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

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

#901

Post by trinsic2 » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:35 AM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #749

morpheuskafka wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a private company. They have zero obligation to sell anything to any part of the government or military. The only reason they are involved in "public affairs" is because they want to profit from the government. Moreover, long before this DoW controversy, they had plenty of nationalist and anti-China rhetoric in their press releases, more so than the other AI firms.

The other explanation besides profit is that they're true believers that democratic militaries should be stronger than the military of dictators around the world, including AI capabilities.

I appreciate your point about this. At the same time AI doesn't discriminate. Its going to help the democratic and the facist altogether.

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

#902

Post by trinsic2 » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:38 AM UTC

Nevermark wrote: post #325

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…

We should stop talking about potential problems or perpetrators, when we have talked about them “enough”? That would be irrational. We should give air time to other problems? I think everyone agrees with that. You have managed to distill a surprisingly pure vintage of false dichotomy, from a near Platonic varietal of whataboutism.

Fuck that. The whataboutism term is used to much to sideline an marginalize different view points. I really hate this use of it. We are too engaged in being right about everything.

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

#903

Post by 9rx » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:45 AM UTC

MattGrommes wrote: post #865

profdevloper wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe just Occam's Razor -- any time I've seen Sam talk in public he just seems to be a neurotic, anxious individual that would have a hard time interacting with people in any normal context. In a world of infinite variables it's hard to say that his aversion was due to your race -- there's really not much to go on here.

Why would you think Occam's Razor would not determine that racism is the reason? It's just as simple of an explanation as anxiety. I'm not sure some people understand how "normal" racism is.

Racism is a social bias that isn't "hardwired". It does not trigger the "fight or flight" response like was described in the earlier tale. Anxiety, of course, describes a "fight or flight" system that is malfunctioning. It is the most likely explanation because that is what was originally described. Mind you, the story could have been misrepresented. We do have to put our faith into what was written.

Another comment suggested that Altman was once beat up by a black man. If true, it is possible Sam has developed a conditioned response that associates black men with danger and his reaction stemmed from that. However, that isn't the same thing as racism and to try and categorize it as such would be quite disingenuous.

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

#904

Post by trinsic2 » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 4:04 AM UTC

laserlight wrote: post #553

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…

I have experience in dealing with Sam Altman-like behavior. I hope to explain how their tactics unfold. > I can see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than accept that they had been intellectually beaten. There are two angles to this: from an individual perspective and from a collective one. One's interaction with such a manipulator isn't a single shot. There is not a single event that they are “bea…

I want to add something about the idea of persuasion. Not that I think you are not doing the word justice or that you are for or against using the tactic.

Here is the etymological definition of the word:

persuasion(n.) late 14c., persuasioun, "action of inducing (someone) to believe (something) by appeals to reason (not by authority, force, or fear); an argument to persuade, inducement," from Old French persuasion (14c.) and directly from Latin persuasionem (nominative persuasio) "a convincing, persuading," noun of action from past-participle stem of persuadere "persuade, convince," from per "thoroughly, strongly" (see per) + suadere "to urge, persuade," from PIE root *swād- "sweet, pleasant" (see sweet (adj.)).

Meaning "state of being convinced" is from 1530s; that of "religious belief, creed" is from 1620s. Colloquial or humorous sense of "kind, sort, nationality" is by 1864.

IMHO if you aim to convince people of something you are on the side of trying to control people's freedom to chose. That in itself is a form of being unethical to the idea of truth.

If you can't let people come to their own conclusions, you got problems and you shouldn't be in a position of power.

In my experience the people who spend the most time convincing are people with narcissistic personality disorders. I stay far away from those people because I know they dont really value truth and justice like I do.

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

#905

Post by trinsic2 » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #787

Lerc wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot find a single action of anyone that cannot be construed as an attempt to get them power/money/influence. I can believe that a persons intentions are good, but I can't make everyone in the world do that, and that is what you are asking. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him" To play your game, he got married, had a child, and…

> I cannot find a single action of anyone that cannot be construed as an attempt to get them power/money/influence Try the other way around, via negativa. We definitely can find plenty of examples of people stepping out of positions of power, deciding not to do something because of moral conflict, etc. Is there any case of such action from Sam? Fuck, anyone with any semblance of moral fortitude would refuse to take m…

>No, this is selection bias. What he did was to put himself in a position where he could have his fingers on any and every possible pie, and then when of these things turned out to be something believed to be valuable by people with money, then he manouvered himself to be in the driver seat.

Thank you I was just going to point this out.

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

#906

Post by trinsic2 » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 4:13 AM UTC

AIorNot wrote: post #743

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

As bad as altman might be he’s just another sociopathic Tech Bro I’m far more concerned with the 25 million dollar personal bribe OpenAI president Greg Brockman gave Donald Trump for his reelection - the fact that a tech company can influence the outcome of an election directly is evil Far more evil than Altmans shenanigans

Exactly. In fact I'd say that everything that is said about Altman is a misdirection from that one point.

People want to focus on scape goats rather than systemic problems

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

#907

Post by ronanfarrow » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 4:20 AM UTC

jzymbaluk wrote: post #154

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

Hi Ronan, thanks for the article and for answering questions. My question is, how do you know when an enormous project like this, conducted over an 18-month time span is "done"? I assume you get a lot of leeway from editors and publishers on this matter. How do you make the decision to finally pull the trigger on publishing?

The answer is that there really is no easy answer. It's an evolving assessment based on a complex matrix of considerations.

You try to reach a critical mass of detailed, rounded understanding of a central question, integrating the most meaningful perspectives, interrogating the weak points and blind spots, and backing up the assertions with documentary evidence or strong sourcing. Eventually, you reach a point where enough sources and materials are reliably triangulating toward the same truths.

As you guessed, there's external pressures that figure in this analysis—whether competitors are closing in on the same leads; what's happening in the broader news cycle that might make a story feel more or less relevant. As you also guessed, I am more fortunate than most writers in the degree to which I get to hold off until something feels fully baked. Mostly, writers simply have to hit a deadline, and resources run out before ambition does. I have deadlines and constraints too, but I get a lot of say in how I organize all of the above.

Then there's the actual process of creating the story. Writing a densely evidence-based investigative piece is labor-intensive—in this case, weeks of initial drafting, and then much iteration. The fact-checking process at the New Yorker is exhaustive, and can span weeks. Every sentence, assertion, and piece of underlying sourcing get scrubbed by multiple independent pairs of eyes. This story had four fact-checkers working on it for the better part of a two week period, pulling very long hours. This is all brought together in a closing meeting where each sentence is revised and polished in a group.

This is all done as additional information comes in—in fact, with these large-scale bodies of reporting, there is very often a snowball effect, where a lot comes in at the end.

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

#908

Post by ronanfarrow » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 4:23 AM UTC

Uhhrrr wrote: post #447

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

The last couple sentences tie things up really nicely.

Appreciate this. I thought deeply about that and took a lot of time, when we had little of it to go around, iterating and shaping it. (Including talking to computer scientists to make sure I sounded as not-dopey as possible on the technical side!)

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

#909

Post by ronanfarrow » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC

snakeboy wrote: post #552

I usually use free archived versions to read mainstream journalism pieces. Seeing this convinced me to subscribe. I've always loved The New Yorker, and am happy to support serious longform journalism (and I know that Ronan is one of the best). However, it's a shame that the only way to subscribe to the print version is to pay $260 upfront for the yearly subscription. Meanwhile the digital version is $1/week ($52 upfr…

This means a lot to me. We're living in a time when we badly need independent journalism, with a very limited number of institutions devoting resources to this kind of work. Subscribing to support journalism you care about is a real public service, in my view.

Noted on the critiques of the subscription options. I'll try to relay.

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

#910

Post by tharkun__ » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 4:41 AM UTC

sampullman wrote: post #102

unsupp0rted wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Us = me and say /r/codex or wherever Codex users are. I've tried both, liked both, but in my projects one clearly produces better results, more maintainable code and does a better job of debugging and refactoring.

That's interesting, I actively use both and usually find it to be a toss up which one performs better at a given task. I generally find Claude to be better with complex tool calls and Codex to be better at reviewing code, but otherwise don't see a significant difference.

Haven't done it in a while, but I've done some tasks with both Codex and Claude to compare. In all cases I asked both to put their analysis and plans for implementation into a .md file. Then I asked the other agent to analyze said file for comparison.

In general, Claude was impressed by what Codex produced and noted the parts where it (i.e. Claude) had missed something vs. Codex "thinking of it".

From a "daily driver" perspective I still use Claude all the time as it has plan mode, which means I can guarantee that it won't break out and just do stuff without me wanting it to. With Codex I have to always specify "Don't implement/change, just tell me" and even then it sometimes "breaks out" and just does stuff. Not usually when I start out and just ask it to plan. But after we've started implementation and I review, a simple question of "Why did you do X?" will turn into a huge refactoring instead of just answering my question.

To be fair, that's what most devs do too (at least at first), when you ask them "Why did you do X" questions. They just assume that you are trying to formulate a "Do Y instead of X" as a question, when really you just don't understand their reasoning but there really might be a good reason for doing X. But I guess LLMs aren't sure of themselves, so any questioning of their reasoning obliterates their ego and just turns them into submissive code monkeys (or rather: exposes them as such) vs. being software engineers that do things for actual reasons (whether you agree with them or not).