The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
garymarcus.substack.com
The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#2Why. Do. We. Keep. Posting. Gary. Marcus.
He's been writing variants of this kind of thing for decades and he's always been wrong.
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#3I've been wondering for a while if Sam is going to become an Elizabeth Holmes style figure with all of his talk about "a magic intelligence in the sky" and that in 5 years AI will replace 95% of marketing work. It seems like he's set up impossible promises, it'll be interesting to see what comes from their non-delivery.
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#4Why. Do. We. Keep. Posting. Gary. Marcus. He's been writing variants of this kind of thing for decades and he's always been wrong.
[deleted]
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#5Why. Do. We. Keep. Posting. Gary. Marcus. He's been writing variants of this kind of thing for decades and he's always been wrong.
Any examples? I've never heard of him, but that seems like a big statement.
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#6Do people actually find this kind of dunk content interesting? It's super popular but I wonder if people find it insightful or entertaining. I watched a little of Stephen Colbert and John Oliver and it's mostly boring stuff that is pretty much characterized as "This guy IS AN IDIOT!" and "They're LOSING" and whatnot. It seems like the equivalent of those "Charlie Kirk owns feminists with FACTS and LOGIC". If you go to /r/all you'll see that it's almost all dunk content.
I get the appeal in an abstract sense. I get a real kick out of watching yet another Manchester United manager cock it up. But all I do is see the scores and enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. The audience for these guys seems highly enthusiastic about their content. It's like if I watched every United game to get as much enjoyment out of watching them suck.
It's particularly annoying because people are clearly not posting this guy because he's right often or because he's good at predicting stuff. They're posting because he's dunking on people they dislike.
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#7The man brought us LLMs and ever more capable models. I don’t know about the critics, but my work life completely changed from Dec 2022 on. Ever since chatgpt was released. I cannot imagine working without LLMs and agents anymore. They make me literally 10-100x more productive, transforming text, generating text, doing research, writing code, documenting systems, doing web search and so much more.
And for that I am forever thankful to Sam Altman and all the people who made this possible.
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#8I've been wondering for a while if Sam is going to become an Elizabeth Holmes style figure with all of his talk about "a magic intelligence in the sky" and that in 5 years AI will replace 95% of marketing work. It seems like he's set up impossible promises, it'll be interesting to see what comes from their non-delivery.
Very different to lie about what your current product actually does (especially if it's a medical testing product!) vs to give predictions about your future products that turn out to be too overhyped. A good example of the latter is Elon, which also goes to show that you only have to have the pie-in-the-sky vision succeed a couple times for a lot of people to forgive a lot of other overpromises.
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#9Why. Do. We. Keep. Posting. Gary. Marcus. He's been writing variants of this kind of thing for decades and he's always been wrong.
Gary Marcus is not the only one that has been critical of Sam Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0K4XPu3Qhg
There's many other people but most of them are independent. It is glaringly obvious now most of the media outlets are afraid to ask the tough questions.
Re: The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
#10Do people actually find this kind of dunk content interesting? It's super popular but I wonder if people find it insightful or entertaining. I watched a little of Stephen Colbert and John Oliver and it's mostly boring stuff that is pretty much characterized as "This guy IS AN IDIOT!" and "They're LOSING" and whatnot. It seems like the equivalent of those "Charlie Kirk owns feminists with FACTS and LOGIC". If you go t…
Haven't read this one, and there is certainly plenty of useless rage bait on the internet. But in general it is important and serves a purpose to criticize people wielding a lot of power. This doesn't have to be constructive, if those people are idiots and doing harmful things.