of the doubt and say that doesn't do it on purpose, it's still a big problem, given the responsibility he has.

The article also mentions many moments where apparently Altman straight out lied, as opposed to being "very persuasive, if you believe those sources then I don't think it's also possible to think he's sincere. I cannot open the article again to get the exact quotes, but the few I remember were: - one time he was claiming he didn't send a message, while people were literally showing him the message he sent, with the confirmation of another OpenAI employee - another time when he accused people of organising a coup, and that someone from the board informed him, and after the person from the board was called in the meeting Altman claimed he never said those words and never accused anyone

These cases can't be put to persuasion, that Altman changed their view, or that someone misremembered, they either happened or they didn't

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

#842

Post by tim333 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

einrealist wrote: post #198

I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of…

I don't think anyone does claim they are superhumanly intelligent today in any general way? The question is how they will do in the future.

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

#843

Post by kranke155 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

fwipsy wrote: post #505

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…

My model is that Anthropic was founded by OpenAI engineers who self-selected for safety-consciousness. However, it's still subject to the same problem: power corrupts. I think they are better than OpenAI but they are definitely sliding.

Eventually something like what happened with the DOW might happen again (hope not) and the IPO will leave them beholden to shareholders.

If the leadership doesn’t bend it might get replaced. It’s annoying. I think Claude is atm the best AI assistant, by far.

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

#844

Post by throwaway132448 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

n4r9 wrote: post #839

throwaway132448 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem with Altman isn't that he's "furthering his own interests". It's the deceitful behaviour he employs in the process.

There’s been enough divergence between words and actions from Amodei for me to also consider him deceitful, if that’s really the low bar you want to set. I’m not saying he’s worse than Altman, just to be clear.

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

#845

Post by tim333 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

Aboutplants wrote: post #22

Seeing Sam Altman slowly degrade into the realization that he is in fact not as smart as others in this space has been fascinating to watch. He used to speak with enthusiasm and confidence and now he’s like a scared little boy who got in way too deep. The last person that this happened to was Sam Bankman Fried as investors and regular folk finally realized he was full of complete shit and could only talk the game for…

They were both pretty smart in certain ways. Altman's very good at being manipulative and raising money though seems so so on the tech. Bankman Fried was smart at crypto and the like but ethically challenged on the don't steal your customer's money part.

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

#846

Post by chpatrick » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

davebren wrote: post #406

chpatrick wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a boring cliche by now. "thinking" and "knowing what it's doing" are totally vague statements that we barely understand about the human mind but in every comment section about AI people definitively state that LLMs don't do them, whatever they are.

This is the epitome of learned helplessness, that you need a neuroscience paper to tell you what thinking and knowledge is when you experience it directly all the time, and can't tell that an LLM doesn't have it. Something is extremely evil about these ideologies that are teaching people that they are NPCs.

I know I'm thinking, I have no idea if you're thinking, or if you're a human or an LLM. But I wouldn't assume you aren't thinking just from reading your output.

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

#847

Post by rexpop » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #371

rexpop wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, we did what with the word "racist"?

> we did what with the word "racist"? “Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in.” The next sentence.

Yeah, no shit. I was hoping for more specificity.

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

#848

Post by chpatrick » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

stonyrubbish wrote: post #313

chpatrick wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a boring cliche by now. "thinking" and "knowing what it's doing" are totally vague statements that we barely understand about the human mind but in every comment section about AI people definitively state that LLMs don't do them, whatever they are.

They aren't so vague that you would argue the parrot is thinking.

Why not?

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

#849

Post by travisjungroth » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

ipsum2 wrote: post #836

rupi wrote: post #498

Ronan Farrow, the write of this article, made a comment in this thread that is buried in all the comments, "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 th…

I don't get why writers do this. It makes sense for fiction, but why a factual, non-fiction article?

It keeps it shorter.

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

#850

Post by abustamam » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #817

abustamam wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an MCU fan. And while I do agree quality has gone down, I think it's hard to ignore the fact that the MCU did something really novel. They made a franchise that spanned 20+ movies and tied it up in a way that was almost universally loved by nerds and normies alike. Are there a lot of plot holes and retcons? Yeah. And some bad writing. And the movies that came after have been pretty meh with some exceptions. But f…

The issue with marvel really is that it took another 20+ movies worth of unique ip or stories that could have been told out the window. Yeah, highest grossing of all time, but that has been marching up the whole time too, no? Especially selling to china now. Studios would have made the same money I’m guessing spread out over other IP.

> Studios would have made the same money I’m guessing spread out over other IP.

I'm not sure if I fully buy that, and these days, much of what comes out of Hollywood are remakes or adaptation no one wants. There's still some gems, but I find personally I'm not interested in a lot of what comes out these days.