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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?

#911

Post by hirako2000 »

andrekandre wrote: post #890
hirako2000 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly we are still experiencing the technological momentum inspired and created by what OpenAI used to be. AI for humanity. Given the initiative started circa 2017, much of the goods remain. It's a hijack of creative geniuses who got together, which is now turning into cow milking tech.

> cow milking tech i mean, in the end, cow-milking is the name of the game isnt it?

Yes if it played that game at the start.

That's the name of a different game.

OpenAI played the charity, coupled with a powerful altruistic card.

It didn't say: we believe a more effective for-profit business shall start as a non-profit in this field, because it would yield innovation which we can then skim money off down the road. That would have been transparent.

Not saying it was the intention at the start. But they flipped the game at some point. Let's play Chess, it's a better game. Oh I decided we are now playing Checkers, sorry, I won.

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

#912

Post by dmux »

cm2012 wrote: post #751
f154hfds wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

This is PG's response about Sam leaving YC. It says nothing about the original motivation of offering him the position at YC.

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

#913

Post by Lerc »

sambuccid wrote: post #841
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 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…

>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.

Yes, but that doesn't work if you look for patterns selectively. There are large amount of people who will tell you vastly different experiences that they had with Altman. If you pick the right grouping, within it, you can find universal praise or condemnation. The article itself acknowledges that.

>The article also mentions many moments where apparently Altman straight out lied.

Does it? It has people saying he lied, and a few things he disputes that he said. If the lies were clearly apparent, I think his position would not be tenable. Which points in the article do they show statements that it clear that he has said them, that they were false, and that he knew they were false when he said them?

The points you list are not clearly apparent lies. At most they are allegations of lies. They might just be different interpretations of the same events. I have seen instances in my own life where someone has said "You said X" the other person says "No I didn't", The first then pulls up the minutes, and says "See you said X", the other responds with "That's not what that says". You see rage bait posts about terms and conditions that take that form all the time. Someone misreads a legal term as meaning something different to what it means in a legal sense and then refuses to acknowledge the commonly accepted definition.

Please respond to this, because I really am interested in the answer, but I did read the article and I didn't see what you appear to have seen.

I have made no claim to the merits of Sam Altman, I just don't like the idea of condemning someone on hearsay and insinuations. There are videos on YouTube claiming he's had people killed. At some point you have to point at something that everyone can agree on is an actual thing that happened and that it actually matters. At most what I have seen is people being able to provide one of those two points on any particular allegation.

I don't feel this should be that contentious. If it were clear there would be demands from all around saying "You did this bad thing, you must resign". Do you think that everyone dealing with OpenAI acknowledges some dark truth and is complicit?

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

#914

Post by aeternum »

AdamN wrote: post #664
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.

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.

Community control typically doesn't work to constrain great men, a group has more weak points than an individual (look for example how easily Sam dismantled the OpenAI board decision by applying the right pressure).

The greatest and often only check on power has always been competition or opposition by other great men.

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

#915

Post by henry2023 »

kazinator wrote: post #893

Altman cannot control anything because he doesn't have any secret sauce. Everything he has has been replicated by others. He doesn't have anything comparable to, say, the operating system platform dominance of Microsoft Windows, or service platform dominance of YouTube. The entire value proposition of OpenAI is that billions of people don't know that anything other exists than ChatGPT, which is rather tenuous and vol…

GoDaddy's annual revenue for 2025 was approximately $4.95 billion.

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

#916

Post by aeternum »

morleytj wrote: post #166

Wow, this is an incredibly detailed piece. Really in depth reporting and the kind of detailed investigation we need more of on important topics like this. > "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence." This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace cro…

It didn't even make sense because they didn't explain what was profoundly altered.

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

#917

Post by palmotea »

rupi wrote: post #853
ipsum2 wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You said factual. But what is factual for you and I may not be for someone else. There are a lot of recollections in the article where sama remembers one version or doesn't remember at all and the other party remembers something else. Combine that with the nature of the article and the legal issues considering egos and sums involved. To top all of that New Yorker is known for fact checking that is exhaustive to the p…

> There are a lot of recollections in the article where sama remembers one version or doesn't remember at all and the other party remembers something else.

Or he's being dishonest about what he remembers.

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

#920

Post by rhubarbtree »

throw4847285 wrote: post #761
rhubarbtree wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which edition? I looked at April 6th and can’t see the article.

The New Yorker posts digital articles in advance of the release of the print edition. At the bottom of this article it says: Published in the print edition of the April 13, 2026, issue, with the headline “Moment of Truth.” As someone who reads the print magazine every week, I always scroll down to check if the article will be published and skip it if so (so I can read it when my magazine arrives).

Thanks. Can confirm the print edition is assigned a date that is 5 days after it becomes available in the Press Reader app in the UK (not sure why) and the article is in that edition.
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