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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?

#871

Post by ahahahahah »

vlovich123 wrote: post #475

> Chesky stayed in contact with the tech journalist Kara Swisher, relaying criticism of the board. Ronan interesting writing as always. I’m curious if the role of the media as a pawn of the rich and powerful to sway perception and build narratives concerns you, especially given your personal experiences with this and the reporting you’ve done. Are there reforms you think reporters and/or news organizations should ado…

Yep, and see https://disconnect.blog/kara-swishers-story-about-sam-altman...

> When Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI on November 17, 2023, Kara Swisher started tweeting up a storm of “scoopage,” as she referred to her calls with high-ranking tech figures. Over the days Altman was on the outside, Swisher helped to craft a narrative that a board stacked with his internal rivals had pulled off a coup without a legitimate reason. The face of the AI boom had been betrayed and deserved to retake his position at the helm.

> She’s chosen a few CEOs to more regularly criticize now that they don’t give her the access she craves, but there are many more whose narratives she will happily help turn into the official record whenever it will help them. Altman is in that group, and six months after his removal and return as CEO of OpenAI, it’s become very apparent that Swisher was echoing the Altman line and defending his interests.

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

#872

Post by keldaris »

physicsguy wrote: post #550
keldaris wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a scientist (computational physicist, so plenty of math, but also plenty of code, from Python PoCs to explicit SIMD and GPU code, mostly various subsets of C/C++), I can confirm - Codex is qualitatively better for my usecases than Claude. I keep retesting them (not on benchmarks, I simply use both in parallel for my work and see what happens) after every version update and ever since 5.2 Codex seems further and fu…

I've tried both against similar and haven't found it such a clear cut difference. I still find neither are able to fully implement a complex algorithm I worked on in the past correctly with the same inputs. Not sharing exactly the benchmark I'm using but think about something for improving performance of N^2 operations that are common in physics and you can probably guess the train of thought.

I've had reasonable success using GPT for both neighbor list and Barnes-Hut implementations (also quad/oct-trees more generally), both of which fit your description, haven't tried Ewald summation or PME / P3M. However, when I say "reasonable success", I don't mean "single shot this algo with a minimal prompt", only that the model can produce working and decently optimized implementations with fairly precise guidance from an experienced user (or a reference paper sometimes) much faster than I would write them by hand. I expect a good PME implementation from scratch would make for a pretty decent benchmark.

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

#873

Post by keldaris »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #703
keldaris wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a scientist (computational physicist, so plenty of math, but also plenty of code, from Python PoCs to explicit SIMD and GPU code, mostly various subsets of C/C++), I can confirm - Codex is qualitatively better for my usecases than Claude. I keep retesting them (not on benchmarks, I simply use both in parallel for my work and see what happens) after every version update and ever since 5.2 Codex seems further and fu…

Have you tried the latest (3.1 pro) Gemini? In my experience, it's notably better for a similar type of problems than Opus 4.6. However, I don't really use OpenAI products to compare.

I actually haven't - I tried Gemini 3.0 Pro in Antigravity and was disappointed enough that I didn't pay much attention to the 3.1 release, it was notably worse than Opus and GPT at the time, and much more prone to "think" in circles or veer off into irrelevant tangents even with fairly precise instruction. I'll give 3.1 a try tomorrow, see what happens.

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

#874

Post by bookofjoe »

throw4847285 wrote: post #73
bookofjoe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is above your comment: https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.c...

I suspect that they are perfectly capable of clicking an archive link or better yet logging in as they are already a subscriber. Maybe, like me, they enjoy reading the physical magazine.

I LOVED the physical magazine, read every word, from the time I started subscribing as a college freshman in 1966 until they started to pile up unread around 2015. Nearly 50 years seems like a good run.

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

#875

Post by pdonis »

kubik369 wrote: post #590
pdonis wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> "Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". I agree with you that this seems to be the idea people have when "balanced" is mentioned. I don't think this is correct. You can easily have a balanced article which has lots of evidence pointing one way or the other. I think that this article is like that. Boatload of pointers towards Altman being a sly person with reporters asking him about…

> I am guessing that you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an editorialisation

Yes.

> that points towards him being untrustworthy.

That points towards the article itself raising a question--which means the article should argue for an answer one way or the other. To ask the question in the title and then not argue for an answer in the article is a cop-out. It's trying to have it both ways.

An article that was simply going to report what was found factually, with no editorialization, would be better done with a title something like "Sam Altman: A look at the career of a key person in AI".

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

#876

Post by mplanchard »

xnx wrote: post #350
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 (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long For anyone unfamiliar with this process, the New Yorker documentary is well worth the watch: https://www.netflix.com/title/81770824

Thanks for sharing! I saw the 100 years exhibit in person, which was really interesting. I was especially moved by the display of and context around the Hiroshima issue. I didn’t know there was also a documentary, and I’m excited to see it

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

#877

Post by ricksunny »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #829
ricksunny wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm all ears: 1. Feel free to share why unmasking Banksy was in the public interest 2. Whether you feel all other public interest priorities had been served by investigative reporting prior to commissioning his unmasking.

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

#878

Post by jjallen »

throwaway132448 wrote: post #810
jjallen wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company, founded another one, that one’s models refused to do things that the previous company would do, then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it. Not small differences to me.

> I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company Problematic why though? For the reasons publicly stated? Then why isn’t Anthropic just what OpenAI was “supposed” to be then? We know what that was from their charter, and Anthropic is not that. > then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it You’re sure about that are you? I don’t…

Yes I am sure of the second part based on the government’s own publicly available tweets and lawsuits that have been filed.

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

#879

Post by ahepp »

throwaway132448 wrote: post #812
AdamN wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t need to convince you, we’ve been through enough cults of personality, time will tell. But I’ve been right enough times to back myself. Maybe it’s because I grew up around a lot of people like them? They can’t hide that they would say whatever they think you want to hear. Actually it’s funny: Their lack of empathy/emotional intelligence would also make them susceptible to thinking that talking to an LLM is lik…

Behold! Plato's man

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

#880

Post by olalonde »

tim333 wrote: post #840
olalonde wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The non-profit still exists and has the for profit as a subsiduary.

It owns only like 25% of the for-profit and was essentially stripped off of all its assets (IP, trademarks, employees, etc.).
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