[HN Gopher] Sam Altman may control our future - can he be trusted?
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Sam Altman may control our future - can he be trusted?
Author : adrianhon
Score : 1960 points
Date : 2026-04-06 10:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| thm wrote:
| Hybris.
| Cheyana wrote:
| Harvey Dent...
| the_doctah wrote:
| The brighter the picture, the darker the negative
| adrianhon wrote:
| Archive link:
| https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.c...
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this
| investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| Great reporting.
|
| Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith
| evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star
| behind all this that's not centered on himself?
| i7l wrote:
| (Other people's) money.
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| The piece is an interrogation of this very question, at great
| length and with some nuance. I think what it does most
| usefully is scrutinize an array of different answers to the
| question.
|
| My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he
| is identifying something of a true north star when he frames
| this around "winning." There are people in the story who talk
| about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opposed to, say,
| wealth). I think he probably also believes, to some extent,
| the story he tells that equates winning, and his gaining
| power, with a superabundant utopian future for all.
|
| However, I think critics correctly highlight a tension
| between his statements about centering humanity writ large
| and his tilt into relentless accelerationism.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a]
|
| This is a _fantastic_ piece, very timely, evidently well-
| researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I
| know, it 's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing
| it with the world.
|
| OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many
| people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company
| has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]
|
| Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude,
| because they think it's a better product.[c]
|
| Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position
| similar?
|
| ---
|
| [a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you
| say you are:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
|
| [b] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-
| sh...
|
| [c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude
| than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
| to
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
| brightbeige wrote:
| He's replying on this twitter thread - perhaps someone with
| an account can ask there and link his comment here?
|
| https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m
| jamiequint wrote:
| Here is the actual link, not a link to some weird third-
| party site that can't be trusted.
|
| https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532
| SwellJoe wrote:
| Whereas X _can_ be trusted?
| jamiequint wrote:
| Yes? It's the data source, not a third-party. How is this
| even a question?
| SwellJoe wrote:
| X restricts what you can view without logging in. Many
| folks don't want to log in to X, for obvious reasons.
| Posting an xcancel link is kinda like folks posting
| various `archive` URLs to bypass paywalls, work around
| overloaded servers, etc. That's an extremely common
| practice here that usually goes without comment.
| jamiequint wrote:
| What is an "obvious reason" one might not want to log
| into X? I can't think of any rational reason.
| minimaxir wrote:
| There's pedantic, and then there's needlessly pedantic.
|
| xcancel is a valid workaround for X links on Hacker News
| and is sufficient for original attribution.
| rounce wrote:
| FYI xcancel is just a mirror that allows reading replies
| without needing an account.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > You may want to provide proof online that you are who you
| say you are
|
| Unfortunately it probably doesn't even matter here on HN
| considering how brigaded down this story is predictably
| getting.
|
| But yeah, it was a fantastic piece.
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| Fair request, here you go:
| https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041203911697068112
| dang wrote:
| It wasn't getting "brigaded down" - it set off a software
| penalty called the flamewar detector. I turned that off as
| soon as I saw it.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you for keeping HN sane :-)
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful
| response.
|
| The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right
| now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and
| flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's
| relative position. We of course mention the allegations of
| "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been
| surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative
| bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much
| about that.
|
| I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's
| technology, products, and roadmap are perceived,
| particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to
| those of competitors.
|
| If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love
| to hear about it.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| My guess is that the answer to your question, fantastic
| question, is that nobody knows. I remember having the
| same thoughts when Covid was first "arriving" if you
| will: we wanted people in the know to throw us a nugget
| of information, and they just didn't know.
|
| As it turns out, and what I'm kind of going with for this
| LLM shit, is that it'll play out exactly how you think it
| will. The companies are all too big to fail, with
| billionaire backers who would rather commit fraud than
| lose money.
| philipallstar wrote:
| How would fraud help here? Don't they just need scale of
| lots of customers paying a little bit? How do you fraud
| your way into that?
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| they don't need customers, when the customers ere each
| others companies for example the deals openAI nvidia
| oracle made
| philipallstar wrote:
| That's not fraud, and it's not sustainable. They aren't
| going to just keep doing that. It only makes sense if an
| AI company wants to pay for GPUs with stock, and - more
| importantly - the GPU company agrees to sell in exchange
| for stock.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Ronan Farrow's expertise is investigations into elite
| amorality, not evaluating technical products. Why are you
| asking this question?
| cs702 wrote:
| I didn't asking him to evaluate them. I asked him how
| customer and partners _perceive_ them.
|
| He's had so many conversations that he likely has a sense
| of how _perceptions_ of the company and its offerings
| have changed.
|
| I'm curious.
| bloppe wrote:
| Much of the article and general palace intrigue is
| predicated on the idea that OpenAI has a singularly
| revolutionary product. If it later turns out to be a
| commodity, or OpenAI is simply outcompeted nonetheless,
| then the idea that Sam Altman's personal shortcomings are
| something to stress about would seem quaint. Just another
| hubristic tech billionaire acting in bad faith doesn't
| really pry attention the same way as someone "controlling
| your future".
| globalnode wrote:
| at this point even googles ai search results are better
| than gpt - obv. this is not for full programs but if you
| know what youre doing and just want a snippet, thats all
| you need.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Wild how different experience people can have. Both
| Google's models and Anthrophic's hallucinate a lot for
| me, even when I try the expensive plans and with web
| searches, for some reason, and none of them come close to
| the accuracy and hallucination-free responses of ChatGPT
| Pro, which to me still is SOTA and has been since it was
| made available. But people keep having opposite
| experiences apparently, I just can't make sense of it.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Kagi (assistant.kagi.com) with Kimi K2.5 (their current
| default) has worked great for me in scenarios where the
| search result data is more important than the model.
|
| I.e. what I used to use Google for and when I don't want
| an AI to overly summarize / editorialize result data.
| globalnode wrote:
| oh thats probably because im a cheap-skate and just use
| the free garbo models. im sure the pro version is quite
| good.
| keepamovin wrote:
| If you were in charge of the deciding what should be done
| with Sam Altman, what would you choose?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I mean, its a fair question, though it does make some
| wonder how extreme the answers could be, so I could see
| why you're being downvoted.
|
| The problem is sometimes on paper everything people like
| Sam Altman do is legal, despite it harming so many. We've
| literally had a major RAM producer pull off the consumer
| RAM market. I feel like Sam Altman should be investigated
| and heavily scrutinized. He kind of is the biggest bubble
| in the AI bubble, we're letting him fester too far into
| it too, and these circular deals have seemingly somewhat
| stopped for now, but it might only get worse.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a
| better product.
|
| No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in
| everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality
| code.
| mliker wrote:
| Who is "us"? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex
| for its math capabilities but when it comes to general
| frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as
| good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills
| library.
|
| Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely
| sophisticated programming for distributed systems
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| 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.
| sampullman wrote:
| 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.
| aswanson wrote:
| Any difference in performance on mobile development?
| sampullman wrote:
| For that I'm not so sure. I tried both early 2025 and was
| disappointed in their ability to deal with a TCA based
| app (iOS) and Jetpack compose stuff on Android, but I
| assume Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 are much better.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| If you want to find an advocate for Codex that can give a
| pretty good answer as to why they think it's better, go
| ask Eric Provencher. He develops https://repoprompt.com/.
| He spends a lot of time thinking in this space and
| prefers Codex over Claude, though I haven't checked
| recently to see if he still has that opinion. He's pretty
| reachable on Discord if you poke around a bit.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Quite irrelevant what factions think. This or that model
| may be superior for these and those use cases today, and
| things will flip next week.
|
| Also. RLHF mean that models spit out according to certain
| human preference, so it depends what set of humans and in
| what mood they've been when providing the feedback.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| On the contrary, I very much care about what the other
| factions think because I want to know if things have
| already flipped and the easiest way to do so is just ask
| someone who's been using the tool. Of course the correct
| thing to do is to set up some simple evals, but there is
| a subjective aspect to these tools that I think hearing
| boots on the ground anecdata helps with.
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| yea Im not in this "us" you speak of.
| Finbel wrote:
| Of course you're not one of "us" if you're one of "them".
| zeroxfe wrote:
| I'm in that camp -- I have the max-tier subscription to
| pretty much all the services, and for now Codex seems to
| win. Primarily because 1) long horizon development tasks
| are much more reliable with codex, and 2) OpenAI is far
| more generous with the token limits.
|
| Gemini seems to be the worst of the three, and some open-
| weight models are not too bad (like Kimi k2.5). Cursor is
| still pretty good, and copilot just really really sucks.
| 7thpower wrote:
| Not a scientist and use codex for anything complex.
|
| I enjoy using CC more and use it for non coding tasks
| primarily, but for anything complex (honestly most of
| what I do is not that complex), I feel like I am trading
| future toil for a dopamine hit.
| zem wrote:
| I've found claude startlingly good at debugging race
| conditions and other multithreading issues though.
| josephg wrote:
| My rule of thumb is that its good for anything "broad",
| and weaker for anything "deep". Broad tasks are tasks
| which require working knowledge of lots of random stuff.
| Its bad at deep work - like implementing a complex, novel
| algorithm.
|
| LLMs aren't able to achieve 100% correctness of every
| line of code. But luckily, 100% correctness is not
| required for debugging. So its better at that sort of
| thing. Its also (comparatively) good at reading lots and
| lots of code. Better than I am - I get bogged down in
| details and I exhaust quickly.
|
| An example of broad work is something like: "Compile this
| C# code to webassembly, then run it from this go program.
| Write a set of benchmarks of the result, and compare it
| to the C# code running natively, and this python
| implementation. Make a chart of the data add it to this
| latex code." Each of the steps is simple if you have
| expertise in the languages and tools. But a lot of work
| otherwise. But for me to do that, I'd need to figure out
| C# webassembly compilation and go wasm libraries. I'd
| need to find a good charting library. And so on.
|
| I think its decent at debugging because debugging
| requires reading a lot of code. And there's lots of weird
| tools and approaches you can use to debug something. And
| its not mission critical that every approach works.
| Debugging plays to the strengths of LLMs.
| keldaris wrote:
| 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 further ahead. The
| token limits are also far more generous (and it matters,
| I found it fairly easy to hit the 5h limit on max tier
| Claude), but mostly it's about quality - the probability
| that the model will give me something useful I can
| iterate on as opposed to discard immediately is much
| higher with Codex.
|
| For the few times I've used both models side by side on
| more typical tasks (not so much web stuff, which I don't
| do much of, but more conventional Python scripts, CLI
| utilities in C, some OpenGL), they seem much more evenly
| matched. I haven't found a case where Claude would be
| markedly superior since Codex 5.2 came out, but I'm sure
| there are plenty. In my view, benchmarks are completely
| irrelevant at this point, just use models side by side on
| representative bits of your real work and stick with what
| works best for you. My software engineer friends often
| react with disbelief when I say I much prefer Codex, but
| in my experience it is not a close comparison.
| ricksunny wrote:
| >As a scientist (computational physicist,
|
| Is there one that you prefer for, i dunno, _physics_?
| physicsguy wrote:
| 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.
| tirutiru wrote:
| I can roughly guess the train of thought and I am a bit
| surprised that Claude is failing you.
|
| That said, I am puzzled at the algorithms that Claude &
| GPT "get" and ones that they do not.
|
| (former physicist here. would love to know the kind of
| things you're working on. email on my profile)
| keldaris wrote:
| 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.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| 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.
| keldaris wrote:
| 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.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are old news. If you're
| having problems, it's because you're not using the latest
| hotness: Cludge. Everyone is using it now - don't get
| left behind.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Cludge has been left behind by Clanker, that's the new
| hotness. 45B valuation!
| p-t wrote:
| ive heard that poob has it for you!
| lhl wrote:
| As some other people mentioned, using both/multiple is
| the way to go if it's within your means.
|
| I've been working on a wide range of relatively projects
| and I find that the latest GPT-5.2+ models seem to be
| generally better coders than Opus 4.6, however the latter
| tends to be better at big picture thinking, structuring,
| and communicating so I tend to iterate through Opus 4.6
| max -> GPT-5.2 xhigh -> GPT-5.3-Codex xhigh -> GPT-5.4
| xhigh. I've found GPT-5.3-Codex is the most _detail
| oriented_ , but not necessarily the best coder. One
| interesting thing is for my high-stakes project, I have
| one coder lane but use all the models do independent
| review and they tend to catch different subsets of
| implementation bugs. I also notice huge behavioral
| changes based on changing AGENTS.md.
|
| In terms of the apps, while Claude Code was ahead for a
| long while, I'd say Codex has largely caught up in terms
| of ergonomics, and in some things, like the way it let's
| you inline or append steering, I like it better now (or
| where it's far, far, ahead - the compaction is night and
| day better in Codex).
|
| (These observations are based on about 10-20B/mo combined
| cached tokens, human-in-the-loop, so heavy usage and most
| code I no longer eyeball, but not dark factory/slop
| cannon levels. I haven't found (or built) a multi-agent
| control plane I really like yet.)
| baq wrote:
| This is the way. Eg. IME Gemini is _really damn good_ at
| sql.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Codex won me over with one simple thing. Reliability. It
| crashed less, had less load shedding and its
| configuration is well designed.
|
| I do regular evaluation of both codex and Claude (though
| not to statistical significance) and I'm of the opinion
| there is more in group variance on outcome performance
| than between them.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Many paying customers say that Anthropic degraded the
| capability of Opus and Claude Code in the last months and
| the outcomes are worse. There are even discussions on HN
| about this.
|
| Last one is from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925
| baq wrote:
| I'm one of those 'us', Claude's outputs require
| significant review and iteration effort (to put it
| bluntly they get destroyed by gpt and Gemini). I'm
| basically using sonnet to do code search and write up
| since it is a better (more human-like) writer than gpt
| and faster and more reliable than gemini, but that's
| about it.
| Razengan wrote:
| I have been using Codex AND Claude side by side for the
| same project*, with the same prompts.
|
| Codex has been consistently better on almost every level.
|
| * (an open source framework for 2D games in Godot 4.6
| GDScript, mostly using AI to review existing code)
| bko wrote:
| I also find Codex much more generous in terms of what you
| get with a Pro ($20/mo) subscription. I use it pretty much
| non-stop and I have yet to hit a limit. Weekly reset is
| much better as well.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| Shill talk
| shevy-java wrote:
| Does this work for people? To me having a "better product"
| would be completely irrelevant if the use cases are evil.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I prefer GLM 5.1 and MiniMax 2.7. With a better harness
| like Forge Code, I have better results for way less money
| than by using GPT and Opus.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| GPT/claude/gemini is pretty interchangeable at this point.
| baq wrote:
| Absolutely not the case. They're complementary.
| thaoanh404 wrote:
| i find myself being more productive with codex/copilot on
| coding tasks, but claude does seem to be better at planning
| jbergqvist wrote:
| Usage limits are more generous and GPT 5.4 is a good model,
| but yes, UI/UX lags behind Claude Code. Currently I'm
| especially missing /rewind with code restoration and proper
| support for plugin marketplaces
| ed wrote:
| It's worth noting Codex has 2x more stories than Claude
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=codex
| cloverich wrote:
| But by page 5, those stories have around 50-60 karma, while
| claude page five is still 500+
|
| (i found your comment surprising based on my daily hn
| reading recollection - i mostly read top N daily and feel i
| only occassionally see codex stories).
| ATMLOTTOBEER wrote:
| Yeah we moved to Claude a few months ago, mostly because the
| devs kept using it anyway. Altman stuff is interesting but at
| the end of the day you just go with whatever tool works
| cableshaft wrote:
| Personally, I prefer Claude for coding, but I still prefer
| ChatGPT for hashing out ideas for my projects (which tend to
| be game designs). So I use both.
| xnx wrote:
| In depth reporting is great. This is a really tricky topic to
| cover over the course of 18 months. A year and a half ago
| OpenAI was ascendant, now it's -at best- stalling and, more
| likely, trending toward irrelevant.
| taurath wrote:
| The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be
| the most puzzling to me - his sister's allegations and claims
| of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with
| younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a
| pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you
| be able to talk about how you investigated?
|
| Did you do any extra investigations into Annie's allegations?
| It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory
| can't be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very
| wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False
| Memory Syndrome Foundation. It was founded by the parents of
| the psychologist who coined DARVO, directly in reaction to her
| accusing them of abuse.
|
| Dissociation is real (I have a dissociative disorder, and abuse
| I "recovered" but did not remember for much of my adolescence
| and early adulthood has been corroborated by third parties) and
| many CSA survivors have severe memory problems that often don't
| come to a head until adulthood. I know you didn't dismiss her
| claim, but the way the public tends to think about recovered
| memories is shaped primarily by that awful organization.
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| All fair points on trauma and memory.
|
| As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman's
| partners and what we found and didn't is as described.
| taurath wrote:
| Thanks for the response! Cheers just fully reread the piece
| and appreciate your reporting.
| girvo wrote:
| It's super neat to see you here on HN taking questions,
| kudos :)
| gowld wrote:
| That's not a fair assessment. "False memory syndrome" and
| "repressed/recovered memory" are both outside scientific
| mainstream consensus.
| taurath wrote:
| Correct, because there truly isn't a great way to answer
| with certainty - there was evidence in the 80s of
| suggestive techniques being used by poorly trained
| psychologists, and there are many people who remember and
| then find corroboration.
|
| There's a lot more who remember and may not have
| corroboration more than with themselves and among their
| close friends or healthcare provider. Part of CSA is
| usually there is very little a kid can do about evidence,
| as the power discrepancy is far too much. Often with rich
| abusers, the exact same process occurs. Perps pick victims
| who are vulnerable or controllable, and constantly seek
| power and domination. Nothing to do with the boardroooms or
| batch of ceo billionaires running the economy right now
| certainly.
| fontain wrote:
| I am very sympathetic to the situation you describe. I
| certainly think it is possible that Annie is describing
| something that happened. I think the author did a fair job of
| representing the allegations, finding the right balance
| between disclosing that they were unable to corroborate the
| allegations without dismissing them.
|
| That said, "recovering" memories as a therapy does not pass
| any sort of sniff test and it doesn't take a concerted effort
| to discredit the concept. Human memory is very malleable.
| Patients with mental health issues (which could predate
| abuse, or could be caused by abuse) are often in search of
| answers and that makes them very vulnerable.
|
| Could a memory be buried deep in our subconscious, forgotten,
| only to return to the surface later? Sure, we all forget
| things and then remember them when triggered by something,
| whether that's a smell or sound or something else entirely.
| But can we engineer that process, with any degree of
| reliability? How can we even begin to reliably reverse
| engineer the triggers?
|
| I think it is also important to keep in mind that Annie is
| rich, and the health care available to rich people can be
| very predatory. There are endless examples of nonsense
| therapies for all types of health, from ear seeds to
| treatments for "chronic Lyme".
|
| Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world
| apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't conflate them.
| If Annie's memories were triggered in adulthood, sure, that's
| really no different than remembering something... but
| "recovered"? That is something else entirely.
|
| Correct me where I'm wrong, I'd like to learn your
| perspective, maybe there's a missing piece.
| taurath wrote:
| > recovering" memories as a therapy
|
| Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy
| that leaned heavily on suggestion or was associated often
| with fairly coercive interrogations during the 80s CSA
| panic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-
| abuse_hysteria
|
| > Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a
| world apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't
| conflate them.
|
| Agree, though I think the mechanism can be a bit more
| towards the idea of a "recovery" of traumatic memory, even
| if the term as understood carries false connotations.
|
| The concept you're missing is dissociation, and
| dissociative disorders. In the 40s it was called just
| "hysteria", and for many cases up to the late 90s an
| extreme form was called multiple personality disorder, now
| DID (dissociative identity disorder).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder
|
| Not everyone who goes through traumatic events will respond
| to it via dissociation of identity, and indeed not all
| people are equally capable of developing a dissociative
| disorder, 2 people may go through very similar events (say
| survive a war as siblings or even twins) and one might
| dissociate the traumatic experience and one might not.
| Dissociation doesn't work quite like you might imagine from
| a term like "multiple personalities" - that happens in some
| extreme cases, but think of identity dissociation as an
| adaptive response to events or situations that are
| paradoxical (esp to a child's mind), extreme or traumatic,
| and can't be escaped or use of other mechanisms cant be
| called upon.
|
| Dissociation is on a sort of spectrum, where at one side
| you have common experiences like zoning out when on a
| common commute, and on another you have separated self-
| parts/alter egos to handle wildly different situations.
|
| It's a mechanism I frankly wasn't aware of and I'm not sure
| that I would be able to fully beleive or empathize with,
| but for my getting a diagnosis of a dissociative disorder
| changed my life, and made a thousand things about me that I
| could never figure out make sense. The "model" as it put it
| at the time responded to experiment, and by recognizing
| that I was dealing with pretty constant, heavy dissociation
| and different self states with memory deficiencies helped
| me figure out how to work through a ton of really
| intractable problems for me. I'm finally after decades of
| ineffective therapy able to really understand how I work.
|
| Idk how to talk about it without sounding like I'm trying
| to sell the idea. But yeah it was a mind blowing thing to
| me. Over the last 20 years especially a ton of truly
| respectable research has been done and the increase in
| efficacy of treatments on dissociation, and trauma
| generally is one of the unsung advancements for humanity in
| the last decade. I think the number is that around 3-6% of
| people meet the clinical criteria for a dissociative
| disorder - OSDD, DID, DPDR, or dissociative amnesia. 5x
| more people than have schizophrenia, 5x more than have red
| hair.
|
| My favorite public clinical resource I point to people is
| the CTAD Clinic YouTube -
| https://youtube.com/@thectadclinic?si=5AyR5H8K8Cf2sn3C
|
| Pretty easy to understand explainers from a clinician in
| the UK.
|
| For a more clinical and study approach this one is the
| currently best put together research IMO: https://www.taylo
| rfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97810030573...
|
| The TLDR is dissociation is an important mechanism that
| most people don't know about but has had a wave of research
| and study and is much more common than one might expect.
| The sad part is how often dissociative disorders correlate
| w abuse.
| fontain wrote:
| Thank you very much for the details.
|
| I'm reading more now and I think the missing piece for me
| is the distinction between "repressed" memories and
| "recovered" memories.
|
| I understood repressed memories to be an accepted idea,
| distinct from "recovered" memories. I am reading that the
| people mentioned in your original comment rejected the
| idea of repressed memory altogether, and believed that
| everything traumatic must be remembered.
|
| So, to me, reading that someone "recovered" memory reads
| like they went through a specific type of therapy
| intended to "find" these repressed memories. Whereas to
| you, "recovered" memories could be repressed memories
| that came back to the surface organically -- whether at
| random, triggered or through a therapy intended to deal
| with disassociating. Is that right?
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I'm confused by what you're saying. Can you help me
| reconcile your first post
|
| > It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is
| recovered memory can't be trusted, which is a popular
| understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now
| defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
|
| with
|
| > Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy
|
| I read your first post as standing up for recovered
| memory therapy and I can't find how the discussion of
| dissociation makes a difference. Does Fontain have it
| right that by "recovered memory" you mean "things people
| happened to remember on their own"?
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| What's the evidence that Annie is rich?
| cm2012 wrote:
| False memories are much, much more common than actual
| recovered memories, unfortunately. OCD is a really common
| cause of it. People think of OCD as a physical thing, but for
| many people it presents as emotional rumination and can lead
| to false memories.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Hi Ronan,
|
| I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for
| it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I
| could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such
| as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents
| per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.
|
| However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to
| access one article I'm interested in.
|
| I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted
| you to know.
|
| You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this
| case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income
| from me.
| caycep wrote:
| You could hit up a public library...
| eichin wrote:
| Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an
| issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad
| subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is
| an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course,
| I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a
| newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up
| on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and
| scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" -
| I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers
| they have :-)
| IrishTechie wrote:
| I've often thought about a model like this and would love to
| see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it
| stacks up.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended
| micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added
| expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is
| probably the NYTimes' gift article feature.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I really doubt the implementation difficulty is the
| actual reason. It's not hard to have an extra table of
| specific article permissions.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Probably true, it's more likely that it's a variation on
| "there are only a small percentage of people willing to
| pay any amount of money for an article, so if we offer
| one-time options, a large enough percentage of people who
| would have otherwise subscribed with recurring revenue
| instead pay one-time so their lifetime value is lower"
| mattbee wrote:
| Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.
| cloud_line wrote:
| You could buy a physical copy (and this isn't meant to sound
| sarcastic).
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| You can walk down to a bookstore or anywhere that sells
| magazines and buy a physical copy
| fblp wrote:
| Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and
| others continue to do journalism like this? (including
| commenting on HN?)
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has
| basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially
| this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The
| media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed
| individuals and companies essentially buying up the
| discourse.
|
| I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to
| amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging
| others to do so.
| fblp wrote:
| Got it! Any recommendations on who to subscribe to? Any
| personal links for you?
|
| In developer communities often you can support individual
| developers or groups through a monthly subscription /
| donation on their github page or similar.
| mplanchard wrote:
| Well, this piece was in The New Yorker, which is
| reasonably priced and regularly includes excellent
| investigative journalism. I get the physical copies,
| which can be too much to keep up with if you try to read
| everything, but it's easy enough if you skim and just
| read the things that stick out as being of particular
| interest.
| ilamont wrote:
| The New Yorker also comes with Apple News+ subscriptions
| (part of an Apple One plan that many people get for extra
| iCloud storage) which further includes a number of top-
| tier and local news orgs such as the Wall Street Journal,
| LA Times, SF Chronicle, Times of London, etc.
|
| The Sam Altman piece can be read here:
| https://apple.news/APTX4OkywRWeJXIL7b8a7zQ
| t0lo wrote:
| Drop Site News, 404 Media, Boston Review, The Intercept,
| and Atavist are all very worth supporting.
| ricksunny wrote:
| 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)?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Because "the public interest" is more widely defined than
| you think.
| ricksunny wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I have no idea, nor care, whether or not unmasking
| Banksy, specifically, was in the public interest. My only
| point is that it's not limited to topics that you
| consider important.
|
| As for your #2, that seems reminiscent of "why are we
| going to space when there are so many problems here on
| Earth."
| wilkommen wrote:
| Only anti-trust action against big tech to break their ad
| monopoly (to make journalism profitable again) and breaking
| up media conglomerates (to reduce concentration of power in
| the journalism industry) can save journalism from becoming
| just a mouthpiece for the powerful. These things can only
| happen through politics. We need a political solution to
| save journalism.
| rhlannx wrote:
| I have the feeling that if you write an article in that style,
| the subject of the story becomes the hero even if you insert a
| couple of negatives. In the same manner that Michael Corleone
| becomes the hero of The Godfather.
|
| I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that
| AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely
| omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted.
|
| On the positive side, the Kushner ad Abu Dhabi involvements
| (and threats from Kushner) deserve a wider audience.
|
| My personal opinion is that "who should control AI" is the
| wrong question. In the current state, it is an IP laundering
| device and I wonder why publications fall silent on this. For
| example, the NYT has abandoned their crown witness Suchir
| Balaji who literally perished for his convictions (murder or
| not).
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| For what it's worth, I don't think the piece at all avoids
| key areas of disillusionment with the technology. Quite the
| contrary.
| Stevvo wrote:
| Love the visual. Fantastic.
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| 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?
| giwook wrote:
| Any plans to tackle any of the other folks who might be
| mentioned in the same sentence as Altman, like Darius Amodei?
| felixgallo wrote:
| This is brilliant work, guys. Did you get any pressure to
| soften or spike the story?
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| I won't get into behind-the-scenes specifics here but I think
| you can imagine how pressurized this topic was and the amount
| of heat that tends to generate. I'm used to getting a lot of
| blowback and it's never fun. I just hope the work is
| meticulous and fair enough, and that enough people see the
| benefits of that, that I get to continue to do it.
| Balgair wrote:
| Hey, just want to say thanks for the piece and for all the
| hard work and effort you did to get this out there. I've
| published a bit here and there, and the actual writing is
| only ~50% of the work load (for me at least). So thanks for
| going through all the effort and pain to get it out, really
| appreciate all the work you do for me and the rest of Joe
| Public.
| trunch wrote:
| If you want another story to run, I'd really love to see an
| investigation into how these different companies are
| convincing governements that the only path forward to win
| global dominance is through achieving 'agi' first and how
| much that contributes to the reckless acceleration of ai
| software and infrastructure development
|
| Also a good expose on accelerationists and e/accs and who
| among the elites fall in this group is direly needed as
| well
| AquinasCoder wrote:
| I am appreciative of your work on this piece. I'd love to
| see one that goes deeper into Dario Amodei. Perhaps even a
| series of profiles on the central figures of this AI era.
|
| Is this something you've thought about?
| sebmellen wrote:
| Ronan Farrow on Hacker News. Now I've seen everything.
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| I've really appreciated how substantive and polite the
| discourse here is, overall!
| dang wrote:
| I'm a mod here and wanted to let you know 2 things: (1)
| I've marked your account with a beta feature that displays
| a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last
| viewed the page). It might help you keep track of this
| rather large thread.*
|
| (2) I'm sorry the post was downranked off the frontpage for
| a while this afternoon. A software penalty kicks in when
| the discussion seems overheated ("flamewar detector") but I
| turned this off as soon as I became aware of it. We make a
| point of moderating HN _less_ when a story is YC-related (h
| ttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu
| ...) but as this goes against standard internet axioms,
| people often assume the opposite.
|
| (* And yes, any reader who wants this is welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com to ask - I haven't turned it on for
| everyone because I'm worried it would slow the site down.
| Also, it's a bit buggy and not only have I not had time to
| fix it, I've forgotten what the bugs are.)
| ta8903 wrote:
| >beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of
| new comments (since you last viewed the page)
|
| Can't wait until this is released!
| nickthegreek wrote:
| If you don't want to wait, the refined HN extension has
| had this feature for a long time, but it is device
| specific.
|
| https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| Thank you so much. I'll be answering more of them
| throughout the day as I have time.
| tootie wrote:
| Not a question but just wanted to make sure you saw this:
|
| https://theonion.com/anyone-else-have-those-weird-dreams-
| whe...
| arduanika wrote:
| Also this exclusive interview with the man himself:
|
| https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-
| sam...
|
| Includes gems such as:
|
| Q: What informs your personal sense of morality?
|
| A: Previous things I've gotten away with.
|
| Q: Why did you decide to devote your life to AI?
|
| A: I just saw so much suffering in the world that needed
| to be automated.
| sebmellen wrote:
| It's good to have you! We try to keep it civil :)
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Do you think the recent conflict between Anthropic and the
| Department of War, and the apparent bootlicking by OpenAI has
| fundamentally altered the public perception of OAI? Are they
| the baddies now in the general public opinion?
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Damn, just wanted to say reporters are scary... The amount of
| detail here is huge. You think of hackers as the ones good at
| doxing... Nah, its reporters.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Dang, can you substantiate that this is actually Mr. Farrow
| like he claims?
|
| Or Mr Farrow can you post some evidence somewhere we can see?
| r721 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663895
| egonschiele wrote:
| Just wanted to say what an incredible person you are! Catch and
| Kill and the related reporting was awesome too!
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| This is so appreciated, thank you! These stories can honestly
| take a lot out of me so thoughtful reactions mean a lot.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I just spent a while reading the article. I really appreciate
| you writing it. In my case, it made me like Sam Altman a lot
| more. But I was only able to conclude this because of all the
| evidence you took the time to put together. It paints the
| picture of someone trying to do something very difficult in a
| rapidly changing environment and a lot of pressure, but still
| making the important choices and not shirking them.
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| Interesting to hear! While this hasn't been a commonplace
| reaction, I think if I do my job right it should allow people
| to read the facts as they will, exactly like this. It's
| strenuously designed to be fair and, where appropriate, even
| generous.
| aragonite wrote:
| I had a question about reporting conventions. In the paragraph
| where Altman is said to have told Murati that his allies were
| "going all out" to damage her reputation, the claim is
| attributed to "someone with knowledge of the conversation" but
| the attribution is tucked inconspicuously into the middle of
| the sentence (rather than say leading upfront ("According to
| someone with knowledge of the conversation, Altman...")) and
| Altman's non-recollection appears only parenthetically.
|
| As a reader, am I supposed to infer anything about evidentiary
| weight from these stylistic choices? When a single anonymous
| source's testimony is presented in a "declarative" narrative
| style like here (with the attribution in a less prominent
| position), should we read that as reflecting high confidence on
| your end (perhaps from additional corroboration not fully
| spelled out)? And does the fact that Altman's non-recollection
| appears in parentheses carry any epistemic signal (e.g. that
| you assign it less evidentiary weight)? Or is that mostly a
| matter of (say) prose rhythm?
| philip1209 wrote:
| 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 the Pentagon's
| decisions, not Anthropic's. And nobody seems interested in
| examining whether the company that branded itself as the
| ethical AI lab actually is one. That seems like a story worth
| writing.
| xvector wrote:
| Normies don't know what an "Anthropic" is. They use ChatGPT.
| Particularly sharp normies _might_ know that ChatGPT is made
| by OpenAI, and the sharpest might know that Sam Altman is the
| CEO.
|
| Now, they may have heard the word "Anthropic" due to recent
| media coverage. But they don't know what it is and don't
| remember what it makes. The fact that all businesses use
| "Anthropic" is about as relevant to them as knowing the
| overseas shipping company for all the shit they buy off
| Amazon.
|
| So articles about OAI will always produce more revenue for
| the media, because it's related to what normies actually use
| day to day.
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| For what it's worth, the story, while focused on OpenAI, is
| not uncritical of Anthropic. It explores whether there is a
| wider race to the bottom in terms of safety, and erosion of
| even some of Anthropic's commitments.
| intothemild wrote:
| I think you might be surprised that more and more Software
| Engineers are souring on Anthropic (the company) and the
| decisions the company has made recently. Not the whole
| drama with the US Government, but them locking down the
| usage of plans to their own tooling.
|
| That really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, as
| ultimately one might have a favorite tool, then suddenly
| they are forced to use another tool.
| giwook wrote:
| There may be a reason why Altman is talked about a lot. This
| article in particular surfaces real information and new
| perspectives we've not heard in this level of detail before
| on some pretty significant topics that will be impacting you,
| me, and pretty much everyone we know not only today but well
| into the future.
|
| You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too
| and that there are interesting perspectives that we've not
| heard of on that front either.
|
| But just because that's true doesn't mean this article isn't
| very much relevant and needed.
|
| Because it is.
| freely0085 wrote:
| The New Yorker has given plenty of coverage about Anthropic
| in their past issues earlier this year.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| > whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI
| lab actually is one
|
| FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one
| for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.
|
| Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that
| the company actually is ethical and safety conscious
| everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about
| joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is
| _actually genuine_ which is practically unicorn rarity in
| corporate America.
|
| We have worked for FAANG so I know where they're coming from;
| this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on
| interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this
| question for myself.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| I think cynicism is deserved just from observing Dario's
| remarks.
| root_axis wrote:
| 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 folks
| who are primarily concerned with money and status. That's
| not a condemnation, but I reject all the "do no evil"
| fanfare as conveniently self serving.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing
| the business they work for as a benign force for good_
|
| This isn't remotely true in my experience. The senior
| folks I know at Meta, for example, pretty much concede
| they're ersatz drug dealers.
| bombcar wrote:
| It should perhaps be generalized as "employees usually
| match the general consensus of their peer-group". Before
| everyone considered Meta to be ersatz drug dealers,
| they'd report that they feel what everyone feels.
|
| Google was "do no evil" until they had to choose between
| that and making the money. The culture has to be not only
| professed but tested.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Depending on what part of Google you work for, you can
| absolutely feel good about what you do. The vast majority
| of employees don't work on ads or adjacent areas. I've
| never seen another company actually care for non profit
| related externalities so much. People talk about it like
| it's the same as Haliburton or Oracle and that's not
| true.
| bombcar wrote:
| The snide response is "of COURSE you can care about non-
| profit related externalities when your giant evil ad
| business is bringing in absolute dump loads of cash".
|
| And there's something true there; few companies are
| Snidely Whiplash evil (maybe the lawnmower but even that
| is just what it is) - and having large amounts of cash
| affords you options in many areas.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| TBH I have worked at multiple FAANG and I don't know
| anyone other than maybe new grads that actually drank the
| koolaid.
|
| Certainly most of us know we are just in it for the
| money, and the soul-grinding profit machine will continue
| to grind souls for profit regardless of what we want.
|
| So that's why it is surprising to me when my (fairly
| senior) grizzled ex-FAANG friends, that share the same
| view, start waxing poetic about Anthropic being different
| and genuine. I think "maybe it is" and decide to
| interview. IDK, I guess some part of me wants to believe
| that nice things can exist.
| fwipsy wrote:
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| 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.
| fwipsy wrote:
| Anthropic is a public benefit corporation. This protects
| them from legal pressure from shareholders. Doesn't
| really help with market pressure/value drift though.
| rapnie wrote:
| Indeed. The bad behavior is emergent, where most
| individual intentions are good. Good story, bad outcome.
| Bolwin wrote:
| I find it bizarre even the public image of Anthropic is
| seen as ethical after the Department of War debacle, in
| which they themselves admitted they had basically no qualms
| with their tech being used for war and slaughter at all
| except two very very thin lines, namely mass surveillance
| of American citizens and fully automated weaponry with
| their _current_ models.
|
| It only showed they were marginally more ethical than
| OpenAI and XAI which isn't saying much.
| fwipsy wrote:
| Anthropic has two principles they're willing to stand
| behind, even when it costs them. That's not a lot, but
| OpenAI only has one principle: look out for number one.
| surajrmal wrote:
| The idea that it's not okay to arm the military is a
| position of privilege. The ethical issues are around how
| the military chooses to use its abilities, not around
| giving them the tools to do their jobs. We're talking
| about folks who are willing to give their lives up for
| others. If you're not going to serve yourself you should
| at least be willing to help them live. This has nothing
| to do with whether or not you support the political uses
| of the military. If world war 3 breaks out and you are
| forced to serve, you may find yourself feeling
| differently.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Yes and... that's a position of privilege that anyone in
| the position should ethically take.
|
| It's unfair to sweep provision of methods to the military
| under a "respect the service" catch-all justification.
|
| Two things can simultaneously be true: (1) individuals
| serving in the military are making sacrifices (in terms
| of pay, family life, personal safety) that deserve
| respect _and_ (2) the military as a political institution
| will amorally deploy whatever capabilities it has access
| to, to achieve political aims.
|
| There's a reason the US stopped offensive chemical,
| biological warfare, and tactical nuclear device research
| and production -- effective capabilities _will_ be used
| if they exist.
| ahepp wrote:
| With respect to the weapons programs, I'm not a
| historian, but I was not under the impression that the US
| stopped development of these weapons unilaterally or out
| of good will. My understanding is that it was due to a
| mixture of not perceiving a need or use for the
| capabilities, along with formal or informal international
| cooperation eliminating the need for deterrence.
|
| Just a couple of thoughts since it seems like the next
| issues in this space are rapidly arriving or already
| here.
| DirkH wrote:
| I have multiple friends at Anthropic. I can second this.
| One thing I notice about Anthropic culture is that it is
| unusually kind.
|
| So much so that I worry they won't be Machiavellian enough
| to survive. Hope I am wrong.
| __alexs wrote:
| If you know even the basics of ethics then such claims are
| clearly nonsense. There is no stable context independent
| ethical behaviour. This is a great example of the dangers
| of motivated reasoning.
| jarek-foksa wrote:
| > the company actually is ethical and safety conscious
| everywhere
|
| I wonder what Anthropic tries to achieve by spreading such
| blatant lies with their bot accounts. I'm definitely not
| buying anything from a company so morally corrupt to smear
| the competition while claiming to be somehow "ethical". And
| I'm not talking just about this thread, it's a recurring
| pattern on Reddit.
| keybored wrote:
| Are your friends also credited in _Silicon Valley_ (2014)?
| victorevector wrote:
| Im curious -- how do ethical and safety conscious manifest
| themselves there? Is it more cultural or process driven? Do
| you have any examples?
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| Maybe people inside the company _think_ Anthropic behaves
| ethically, which says something scary about either their
| ethical standards or their general awareness, considering
| how much documented unethical behavior we 've seen from
| Anthropic leadership.[1]
|
| [1] "Unless Its Governance Changes, Anthropic Is
| Untrustworthy" https://anthropic.ml/
| hollerith wrote:
| >the company actually is ethical and safety conscious
| everywhere
|
| Anthropic is emphatically not _safe_. None of the AI labs
| with customers (i.e., excluding a few small nonprofits
| whose revenue comes from donations) are anything like
| _safe_ -- because of extinction risk. The famous positive
| regard that Anthropic employees have for their organization
| 's mission means almost nothing because there have been
| hundreds of quite destructive cults and political parties
| whose members believed that theirs is the most ethical and
| benign organization ever.
|
| The best thing you can say about Anthropic is that if you
| have to support some AI lab by becoming a customer,
| investor or employee, it is slightly less dangerous for the
| world to support Anthropic than OpenAI although IMHO (and I
| admit I am in a minority on this among extinction-risk
| activists) it is slightly less dangerous to support Google
| Deep Mind or Mistral than Anthropic.
|
| All four organizations I mentioned should be shut down
| tomorrow with their assets returned to shareholders.
|
| The current crop of services provided by the leading AI
| labs are IMHO positive on net in their effect of people and
| society, but the leading AI labs are spending a large
| fraction of the 100s of billions of dollars they've
| received from investors on creating more powerful models,
| and they might succeed in their goal of creating models
| that are much more powerful than the ones they have now,
| which is when most of the danger would manifest.
|
| The leaders of all of the leading AI labs have the ambition
| of completely transforming society and the world through
| AI.
| basisword wrote:
| OP says they've been working on this for 18 months. Most of
| what you've said wasn't the case until much more recently.
| Nevermark wrote:
| 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.
| k1m wrote:
| After the US launched its attack on Iran, the ethical AI
| lab's CEO wrote: "Anthropic has much more in common with the
| Department of War than we have differences." -
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war
| mptest wrote:
| "how easy it is, for those of us who play no part in public
| affairs, to sneer at the compromises required of those who
| do" - robert harris
|
| Not making any value judgements, but I can see how one
| might value their interpretability research higher than
| what the ceo _says_ in a time where the corrupt, criminal
| executive branch is muscling in to everything from what 's
| written on currency, to journalistic sources. I generally
| blame fascists before i blame those unable or unwilling to
| resist them. though obviously, ideally, we'd all lock arms
| and, together through friendship, crush authoritarians and
| fascists.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Seriously blame anyone other than the fucking abuser.
| These people
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| nswango wrote:
| Not sure that quote has aged well from a close personal
| friend and spirited defender of Peter Mandelson.
| keybored wrote:
| "I was only following orders"--not a legitimate defense
| for some footsoldier.
|
| "I had the burden of impacting public affairs through my
| wildly succesful corporation"--poor them.
| stavros wrote:
| There's a very minor typo in the article:
|
| > "Investors are, like, I need to know you're gonna stick with
| this when times get hard,"
|
| Should be:
|
| > "Investors are like, I need to know you're gonna stick with
| this when times get hard,"
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I'm not seeing a typo. Just a stylistic difference.
| SwellJoe wrote:
| Pretty sure the correction is wrong, not merely a stylistic
| choice.
| stavros wrote:
| In "that's, like, your opinion", "like" is an interjection,
| you can take it out and not change the meaning: "That's
| your opinion".
|
| In "investors were like, you need to grow", you're semi-
| quoting someone, and can't take it out: "investors were you
| need to grow".
| tbagman wrote:
| Wonderful work and writing, Ronan -- I'm appreciative of your
| careful balance between objective fact-finding and synthesis.
|
| For me, a big worry about AI is in its potential to further
| ease distorting or fabricating truth, while simultaneously
| reducing people's "load-bearing" intellectual skills in
| assessing what is true or trustworthy or good. You must be in
| the middle of this storm, given your profession and the
| investigations like this that you pursue.
|
| Do you see a path through this?
| jharohit wrote:
| what model was used to create the visual at the top of the
| article?
| euio757 wrote:
| Nice biography from Loopt to OpenAI. Why no mention of the
| Worldcoin cryptocurrency
| https://x.com/sama/status/1451203161029427208 in this piece?
| Was there nothing interesting to report in that area?
| shinryuu wrote:
| It was mentioned, but not by name.
| bck102 wrote:
| Have you considered doing a piece on Aaron Swartz? Timnit
| Gebru? Michael O. Church?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| It could be titled "Hypergraphia"
| mplanchard wrote:
| Hi Ronan, absolutely wild to see you here in the belly of the
| beast.
|
| I have not read the article yet, because I get the physical
| magazine and look forward to reading it analog. I therefore
| only have an inconsequential question.
|
| I love the New Yorker's house style and editorial "voice," and
| I have always been curious about the editing process. I enjoyed
| the recent exhibit at the NYPL, which had some marked up drafts
| with editor feedback and author comments.
|
| Did you find that your editors made significant changes to the
| voice of the piece, and/or do you find any aspects of their
| editing process particularly notable or unusual?
|
| Can't wait to read this one, and hope the HN crowd treats you
| well.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I know why the cantilevered pool statement is there and why you
| mentioned it.
|
| I'm sure you don't know half of the totally fucked up things
| Sam did to get "revenge" for the slight of a leaking pool.
| worldwidewes wrote:
| Now I want to know more....
| tstrimple wrote:
| Hard hitting journalism here. Is the person who lied for years
| to promote himself trustworthy? More news at 11!
| Lerc wrote:
| 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 on Altman has been that he presents as
| sincere. In interviews I have never seen him make a statement
| that I considered to be a deliberate untruth. I also recognise
| that people make claims about him go in all directions, and
| that I am not in a position to evaluate most of those claims.
| About the only truly agreed upon aspect has been how persuasive
| he is.
|
| I can definitely see a possibility of people feeling like they
| have been lied to if they experienced a degree of persuasion
| that they are unaccustomed to. If you agree to something that
| you feel like you didn't really feel like you would have, I can
| see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than
| accept that they had been intellectually beaten.
|
| In all such cases where an issue is contentious, you should ask
| yourself, what information would significantly change your
| views. If nothing could change your view, then it's a matter
| beyond reason.
|
| I think you will agree that there is no smoking gun in this
| article, and it is just an outlay of the allegations.
| Evaluating allegations becomes tricky because I think it
| becomes a character judgement of those making the claims.
|
| I have not heard a single person in all of this criticise Ilya
| Sutskever's character. If he were to make a statement to say
| that this article is an accurate representation of what he has
| experienced, it would go a long way.
|
| I think Paul Graham should make a statement, The things he has
| publicly claimed are at odds with what the article says he has
| privately claimed. I have no opinion if one or the other is
| true or if they can be reconciled but there seem to be
| contradictions that need to be addressed.
|
| While I do not have sources to hand (so I will not assert this
| as true but just claim it is my memory) I recall Sam Altman
| himself saying that he himself did not think he should have
| control over our future, and the board was supposed to protect
| against that, but since the 'blip' it was evident that another
| mechanism is required. I also recall hearing an interview where
| Helen Toner suggested that they effectively ambushed Altman
| because if he had time to respond to allegations he could have
| provided a reasonable explanation. It did not reflect well on
| her.
|
| I am a little put off by some of the language used in the
| article. Things like "Altman conveyed to Mira Murati" followed
| by "Altman does not recall the exchange" Why use a term such as
| 'conveyed' which might imply no exchange to recall? If a third
| party explained what they thought Altman thought. Mira Murati
| could reasonbly feel like the information has been conveyed
| while at the same time Altman has no experience of it to
| recall. Nevertheless it results in an impression of Altman
| being evasive. If the text contained "Altman told Mira Murati"
| then no such ambiguity would exist.
|
| "Later, the board was alarmed to learn that its C.E.O. had
| essentially appointed his own shadow board" Is this still
| talking about Brockman and Sutskever? I just can't see this as
| anything other than a claim he took advice from people he
| trusted. I assume those board members who were alarmed were not
| the ones he was trusting, because presumably the others didn't
| need to find out. The people he disagreed with still had votes
| so any claim of a 'shadow board' with power is nonsense, and if
| it is a condemnable offence, is the same not true of the
| alignment of board members who removed him.
|
| Josh Kushner apparently made a veiled threat to Muratti, the
| claim "Altman claims he was unaware of the call" casts him as
| evasive by stacking denial upon denial, but without any other
| indication that was undisclosed in the article, it would have
| been more surprising if he did know of the call. I also didn't
| know of the call because I am not those two people.
|
| The claim of sexual abuse says via Karen Hao "Annie suggested
| that memories of abuse were recovered during flashbacks in
| adulthood." To leave it at that without some discussion about
| the scientific opinion on previously unremembered events being
| recalled during a flashback seems to be journalistically
| irresponsible.
| laserlight wrote:
| 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 "beaten".
| First, one gets persuaded --- you might argue that there's
| nothing wrong with a skillful persuasion. At some point they
| realize that the reality is not in line with their
| expectations. They bring the point up to the manipulator and
| ask for a change, this time in more concrete terms. The
| manipulator agrees with the change, negotiates compromises,
| and the relationship continues. After some time the
| manipulated party realizes that things are not going in the
| direction they desire. This time they ask for more concrete
| terms, without accepting any compromises. The manipulator
| accepts, yet continues to act against the terms. The
| manipulated party is now angry and directly confronts the
| manipulator. The manipulator apologizes and tells that none
| of it was intentional, and asks for another chance. However,
| at that point, the manipulator has run out of "politically
| correct" "persuasion tactics", and tells blatant lies to make
| the other party behave.
|
| From a collective perspective, even those "politically
| correct" "persuasion tactics" are discovered to be lies,
| because what the manipulator told different parties are in
| direct opposition to each other, i.e., they cannot all be
| truths.
|
| > Helen Toner suggested that they effectively ambushed Altman
| because if he had time to respond to allegations he could
| have provided a reasonable explanation. It did not reflect
| well on her.
|
| I understand how her behavior may raise a flag for the
| unsuspecting, but it was exactly the right one. Manipulators
| prey on the benefit of the doubt. If Toner were to bring
| Altman's behavior into attention of others, no doubt that
| Altman would manipulate them successfully.
|
| It's unfortunate that many people are unaware of these
| tactics and assume the best of intentions, when such
| assumptions fuel the manipulation that they would better
| avoid.
| whynotminot wrote:
| It's wild to write something like "I have experience with
| Sam Altman-like behavior" and expect us to come along for a
| 5+ paragraph ride that actually has _no Sam Altman
| connection at all except the one you imagine is true_.
|
| Talk to your therapist about your problems. Don't project
| them on people you don't know and seemingly have no actual
| first-hand experience with.
| laserlight wrote:
| I'm sorry that it wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply
| that I was going to connect to Sam Altman. I specifically
| wanted to address why it wasn't the case that people were
| "intellectually beaten" by Sam Altman.
|
| > except the one you imagine is true
|
| I'm not sure what you mean. I told about an example of
| manipulation that I witnessed. I later learned that these
| were common tactics employed by con-artists, scammers,
| etc.
|
| > Don't project them on people you don't know and
| seemingly have no actual first-hand experience with.
|
| I don't need first-hand experience with someone to
| understand that they are a manipulator. I am comfortable
| forming my opinion based on reports.
| nickpp wrote:
| Paul Grahams's latest public statement on the issue:
|
| https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353
| rglullis wrote:
| > what information would significantly change your views
|
| Quite simple: show me any single action took by Sam Altman
| which can not be construed as an attempt to get him more
| power/money/influence. You can't find it.
|
| The difference between what he _claims to believe_ and what
| he _actually does_ is a textbook example of sociopathy.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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 joined
| an AI research organisation at a time when everybody
| thought the big advances were much further away than they
| turned out to be.
|
| You could still construe those actions as evil if you
| choose to see them as evil.
|
| I'm not going to claim that Sam Altman is not a sociopath,
| I lack the information and knowledge of psychology to make
| that determination. On the other hand I have not detected
| those attributes in anyone who has claimed he is a
| sociopath.
|
| It seems odd that people seem to take offense at the notion
| that arbitrary people do not reach a conclusion that
| requires specialised expert knowledge and a decent amount
| of irrefutable evidence.
| rglullis wrote:
| > 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 money from the Saudis. But he had no
| problem to do it.
|
| > joined an AI research organisation at a time when
| everybody thought the big advances were much further away
| than they turned out to be.
|
| 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| When people are described as sociopathic it's not about any
| particular lie, but the relationship that the person has
| with the truth, which is that they will lie when it suits
| them and tell the truth when it suits them and they don't
| seem to distinguish morally between them. And more than
| that, they treat people the same way, and will use them
| while it suits them and then dispose of them when they are
| inconvenient.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Paul made a statement today:
| https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353?s=20
|
| It clarifies he did not fire Sam
|
| I overall agree with your takeaway, but this is not a
| criticism of the article itself.
| giwook wrote:
| > My prima facie view on Altman has been that he presents as
| sincere.
|
| That is how pathological liars present.
| sambuccid wrote:
| 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
| f154hfds wrote:
| > 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..
| sonofhans wrote:
| Perhaps your question answers itself.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Paul answers that here:
| https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353?s=20
| artursapek wrote:
| hey I loved that Ricky Gervais joke about you at the globes
| e40 wrote:
| For those that don't know or remember:
|
| "Tonight isn't just about the people in front of the camera.
| In this room are some of the most important TV and film
| executives in the world. People from every background. But
| they all have one thing in common: They're all terrified of
| Ronan Farrow."
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| The last couple sentences tie things up really nicely.
| gib444 wrote:
| As someone on a budget, how can I pay for good journalism when
| it so spread out across various (expensive) outlets?
| input_sh wrote:
| Paying for 1 is doing more than paying for 0.
|
| It's not your responsibility to fund for every single one,
| just find the one you like the most and subscribe to that
| one.
| antirealist wrote:
| Hi Ronan. TCatK is a phenomenal book, not only in exposing the
| wrongdoing of powerful people, but also in presenting the meta-
| issue of how hard it was to get the word out, and you handled
| it all with nuance. You're about as close as I have to a
| personal hero.
|
| Long time HN lurker, made an account just to say that :)
| Akuehne wrote:
| Great article.
|
| Thank you for fielding questions. And please don't stop, your
| work is great.
| saberience wrote:
| The article is paywalled, where can we read it?
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Do we have a choice?
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Please ask The New Yorker to extend some of their very generous
| subscription sale prices to Canada, I would subscribe to print
| if even a single sale applied to us, but all the sales are
| always USA only.
| AIorNot wrote:
| 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
| popalchemist wrote:
| How do you feel about the title of your article? I assume an
| editor chose it.
|
| Clearly he's straight up evil; between tanking the global
| economy, constantly lying, and raping his 3 year old sister, it
| feels really disingenuous to me to frame this as an open
| question.
| noodlebreak wrote:
| Seems a bit conspiracy theorist to me
| spacebacon wrote:
| Ask him about the "hermetic order"(that is either emergent,
| convergent or by design?)one discovers in interiority studies
| of GPT.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Well, no, obviously not. Not one bit.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| No
| gonzo41 wrote:
| just like Zuck.
| catigula wrote:
| 1. No.
|
| 2. You cannot "control" superintelligent AI.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| No.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell, no.
| sumeno wrote:
| Betteridge strikes again
| gchokov wrote:
| He is cooked. Only a matter of time before the whole thing blows
| up. Once a scammer, always a scammer.
| Aboutplants wrote:
| 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 so long until the
| truth emerged.
| the_doctah wrote:
| And they both peddle the same altruism smokescreen. Sociopath
| leader playbook.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Excellent work. I'll have to wait until we get the print version
| delivered to finish as I'm not signed into the new Yorker on my
| phone.
|
| I've always been a huge fan of Ronan Farrow's journalism and
| willingness to speak truth to power. I think he's pulling at
| exactly the right thread here, and it's very important to
| counteract Altman's reputation laundering given that we run a
| very real risk of him weaseling his way into the taxpayer's
| wallet under the current administration.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| This is above your comment:
| https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.c...
| throw4847285 wrote:
| 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.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| 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.
| lnenad wrote:
| This whole situation goes to show that yesterday's conspiracy
| theorists are today's realists. What's happening to USA's
| leadership and as a country and what's happening with with their
| top companies is really scary for the rest of us. If this trend
| continues we're all definitely gonna end up in a kleptocracy.
| isolay wrote:
| End up? It already is.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Looks like Betteridge's law of headlines applies here too.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any
| headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word
| "NO."
| just_once wrote:
| Amazing that this article and an actual comment from Ronan Farrow
| is this far down the list while...Scientists Figured Out How Eels
| Reproduce (2022) has 6 times the points.
| dang wrote:
| This thread set off a software penalty called the flamewar
| detector.* I turned that off as soon as I saw it.
|
| (* This was predictable from the title, because the question in
| it was inevitably going to trigger an avalanche of crap
| replies. Normally we'd change the title to something less
| baity, and indeed the article is so substantive that it
| deserves a considerably better one. But I'm not going to change
| it in this case, since the story has connections to YC - about
| that see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fa
| lse&qu....)
| pupppet wrote:
| Ask Conde Nast if he can be trusted..
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VWJVBNzc2u
| simoncion wrote:
| Uncrappified link: <https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments
| /3cs78i/whats_the...>
| HardwareLust wrote:
| Of course he cannot be trusted. Anyone whose motivation is based
| on greed is by nature untrustworthy.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Even if your motivation is some utopian vision of the future,
| you should not be trusted. Utopia is a thought experiment in a
| philosophy of living taken too far, not something to be reached
| for earnestly.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Why is it that criticism of people's insatiable greed for
| wealth and power often gets dismissed with this thought-
| terminating cliche about utopias?
|
| Desire to live in a society that's less greedy, that rewards
| compassion and punishes sociopathy is completely valid. We
| _should_ be pursuing that earnestly because survival of our
| species depends on it. The people in charge are so drunk on
| wealth and power that they would rather drive our entire
| species off a cliff than sacrifice even 10% of their
| effectively bottomless wealth.
|
| But instead of criticizing our current philosophy that's
| actively being taken too far and threatens to destroy us, you
| criticize people who express their frustration with this
| state of affairs.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| The criticism is not of the idea that the world has
| problems, and that we should look at those problems with
| the aim of fixing them.
|
| The criticism is of the assumption that a world without
| problems theoretically could exist.
|
| You may disagree, but you will not find a definition of
| such a world that everyone can agree on.
|
| Regardless, of whether you agree (that such a definition
| doesn't exist) or not, if you do plan on bringing about
| such a utopia, and you begin to meet resistance, the
| question you will inevitably need to answer is: How do
| those who resist fit into this utopia?
|
| The historical answer for this question, which by all
| appearances seems like an inevitable answer, is the reason
| why people criticise utopian thinking.
| hellojimbo wrote:
| lol thats like 99% of planet earth, including the animals
| MegagramEnjoyer wrote:
| no it isn't lol
| davebren wrote:
| Not just the greed. The whole AI is so dangerous that we must
| be the ones to build it to save humanity, and then gaslighting
| yourself and everyone around you into believing that your
| language model is AGI. This is some weird detached from reality
| cult behavior.
| kortex wrote:
| Complete hearsay, but I struck up a convo with someone who
| had spent a few hours drinking around a campfire with him and
| a few others at burning man, prior to GPT3's popularity.
| Apparently he was utterly convinced in his pivotal role to
| shepherd in a new era with AI, to the point where it got
| really messianic and culty. He didnt recall much else other
| than just being really weirded out by the dude.
| davebren wrote:
| The AI CEOS and most of their employees are in the same
| place as that guy. They're just in a more professional
| context and will be careful not to let their delusions of
| grandeur look too insane.
|
| I remember watching the fitness function improve while my
| neural net learned to recognize characters for a project I
| did in school, and there was something about it that felt
| powerful. I guess we've always had that with the machines
| we imbue that have any sort of decision making
| "intelligence", but mix that with taking psychedelics and
| you have an interesting cocktail.
| jesterson wrote:
| Watch Altman's reaction in Tucker Carlson interview to the
| question about (alleged) murder of OpenAI researcher Suchir
| Balaji.
|
| The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a
| lot.
| kmfrk wrote:
| Gobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator
| president, in case anyone's wondering.
|
| Fantastic reporting.
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| 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.
| kmfrk wrote:
| One of the decidedly eerier parts of this story as you keep
| reading are all the gaps between what people are _saying_
| about Altman, and what they clearly _want_ to say about
| Altman but _can 't_.
| devmor wrote:
| Throughout my life, what colleagues/friends are unwilling
| to remark plainly on has been the most telling factor of
| someone's character to me.
| dugidugout wrote:
| This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few
| friends who practically play characters as if they've
| resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance:
| one of my friends is late to just about everything and
| treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note
| this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally
| frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this
| nothing changes. This is obviously a critical element to
| their broader character.
|
| Perhaps you mean to distinguish social groups without
| much intimacy? To which I'm sure we could provide some
| convincing cases, but this seems like a silly heuristic
| generally.
| rincebrain wrote:
| I have been in or next to a number of social circles with
| such missing stairs, where for various reasons people in
| the groups have decided to not directly acknowledge
| certain Facts that are known about some members, because
| it would involve them confronting their hypocrisy.
|
| Someone cheating regularly on their partner, flagrant
| substance use problems, controlling people who ostracize
| anyone who doesn't agree with their sometimes insane
| perspectives...
|
| People will go along with quite a lot to avoid friction,
| especially as they get older and picking up new social
| circles becomes higher cost.
|
| It's possibly the most telling thing, when you see what
| people say is a hard line versus how they actually
| respond to it.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Maybe they have ADHD because the symptoms fit, if they
| really do acknowledge the problem yet cannot fix it.
| ed_balls wrote:
| that's not ADHD _. People with ADHD would improve - it
| may take a LOT of time, but it will happen. Quite often
| they will go to the extreme and come in way too early. My
| bet would be on Cluster B personality trait e.g. lack of
| empathy and constant need for attention and validation.
|
| _ ADHD frequently co-occurs with other conditions.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That is not always true and not always with everyone.
| Many people who have ADHD have unsolvable time blindness.
| They don't mean to do it but their brain chemistry
| literally disallows them from not doing so in many cases.
| devmor wrote:
| Correct. It's been a lifelong struggle for me. I have
| found outside ways to address it, but even in my 30's I
| will forget to eat meals or do chores if I don't set
| disruptive alarms to do so.
| ed_balls wrote:
| That's exactly my point! you do set alarms, you seek the
| solution. You feel bad when running late so you mask or
| compensate. If you lack empathy or seek attention, you
| wouldn't do those things.
| dugidugout wrote:
| To be clear, I am ADHD (executive-type) and am empathetic
| to my friend. All considered I am quite fond of my time
| spent with them. But in regards to developing a model for
| ones character I don't think it is very helpful to allow
| disabilities to shape them. It is simply impossible to
| share the individual essence related and is better
| understood through the manifestation which is ultimately
| shared. And regardless I would hope they would seek this
| diagnosis as a function of their own introspection
| according to my account of the phenomenon, not some
| extrapolation. [0]
|
| To engage with your curiosity of their situation though,
| they spend a lot of time at poker tables, sitting for 8+
| hours. I would assume this is not a common enjoyment for
| most ADHD minds. From my experience as soon as I'm out
| the action for a string of hands I'm completely checked
| out of any rigid strategy. Now sit me at a blackjack
| table and I can crank hands until the morning! But here I
| am being fed action and drinks basically on demand.
|
| [0] I'm just thinking out loud here, not accusing you of
| making any claim related
| devmor wrote:
| I would say I didn't mean the statement that generally -
| it was contextual to the topic.
|
| i.e. If your friends wont remark on your penmanship, who
| cares? If they wont remark on how you treat service
| workers at a restaurant, that's probably concerning.
| dugidugout wrote:
| I should've edited my comment, on reflection my example
| doesn't fit! I think rincebrain had a nice way of wording
| what I now believe to be your intent!
| Teever wrote:
| You mention many proxies of Musk who post negative content
| about Altman.
|
| In your investigation were you able to determine if Altman
| has similar proxies?
|
| How common would you say that this is? Do these kinds of
| people generally have teams of people who sling mud for them?
|
| Can you speculate on how that manifests on a site like
| Hackernews?
| xnx wrote:
| > 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
| mplanchard wrote:
| 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
| trvz wrote:
| Calling your own article all those things is a major turn-
| off.
| jonstewart wrote:
| This might be the major dilemma in the tech industry today,
| where the natural tendencies of literalism and optimism among
| technologists has turned into a form of defensive credulity.
| The real world rigor of The New Yorker's editorial standards
| and concerns about defamation necessitate this circumscribed
| style that rewards close reading and skepticism, but those
| aren't in favor in the tech industry currently.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > ... where every word is chosen carefully...
|
| In light of that...
|
| > "Texts from this period show Altman _coordinating_ closely
| with Nadella "
|
| Why did you make the odd choice of a diaresis on this word?
| eieio wrote:
| if this isn't a joke - new yorker style uses a diaresis
| when a word has a repeated vowel where the second vowel is
| part of a different syllable. coordinate, cooperate, and
| reelect are probably the most common places where this
| comes up
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-
| of-...
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| With this in mind, I think you would be the perfect
| investigative journalist to track down the archives of The
| National Enquirer.
|
| This was our "hometown" gossip paper in South Florida, and
| you should have seen the pictures and stuff that they did
| print. And this was after threats of celebrity lawsuits in
| the mid-1970's had curtailed any tendency to exaggerate.
|
| Back when almost nobody outside of New York had heard of
| Trump, he started coming down to play golf and made quite an
| impression among the well-established Florida real-estate
| operators. They could see right through him like any other
| fake millionaire from New York, which were a dime a dozen.
| There was just a general consensus among many visitors that
| what happens in South Florida stays in South Florida. Epstein
| grew up in this environment.
|
| You would see pictures of him with unidentified non-Stormy
| dates, and some insinuation in the gossip column but you knew
| they were holding back from anything that could not be truly
| verified.
|
| By the time of his presidential run, it looks like he had
| become well acquainted with David Pecker who owned the
| Enquirer. I wouldn't be surprised when he sold the publishing
| company that there are archives somewhere that contain all
| the supporting stuff that was unverified at the time. When
| Trump & Epstein were much younger running buddies for so
| long.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| Disclaimer: I have no association with any AI company and have
| never met Altman or any of the other top AI scientists.
|
| The real question is: can _anyone_ be trusted if the fever dreams
| of super-intelligence come true? Go ahead and replace Sam Altman
| with someone else - will it make a difference? Any other CEO is
| going to be under the same overwhelming pressure to make a profit
| somehow. I think the OpenAI story is messier because it was
| founded for supposedly altruistic reasons, and then changed.
|
| Methinks many of Altman's detractors protesteth too much. He's
| doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) Nothing
| of substance in this article seemed to make him exceptionally
| "sociopathic" compared to any other tech CEO. It goes with the
| territory.
|
| What depressed me most is that _trillions_ of dollars are being
| raised for building what will undoubtedly be used as a weapon. My
| guess is the ROI on that money is going to be extremely bad for
| the most part (AI will make some people insanely rich, but it is
| hard to see how the big investors will get a return.) Could you
| imagine if the world shared the same vision for energy
| infrastructure (so we could also stop fighting wars over control
| of fossil fuels and spewing CO2?) A man can dream...
| tim333 wrote:
| People do vary even if none are perfect. Demis Hassabis has a
| pretty good reputation amongst the AI leaders. Altman seems
| unusually shifty.
| laserlight wrote:
| > He's doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.)
|
| What? OpenAI was a non-profit until Sam made it for-profit.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| Seems this got buried from the front page very quickly
| ronanfarrow wrote:
| There is dwindling space for sincere independent accountability
| reporting on big tech like this to a) be created, since it's
| incredibly resource-intensive and so many resources flow from
| Silicon Valley, and b) actually reach people, since more
| platforms are now owned or otherwise influenced by interested
| parties.
|
| Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting
| in your communities, and subscribe to investigative outlets
| when you can.
| big_toast wrote:
| You can see the vote history here[1]. It's always hard to
| know exactly why something gets buried. I was a little sad to
| see the story down-ranked when I saw that you were here in
| the comments.
|
| But the discussion is generally pretty low quality with these
| sort of posts. People react without having read the story, or
| with whatever was on their mind already, or are
| insubstantive, or simply low effort. I don't think you'll
| lose k-factor not having a bigger post here.
|
| Sometimes if you talk to the mods, they'll let you know their
| perspective. I generally find they're correct that people are
| much better at contributing/disseminating new knowledge to
| the world on more technical topics here.
|
| [1]: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47659135
| throw4847285 wrote:
| But isn't that circular? If the ranking algorithm used by
| the mods tends to devalue articles like this because they
| don't trust the user base to comment intelligently, doesn't
| that alter the culture of this site to make that more true?
| dang wrote:
| I'm not sure what big_toast meant, but we do trust the
| user base to comment intelligently (which sometimes works
| and sometimes not), and we don't devalue articles like
| this.
|
| We do tend to devalue _titles_ like this, or more likely
| change them to something more substantive (preferably
| using a representative phrase from the article body), but
| I 'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls
| of protest, since YC is part of the story.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I'm sure you're sick of comments about moderation, but I
| will say, this makes me more sympathetic to the position
| you're in.
|
| It's an interesting dilemma. Many very respected
| publications use provocative titles because of the
| attention economy. And I'm sure you have good data that
| provocative titles lead to drive-by comments and flame
| wars.
|
| But I don't think big_toast was entirely wrong that there
| is a side effect of sometimes burying articles that are
| by their nature provocative. And how do you distinguish a
| flame war over a title from a flame war over content?
| That's not a leading question. I don't know.
| dang wrote:
| For us the litmus test isn't the title, it's whether the
| article itself can support a substantive discussion on
| HN. If yes, then we'll rewrite the provocative title to
| something else, as I mentioned. Ironically this often
| gives the author more of a voice because (1) the headline
| was often written by somebody else, and (2) we're pretty
| diligent about searching in the article itself for a
| representative phrase that can serve as a good title.
|
| If, on the other hand, the title is provocative and the
| article does _not_ seem like it can support a substantive
| discussion on HN, we downweight the submission. There are
| other reasons why we might do that too--for example, if
| HN had a recent thread about the same topic.
|
| How do we tell whether an article can support a
| substantive discussion on HN? We guess. Moderation is
| guesswork. We have a lot of experience so our guesses are
| pretty good, but we still get it wrong sometimes.
|
| In the current case, the title is baity while the article
| clearly passes the 'substantive' test, so the standard
| thing would have been to edit the title. I didn't do that
| because, when the story intersects with YC or a YC-funded
| startup, we make a point of moderating less than we
| normally do.
|
| I know I'm repeating myself but it's pretty random which
| readers see which comments, and redundancy defends
| against message loss!
| dang wrote:
| Yes, I was surprised that it was downranked when I saw that
| too. Then I realized it had set off the flamewar detector
| and it was a simple matter to turn it off. I'm glad we got
| to this in time, because sometimes we don't, and this was
| an important case not to miss.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| This was an excellent piece with many new pieces of
| information in it. Thanks to you and your coauthor for
| getting it released.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teams_
|
| A paper with "ideas to keep people first" was
| (coincidentally?) published today: * Worker
| perspectives * AI-first entrepreneurs * Right to
| AI * Accelerate grid expansion * Accelerate
| scientific discovery and scale the benefits. *
| Modernize the tax base * Public Wealth Fund *
| Efficiency dividends * Adaptive safety nets that work
| for everyone * Portable benefits * Pathways
| into human-centered work
|
| https://openai.com/index/industrial-policy-for-the-
| intellige...
| dang wrote:
| It set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now.
|
| I only saw this thread by chance and almost didn't look,
| because the title made the piece sound like a flamebait blog
| post. Fortunately I saw newyorker.com beside the title and
| looked more closely.
| innocenttop wrote:
| Why is the story so downranked? Folks at HackerNews have
| something to do with it ?
| randycupertino wrote:
| HN generally downvotes and/or flags anything that paints
| ycombinator in a bad light. As Altman was president of yc from
| 2014 to 2019 that could be why this is getting downvoted.
|
| Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get
| flagged and taken down.
| dang wrote:
| I'm not sure whether you meant this about moderator
| interventions or not, but our actual practice is the
| opposite:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.
| ..
|
| As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN
| moderation from the beginning. See also https://hn.algolia.co
| m/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
| lovich wrote:
| I don't think the poster you responded to was claiming that
| moderators directly did this. The flagging system is open
| to bias from the community at large and certain types of
| articles(ex. Anything critical of the current admin) get a
| bunch of real users organically flagging them.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, it's hard to tell sometimes but I've at least
| learned not to _automatically_ take these personally.
| Well, partly learned.
|
| I don't think anyone familiar with this community would
| assume positive bias towards Sam, Airbnb, or even YC
| anymore - it's quite the contrary, from my perspective,
| but of course everyone notices different things and has
| their own view. Ditto for political slants.
| lovich wrote:
| I dont assume positive bias, but I do assume that most
| negative things that get people irked are removed as a
| result of the mechanics of the flagging system.
|
| Like, I dont really expect puff pieces for ycombinator or
| the like to get artificially pushed to the top, but I do
| expect that enough people who are feel culturally or
| financially invested in ycombinator to flag negative
| things into oblivion, especially as its completely
| reasonable that the population of users here has a much
| higher percentage of those folk than any random
| population sampling.
| dang wrote:
| It off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion
| detector. I've turned that off now - this is obviously a
| serious article.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| A new Ronan Farrow piece is a rare gift (and Marantz is no
| slouch). Can't wait to read this in the physical magazine when it
| arrives!
| geokon wrote:
| I hadn't heard of him before. The wiki article is worth a look
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Farrow
|
| It's got to be one of the most unusual biographies of a living
| person that I've ever come across. Nearly every sentence is a
| head-turner. If you made it up no one would believe you
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Truly a unique individual on every level.
| guzfip wrote:
| > Lehane--whose reported motto, after Mike Tyson, is "Everyone
| has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth"
|
| lol do you think these guys have ever been hit? Let alone in the
| face. They'd probably be less eager to mouth off as much as they
| do if so.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| For those curious about how sama got to where he got and stayed
| on top for so long, I recommend you read the book: The Sociopath
| Next Door by Martha Stout.
|
| I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I
| don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any
| other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting.
|
| Some concepts from the book:
|
| > Core trait: The defining characteristic is the absence of
| conscience, meaning they feel no guilt, shame, or remorse.
|
| > Identification: Sociopaths can be charming and appear normal,
| but they often lie, cheat, and manipulate to get what they want.
|
| > The Rule of Threes: One lie is a mistake, two is a concern, but
| three lies or broken promises is a pattern of a liar.
|
| > Trust your instincts over a person's social role (e.g., doctor,
| leader, parent)
|
| Check and check.
|
| OpenAI is too important to trust sama with. He needs to go. In
| fact, AI should be considered a public good, not a commodity pay-
| as-you-go intelligence service.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a
| sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have
| a good definition for.
|
| We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they're in
| that third category we haven't named, where they're very good
| at manipulating people, but also can feel conscience, guilt,
| remorse, etc, perhaps just muted or easier to justify against.
|
| E.g. if you think you're doing something for the betterment of
| mankind, it doesn't really matter if you lie to some board
| members some year during the multi-decade pursuit.
| xg15 wrote:
| That's not a third category, that's just a sociopath as seen
| by themself.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I doubt most sociopaths, when they're honest, would agree
| they feel much guilt or remorse at all.
|
| Whereas the people in the category I'm describing might
| feel those things, but prioritize those feelings far below
| the benefits of achieving what they set out to achieve.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > I doubt most sociopaths, when they're honest, would
| agree they feel much guilt or remorse at all.
|
| Yes that is the core trait I highlighted in the 1st
| bullet.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a
| sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't
| have a good definition for.
|
| There is -- I call it "corpo sociopath." The corpo sociopath
| really comes out in the workplace, less so in personal life.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I was with you right up until the final paragraph, but this
| made me do a double take:
|
| > OpenAI is too important to trust sama with.
|
| ...wat? They made a chat bot. How can that possibly be so
| existentially important? The concept of "importance" (and its
| cousin "danger") has no place in the _realistic assessment_ of
| what OpenAI has accomplished. They haven 't built anything
| dangerous, there is no "AI safety" problem, and nothing they've
| done so far is truly "important". They have built a chat bot
| which can do some neat tricks. Remains to be seen whether
| they'll improve it enough to stay solvent.
|
| The whole "super serious what-ifs" game is just marketing.
| davebren wrote:
| Yeah the whole fearmongering is clearly just marketing at
| this point. Your LLM isn't going to suddenly gain sentience
| and destroy humanity if it has 10x more parameters or trains
| on 10x more reddit threads.
|
| I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before
| LLMs. It's getting more funding and research, but none of the
| research seems very innovative. And now it's probably much
| more difficult to get funding for anything that's not a
| transformer model.
| arcfour wrote:
| > I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were
| before LLMs.
|
| I mean this is very obviously untrue. It'd be like saying
| we aren't any closer to space flight after watching a
| demonstration of the Wright Flyer. Before 2022-2023 AI
| could barely write coherent paragraphs; now it can one-shot
| an entire letter or program or blog post (even if it's full
| of LLM tropes).
|
| Just because something is overhyped doesn't mean you have
| to be dismissive of it.
| davebren wrote:
| Point is that LLMs could be a local minima we are now
| economically stuck in until the hype wears off.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Or we could be stuck here for decades pending a
| breakthrough nobody alive today can even conceive of, or
| we could be compute limited by a half dozen orders of
| magnitude. Or it could happen next week. That's the
| nature of breakthroughs--you just can't have any idea
| when or how (or if) they'll happen.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| In hindsight there's an obvious evolutionary pathway from
| the Wright Flyer to Gemeni/Apollo/Soyuz.. but at the time
| in 1903 there absolutely was not, and anyone telling you
| so would be a crank of the highest degree. So _it may
| turn out_ that LLMs have some place on the evolutionary
| path to AGI, or it could turn out they 're a dead end
| like Cayley's ornithopters. Show me AGI first, then we
| can discuss whether LLMs had something to do with it.
| arcfour wrote:
| In order to get to space, you must first be capable of
| flight through the atmosphere. That should be apparent to
| anyone even then because the atmosphere is in between
| space and the ground.
|
| Regardless of whether spaceflight is still 1000 or 100 or
| 50 years away, you are still closer than you were before
| you demonstrated the ability to fly.
| gib444 wrote:
| It's fairly obvious sociopathy is a prerequisite for top CEO
| jobs. Some just hide it better than others or have better PR
| people
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Na, it will be Dario instead of Sam, Id say? :-))
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/hOYMn
| nafey wrote:
| I hope ronan farrow doesn't mind his article being shared like
| this
| stevenwoo wrote:
| It's also available via public libraries in USA via Libby if
| your local library system pays for a subscription, so it's a
| way to support the magazine indirectly, since your local
| taxes pays for your library. The downside for weekly is you
| have to read it that week, no archive access.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Which edition? I looked at April 6th and can't see the
| article.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| 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).
| sph wrote:
| Truth > revenue
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I'm not going to pay for another newspaper subscription just
| to read one article
| vasco wrote:
| The information is more important than the wants of the
| writer, always.
| calebm wrote:
| This is pretty hilarious - when I asked ChatGPT to "summarize
| this article: https://archive.ph/hOYMn", it said it's about
| Jesus ("The article traces the development of early Christian
| Latin hymns, especially focusing on how themes about the Virgin
| Mary and Christ evolved from the 4th to later centuries..." (ht
| tps://chatgpt.com/share/69d48476-9bf4-8327-8c19-709865a547...)
| sph wrote:
| Sharing what an LLM has to say about a thing is like sharing
| what you dreamt of last night -- no one really cares.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| unless you dreamt how to debug that problem no-one else can
| solve
| sph wrote:
| It works better if you said it came to you under the
| influence of heavy drugs
| flux3125 wrote:
| Interesting. If you look at the sources it cited, there are a
| few links about "Sacred Songs and Solos" (likely from
| related/side content on the page), my guess is it didn't read
| the main article and instead anchored on those and
| hallucinated
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the owner of that site has AI
| scraping protections enabled.
| thesquandered wrote:
| Why even have GPT summarize it? Just RTFA.
| calebm wrote:
| I like to consume content in a breadth-first way. Title ->
| Summary -> Maybe read it.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| aksss wrote:
| "could", "may", "might" - these words do so much heavy lifting in
| "journalism". Almost always it's an invitation to worry and be
| miserable.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| If you are asking if a single human can be trusted with such a
| responsibility, the answer is, by default, no.
| romeroej wrote:
| Can anybody tho?
| morleytj wrote:
| Yeah, some people can more than others.
| jader201 wrote:
| Am I the only one that feels like Claude is clearly winning code
| generation, and Gemini in general LLM?
|
| I just don't feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning
| any of the AI battles.
|
| Therefore, I feel like "Sam Altman may control our future" is a
| far stretch.
| dominotw wrote:
| how is gemini winning in general llm. what is general llm .
| SwellJoe wrote:
| General LLM is what Apple is paying Google for.
| tartoran wrote:
| I noticed that Apple speech to text has gotten pretty good
| lately. Is that because they're paying Google? Not sure I
| use other AI features from Apple as I have my Siri turned
| off.
| laserlight wrote:
| > Is that because they're paying Google?
|
| No, the Google deal hasn't shipped yet.
| guelo wrote:
| Well I just canceled my Claude Pro subscription because of the
| mysterious limits that I don't experience with codex, even
| after paying for "extra usage". If Anthropic can't figure out
| their capacity problems they are in trouble.
| chrisjj wrote:
| I doubt Anthropic see this as their capacity problem. They
| like "extra usage", and users who don't, well its _their_
| capacity problem.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>and Gemini in general LLM?
|
| You might be. Or at least I feel like Gemini is actually dumber
| than a house of bricks - I have multiple examples, just from
| last week, where following its advice would have lead to damage
| to equipment and could have hurt someone. That's just trying to
| work on an electronics project and askin Gemini for advice
| based on pictures and schematics - it just confidently states
| stuff that is 100000% bullshit, and I'm so glad that I have at
| least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would
| have easily hurt myself.
|
| It's somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me
| every week, but it just doesn't follow instructions and keeps
| repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now,
| like it's some kind of giant joke that all these companies are
| playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that
| don't seem that intelligent.
|
| I also use claude at work, and for C++ programming it behaves
| like someone who read a C++ book once and knows all the
| keywords, but has never actually written anything in C++ - the
| code it produces is barely usable, and only in very very small
| portions.
|
| Edit: I just remembered another one that made me incredibly
| angry. I've been reading the Neuromancer on and off, and I got
| back into it, but to remind myself of the plot I asked Gemini
| to summarise the plot only up to chapter 14, and I specifically
| included the instruction that it should double check it's not
| spoiling anything from the rest of the book. Lo and behold, it
| just printed out the summary of the ending and how the
| characters actions _up to_ chapter 14 relate to it. And that
| was in the "Pro" setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real
| life person did that I'd stop being friends with them, but
| somehow I'm paying money for this. Maybe I'm the clown here.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I'm curious: did you give Gemini the entire text of
| Neuromancer or did you expect it to use search results for
| chapters 1 to 14?
|
| I would have just fed it the text of chapters 1 to 14 from a
| non drm copy.
| gambiting wrote:
| I just asked like I said, give me plot summary until
| chapter 14, don't spoil the rest of the book. And of course
| when I told it what it just did it was like oh I'm sorry,
| here's a summary without the spoilers for the ending. So
| clearly it could do it without additional context.
| calf wrote:
| I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a
| request. Do they even have direct access to published
| works to use as reference material?
|
| Also, last time I played 20 questions with ChatGPT, it
| needed 97 turns and tons of my active hinting to get the
| answer.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Do they even have direct access to published works to
| use as reference material?
|
| I mean, clearly, given that it did answer my question
| eventually. Also wasn't it a whole thing that these
| models got trained on entire book libraries(without
| necessarily paying for that).
|
| >>I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a
| request
|
| Why though? They seem to know everything about
| everything, why not this specifically. You can ask it to
| tell you the plot of pretty much any book/film/game made
| in the last 100 years and it will tell you. Maybe asking
| about specific chapters was too much, but Neuromancer
| exists in free copies all over the internet and it's been
| discussed to death, if it was a book that came out last
| year then ok, fair enough, but LLMs had 40 years of
| discussions about Neuromancer to train on.
|
| But besides, regardless of everything else - if I say
| "don't spoil the rest of the book" and your response
| includes "in the last chapter character X dies" then you
| just failed at basic comprehension? Whether an LLM has
| any knowledge of the book or not, whether that is even
| true or not, that should be an unacceptable outcome.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I wouldn't expect an AI to know exactly what happens in
| every chapter of a book.
|
| Knowing the plot of Neuromancer isn't the same as being
| able to recite a chapter by chapter summary.
|
| I tried this Neuromancer query a few times and results
| greatly vary with each regeneration but "do not include
| spoilers" seems to make Gemuni give more spoilers, not
| less.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>I wouldn't expect an AI to know exactly what happens in
| every chapter of a book.
|
| Cool. I did - and turns out it can do it, just not
| without giving me some spoilers first.
|
| >>vary with each regeneration but "do not include
| spoilers" seems to make Gemuni give more spoilers, not
| less.
|
| I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this then.
| calf wrote:
| _Why though? They seem to know everything about
| everything, why not this specifically._
|
| The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is
| unscientific. "They seem to" is not good enough for an
| operational understanding of how LLMs work. The whole
| point of training is to forget details in order to form
| general capability, so it is not surprising if they
| forget things about books if the system deemed other
| properties as more important to remember.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> if they forget things about books if the system deemed
| other properties as more important to remember.
|
| I will repeat for the 3rd time that it's not a problem
| with the system forgetting the details, quite the
| opposite.
|
| >>The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is
| unscientific.
|
| How do you scientifically figure out if the LLM knows
| something before actually asking the question, in case of
| a publicly accessible model like Gemini?
|
| Just to be clear - I would be about 1000000x less upset
| if it just said "I don't know" or "I can't do that". But
| these models are fundamentally incapable of realizing
| their own limits, but that alone is forgivable - them
| literally ignoring instructions is not.
| slg wrote:
| One thing that stands out when reading profiles like this is the
| number of positive and negative descriptions of the subject that
| agree. For example, there seems to be little dispute that Altman
| will happily say something that he knows/believes isn't true,
| there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any lies
| if the lies are in service of something they themselves agree
| with.
| palata wrote:
| > there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any
| lies if the lies are in service of something they themselves
| agree with.
|
| Or if the person lying is in a position of power?
| ambicapter wrote:
| > The day that Altman was fired, he flew back to his twenty-
| seven-million-dollar mansion in San Francisco, which has
| panoramic views of the bay and once featured a cantilevered
| infinity pool, and set up what he called a "sort of government-
| in-exile." Conway, the Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, and the
| famously aggressive crisis-communications manager Chris Lehane
| joined, sometimes for hours a day, by video and phone. Some
| members of Altman's executive team camped out in the hallways of
| the house. Lawyers set up in a home office next to his bedroom.
| During bouts of insomnia, Altman would wander by them in his
| pajamas. When we spoke with Altman recently, he described the
| aftermath of his firing as "just this weird fugue."
|
| These sociopaths are so good at giving away nothing. He managed
| to engender sympathy instead of saying "I'm not gonna talk about
| anything that happened then".
|
| Also very weird how many of these people are so deeply-linked
| that they'll drop everything they're doing just to get this guy
| back in power? Terrifying cabal.
| arionhardison wrote:
| Hi @ronanfarrow -- I have only had one interaction with Sam
| Altman in person, and I was advised to keep it to myself. I know
| this crowd may not care, but Altman is absolutely terrified of
| Black people -- not in any contextual sense, but in a visceral,
| instinctive way. For someone who, as you put it, "controls our
| future," this should matter.
|
| FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it
| 100% impacts hiring and other decisions at OpenAI.
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Can you give more details?
|
| It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist,
| but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.
| arionhardison wrote:
| Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things.
|
| 1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did
| not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim.
|
| 2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any
| follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not
| answer.
|
| 3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am
| 6'1 140lbs
|
| I was working for a company called NationBuilder and I had
| the opportunity to go on a work trip. Outside of a talk he
| had just given I was waiting for my ride and I looked over
| like...damn thats the speaker. I wanted to say Hi; he damn
| near flagged down the police. I apologized and just decided
| to move on.
|
| Note: It was in Reno, and no I don't want to go into details;
| the others are not hard to find because I happened upon them
| via blog posts so i'm sure if someone with the accumen of RF
| wants to know, he will find.
|
| I have heard similar stores from several people in the years
| since. I AM NOT CALLING THIS PERSON RACIST. I am saying; he
| is observably scared of black people and that is not someone
| I want making descions about how the world moves foward.
| arionhardison wrote:
| Note: To all the downvotes; I did this publicly and not
| anon for a reason, if you will do the same I am more than
| willing to provide evidence for all of these claims as long
| as its done publicly and in the open.
| arionhardison wrote:
| PG said something along the lines of: "There should be no
| truth that is increasingly unpopular to speak."
|
| If you don't believe what I shared is true, address that
| directly. But seeing my post sitting at 1 point and
| [flagged] after 2 hours is not OK. Just as DJT can't flag
| away his issues, you shouldn't be able to do so on HN.
|
| One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was
| real -- grounded in observability, empirical evidence,
| not bias or feelings. I really hope that what happened to
| my post is not the beginning or a continuance of the end
| for that ethos.
| sharmi wrote:
| Just came to say, I appreciate your emotionally
| intelligent and balanced take on your experience, where
| it would have been very easy to react and let emotions
| take over (understandably).
| tastyface wrote:
| I tried to respond to your comment with some personal
| observations on racist currents in this community, but my
| comment immediately got flagged. So yeah! This site ain't
| what it used to be. Best for the good folks to seek
| community elsewhere, I reckon. I miss the old days as
| well, but I don't think they're coming back.
| hnbad wrote:
| If this site ever was anti-racist, that must have been a
| long time ago. I threw away my old account many years ago
| only to come back with this one (because it's difficult
| to completely ignore HN if you work in tech) and the
| reason I threw that one away was in part the overwhelming
| reactionary bias in this community.
|
| The "progressives" were at best silent "don't rock the
| boat" types more inclined to insist on civility than to
| challange reactionary sentiments while the reactionaries
| ranged from dog-whistling to outspoken, across the entire
| range of white supremacism, sexism, homophobia,
| transphobia, antisemitism, zionism and so on. The only
| comments that would ever get flagged or downvoted were
| those that were explicit enough to be seen as "impolite"
| because they happened to spell out calls for genocide or
| violence rather than merely gesturing at it with the
| thinnest veneer of plausible deniability.
| tastyface wrote:
| Well, I do remember it being more about the underdogs and
| a cheeky "fuck the system" attitude without much malice.
| Maybe I just wasn't tuned into this stuff back then. Now,
| though, both users and tech leaders can unironically
| parrot Stormfront rhetoric from 10 years ago (using
| vaguely cordial language) and no one even bats an eye.
| The kind of stuff that would have made you unemployable
| just a few years ago.
|
| When I think of HN in the before times, I think of people
| like Aaron Swartz. Would he have enjoyed his technical
| discussions peppered with comments on how the West is
| being "invaded" and "outbred" by third-world hordes?
| Based on what I know about him -- and please correct me
| if I'm wrong -- I'm guessing he would have noped out of
| that kind of community in a flash. Yet nowadays I see
| this kind of talk here all the time, percolating all the
| way up to industry leaders like Musk and DHH.
| latexr wrote:
| > One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it
| was real -- grounded in observability, empirical
| evidence, not bias or feelings.
|
| That has never been the case, because HN is frequented by
| humans and humans are biased. Someone who claims to be
| unaffected by feelings is someone you cannot trust, as it
| means they are blind to their own shortcomings. Being
| robotic about the world is no way to live--that's how you
| get people who are so concerned with nitpicks and
| "ackshually" that they completely lose sight of what's
| important. They become easy to manipulate because they
| are more concerned with the letter of the law than its
| spirit or true justice.
|
| Objectivity and empiricism are positive traits but should
| be employed selectively. Emotions aren't a weakness, they
| are what drives us to change and improve. Understanding
| your own emotions equips you better to understand the
| world. But they too can be used to manipulate you. To
| truly grow, you have to employ your emotional and
| rational sides _together_. Focusing on just the rational
| will get you far but not all the way.
|
| HN is primarily about _curiosity_ --it's in the
| guidelines four times--and you can't have that without
| emotion.
| palmotea wrote:
| >> One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it
| was real -- grounded in observability, empirical
| evidence, not bias or feelings.
|
| > That has never been the case, because HN is frequented
| by humans and humans are biased. Someone who claims to be
| unaffected by feelings is someone you cannot trust, as it
| means they are blind to their own shortcomings.
|
| Yes, and HN is full of people like that: simultaneously
| arrogant and stupid software engineers whose arrogance is
| founded on their own ignorance and self-regard. "Grounded
| in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or
| feelings" actually sounds like a smokescreen to obscure
| one's bias and feelings from oneself.
|
| > Being robotic about the world is no way to live--that's
| how you get people who are so concerned with nitpicks and
| "ackshually" that they completely lose sight of what's
| important. They become easy to manipulate because they
| are more concerned with the letter of the law than its
| spirit or true justice.
|
| They're also easy to manipulate, because their emotions
| can be appealed to without them having enough awareness
| to be on guard. For instance: you can manipulate many
| software engineers by working your position into the form
| of a technical "system" (e.g. Econ 101) then praise them
| for being smart little boys for understanding and
| believing it.
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| I don't know if he is a racist or not, but forget HN.
| Last couple years it has gone on the deep end, not sure
| if delusion or $ interests, but it is impossible to have
| a decent conversation here. I think the only reason this
| article stayed up is because OAI is starting to be a bit
| 'toxic' now, but if this was published a year ago, it
| would have been flagged to oblivion.
|
| So just ignore those points and flags. HN *used* to be a
| nice place for intelectual conversations, even if you
| disagreed with each other. Now is nothing more than bots,
| people with financial interests in this bubble or
| sycophants.
| kombookcha wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this.
| interstice wrote:
| It's disappointing to me that a completely factual
| personal experience can be relayed with zero spin - and
| yet some of the replies act as if it's 100% spin without
| any factual evidence. Some people seem to prefer to
| respond to an imaginary version of a conversation rather
| than the one that's actually happening in front of them.
| pesus wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this. I 100% believe it, and it lines
| up with my experience with other people who came from
| similar backgrounds as Sam Altman - i.e. white, rich,
| privileged, and attending elite universities.
|
| I will disagree with one part - I do believe it is racism.
| Most will never admit it publicly, but if they think you're
| one of them, it often comes out rather quickly, especially
| when alcohol is involved.
| portender wrote:
| It's sad to me that "racism" is such a divisive word to
| many, and is met with defensiveness rather than
| introspection and communication. Trying to not be racist
| takes work, and communication, and is a process, not a
| state.
|
| I appreciate OP's sharing as well. Also, racism isn't
| peddled only by rich white elite university attendees, it
| reaches into all the corners.
| mememememememo wrote:
| An extranordinary claim needs a bit more evidence than one
| datapoint where in his defense maybe he is scared of anyone
| he doesn't know trying to talk on the street.
| interstice wrote:
| Also mentioned was that more evidence is not hard to find
| profdevloper wrote:
| If this is noteworthy, the burden of proof should be on
| the poster, not the reader to substantiate these claims.
| interstice wrote:
| I don't really like this take, as it tries to make being
| informed somehow not the readers responsibility.
| mememememememo wrote:
| Sorry, not going to open a cold case file for every HN
| claim. Citations would be good. I'd read them.
| upmind wrote:
| Agreed, his two posts read really weirdly. He made a
| deliberately vague(?) initial post to get a response and
| I'm not sure how I feel about his story as you've said,
| if I was Sam Altman I'd be wary of anyone coming up to me
| too.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this experience with us. Don't worry
| about the downvotes. That's just how it is here sometimes.
| I don't think it reflects the views of most readers.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Just to clarify, because I am not sure I am reading this
| correctly:
|
| Your statement that he is terrified of black people is
| based on you (presumably a black person) running into him
| outside an event, and him reacting with fear/extreme
| caution when you approached him?
|
| Not defending Sam, but if that is the case, then it's the
| kind of thing that Sam can hold up and say "Do you really
| think my critics are intellectually honest?"
|
| Rock solid evidence is what brings people down. Stretched
| truths, assumptions, and careful half-truth wording, are
| all ammo the accused will use to strengthen their side.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Not defending Sam, but if that is the case, then it 's
| the kind of thing that Sam can hold up and say "Do you
| really think my critics are intellectually honest?"_
|
| Why? It sounds like they were in an environment with many
| people and Sam reacted negatively to the black guy. It's
| not like the story was, "so I followed him down a
| deserted alley and he got scared, so he must be racist."
| WarmWash wrote:
| It sounds like Sam was approached on the street by a
| stranger, and he had a negative reaction. Which is fairly
| common for high profile people, especially people with a
| following of haters (let's not deny AI/data center
| general unrest).
|
| I cannot see any legitimacy to the claim besides the
| commentor's own interpretation of the situation. They
| posit this like the authors would want to know, but here
| I am doing the first thing the authors of the article
| would do, and I'm getting downvotes for it. The author(s)
| won't touch it anyway.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's a little weird to be scared of random strangers,
| famous or not.
|
| If this happened when Altman was already so well-known so
| as to make this a problem, maybe he shouldn't have been
| traveling on his own?
|
| Private security is a thing he can afford (now, at
| least).
| profdevloper wrote:
| 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.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| I wonder if this stems from Sam getting beat up by a black
| guy. From the article:
|
| > When Altman was sixteen or seventeen, he said, he was out
| late in a predominantly gay neighborhood in St. Louis and
| was subjected to a brutal physical attack and homophobic
| slurs. Altman did not report the incident, and he was
| reluctant to give us more details on the record, saying
| that a fuller telling would "make me look like I'm
| manipulative or playing for sympathy."
| elschneider wrote:
| I really hope @ronanfarrow addresses this. Thanks for sharing
| baq wrote:
| The longer I live, the more secrets coming out I see, the less
| surprised I am with every next one.
| rkozik1989 wrote:
| Career ladders have a tendency to hoist up those among us
| with the worst personality traits.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Altman is absolutely terrified of Black
|
| Can you share more about how this manifested?
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| well, just based off that group photo of the openclaw developer
| and the staff at openai, i wouldnt be surprised if there was
| some truth to this
| wk_end wrote:
| This anecdote is so absurd it sounds like satire. This is the guy
| with the $23M mansion?
|
| > Amodei's notes describe escalating tense encounters, including
| one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister,
| Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell
| them that he had it on "good authority" from a senior executive
| that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue,
| "lost it," and brought in that executive, who denied having said
| anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman
| then denied having made the claim. "I didn't even say that," he
| said. "You just said that," Daniela replied.
| simoncion wrote:
| He's a liar and untrustworthy. Based on their public
| statements, that's a big part of why the board fired him.
|
| Of course, (despite the fact that Altman previously publicly
| stated that it was very important that the board can fire him)
| he got himself unfired very quickly.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Well they did indeed have a coup so looks like Altman was
| right.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Sam Altman may control our future"
|
| TLDR but just the heading is already ugly. No single person no
| matter how nice they're should be able to control our future.
| Power corrupts, what fucking trust. We are supposed to be
| democratic society (well looking at what is going on around this
| is becoming laughable)
| nielsbot wrote:
| No one person control our future. Stop there.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Yeah, but one person can fuck a lot of shit up.
| _moof wrote:
| Some people have far, far more power over our lives than
| others. More than they deserve, frankly.
| swingboy wrote:
| It's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs.
| Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going
| to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So
| much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.
| 0x3f wrote:
| It's because they're really good at the kind of busywork the
| average white collar job requires. Most people are out there
| writing documents and making presentations. Only when you use
| them for actual complexity does the shortfall become clear.
| red369 wrote:
| I'm going to write a silly comment here: For a moment I thought
| you wrote "... LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't
| know that _they 're_ going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo
| street bar anytime soon."
|
| I liked that mental image a lot! (I try to maintain being
| uncertain whether Deckard was a replicant)
| m4rtink wrote:
| I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really
| include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There
| is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall
| technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself
| does not actually play a big role.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Deus Ex is an outlier, AI is a core part of that plot
| staticman2 wrote:
| The first Cyberpunk book, Neuromancer, has a plot which
| revolves around A.I recruiting human agents to forward its
| plans...
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| I think you can look at Star Trek as a fairly grounded
| example of where current LLMs could go: the ship's computer
| is not autonomous in any way but it does accept fairly vague
| instructions and you can apparently vibe-code the holodeck.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| Im hoping more for red dwarf
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I find that more realistic then, because it appears that's
| the trajectory we are going on with regards to AI, as a tool
| not a panacea.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving
| the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.)
|
| A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is
| at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the
| worldwide crapsack economic system. They don't abolish
| corporations, although they might take them over.
|
| Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the
| world into a post-scarcity society, it probably wouldn't be
| filed under "cyberpunk" either...
| hnbad wrote:
| Rampant capitalism is kinda genre-defining for Cyberpunk so
| Cyberpunk without corporations wouldn't really be
| Cyberpunk. _The Matrix_ only qualifies as Cyberpunk because
| within the matrix the machines effectively control the
| capitalist power structures to exert their influence.
|
| Abundance/scarcity isn't really about availability, it's
| more about access. You can have a cyberpunk story in a
| "post-scarcity" setting in the sense of availability (due
| to sci-fi tech) but you can't have it without unequal
| access to those resources.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Agreed, which is why The Culture (series) isn't cyberpunk
| but The Polity (by Neal Asher) kinda skirts the line, in
| many ways they are similar except resource inequality
| still exists on a wide/policy scale in the latter.
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| citruscomputing wrote:
| Well yeah, that's what "alignment" means...
| ehnto wrote:
| It is a pretty core part of Cyberpunk the "franchise" though,
| both tabletop and more recent video game.
|
| I think as well if you look closer, many cyberpunk worlds
| imply AI through robots, computers with personality etc.
| helloplanets wrote:
| AI is one of the core parts of cyberpunk, through androids /
| humanoid robots. Blade Runner is completely built on the
| protagonist having to interact with rogue artificial
| intelligence.
| rwmj wrote:
| Hyperion has a pretty well-developed view of AGI.
| mcat_god wrote:
| I assume it just becomes one of those things as ubiquitous as
| Wi-Fi
| keiferski wrote:
| AIs are in plenty of cyberpunk stories, but your comment did
| make me think that they are often rather stereotypically
| "alien entity characters" and not a kind of corporate
| technology / weapon that is controlled by a specific
| organization.
|
| Which is a shame, as it seems to me that the overwhelming
| risk of AI is from the latter scenario, and not as a rogue
| individual entity.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Well I'd hope they're transformative, they're using
| transformers after all. We just need to pay attention to them,
| that's all they need.
| kfarr wrote:
| Do they need all our attention?
| ninjahawk1 wrote:
| OpenAI is like #3 or #4 of the AI companies right now in terms of
| power, and last place in the court of public opinion.
|
| I'd be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good
| graces of the public and having access to all of our computers
| indirectly with Claude Code.
| 0x3f wrote:
| OpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.
| aduffy wrote:
| I'm not sure how much of that converts to revenue. If it's
| free plan users, that's just cost. You can say what you want
| about "creating a training data moat" but that doesn't seem
| like it's prevented the other labs from putting out excellent
| models.
| 0x3f wrote:
| Well we were talking about power and reputation and being
| well-known and all that. Being more ubiquitous is surely a
| big part of that. GP seems to think Anthropic is doing
| better because of the DoD thing. In my estimation, 90% of
| people do not care about that at all.
| hellojimbo wrote:
| Around the same revenue due to Anthropics strong enterprise
| strategy
| 0x3f wrote:
| Perhaps, but I'd venture the ear of the regime is even more
| valuable.
| ninjahawk1 wrote:
| They're all in the negative excluding subsidies, hard core
| coders are more valuable than high schoolers cheating on
| homework.
| estearum wrote:
| makes sense if you think the point of journalism is just to
| take everyone down a notch instead of... um... informing the
| public of bad actors
|
| "the local drug-dealing pimp is so passe, we need to
| investigate the most upstanding members of the community _just
| to be sure_ " is a frankly insane strategy
| killbot5000 wrote:
| No. Why is this a question?
| bijowo1676 wrote:
| This article is just another typical New Yorker fluff piece that
| tries to look deep but misses the actual point.
|
| The biggest flaw is that it spends way too much time on high-
| school level drama and "he-said-she-said" gossip about Sam
| Altman's personal life instead of focusing on the actual
| technical and corporate capture of OpenAI.
|
| The author treats the "nonprofit mission" like some holy quest
| that was "betrayed," when anyone with a brain in tech saw the
| Microsoft deal as the moment the original vision died. Instead of
| a hard-hitting look at how compute-monopolies are actually
| forming (MSFT AMZN NVDA and circular debt dealing inflating the
| AI bubble that could crash the economy), we get 5,000 words of
| hand-wringing over whether Sam is a "nice guy" or a "liar."
|
| Who cares???????
|
| The board failed because they had no real leverage against
| billions of dollars, not because they didn't write enough Slack
| messages. It's a long-winded way of saying "Silicon Valley has
| internal politics," which isn't news to anyone here.
| simoncion wrote:
| Can Sam "The board can fire me, I think that's important." Altman
| be trusted?
|
| If for no other reason, given what happened when the board fired
| him... no. I'd say not.
| ergocoder wrote:
| I wonder if Sam might abandon the ship soon. Other co-founders
| already did.
|
| The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the
| upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't.
| If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth
| >$100B already.
|
| This is probably _one_ of the significant factors why other co-
| founders left too. It 's just a lot of headaches with relatively
| low reward.
| raincole wrote:
| And OpenAI's influence is hugely exaggerated compared to, say,
| Google.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Yes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-
| founders, for example.
|
| All the downsides without much upside...
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Yes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-
| founders, for example.
|
| Sergey Brin is trying to change that lately, but Altman
| still has a sizable head start.
| 0x3f wrote:
| But nobody is going to just gift him the same valuation on the
| next company. It's not like his execution is OpenAI's moat
| right now. So where would he be going that's a better deal for
| him?
| ergocoder wrote:
| Founding his own company would be one alternative. Full
| control. No stigma on the non-profit part. Probably get the
| same paper money as he got now at OpenAI.
| davebren wrote:
| What is the value he adds anyway, being a delusional cult
| leader where most people around him characterize him as a
| sociopath? Is it just his ability to lie and create fear-
| hype?
|
| It's not like he had anything to do with the technical
| achievements, except convincing the engineers that they were
| doing something valuable, but the cat is out of the bag on
| that.
| palata wrote:
| IMHO, nobody is remotely worth $1B, period.
|
| The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows
| that the system is flawed.
|
| The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything
| other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that
| they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is _very_
| flawed.
|
| We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their
| money.
| rafterydj wrote:
| Well, redistributing their money is (in some cases
| disingenuously) exactly how they are able to pitch investors.
| "Sure, value my company at $10B and my shares make me $2B,
| but we're alllllll gonna make money when hit AGI!!!" That
| kind of thing.
| palata wrote:
| Sure, I understand why the people around them who benefit
| from it also want to do that.
|
| My point is that it all only benefits _a few people_. Those
| people used to call themselves "kings", appointed by god.
| Now they are tech oligarchs. If the people realised that it
| was bad to have kings, eventually maybe they will realise
| that it is bad to have oligarchs?
| simonh wrote:
| If someone founds a company, grows it and owns $1bn of its
| stock, they don't have $1bn in cash to distribute. They have
| a degree of control over the economic activity of that
| company. Should that control be taken away from them? Who
| should it be given to?
|
| I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I'm
| not clear how that should work without creating really weird
| incentives. Some sort of special tax?
| palata wrote:
| > Some sort of special tax?
|
| Well yeah. After some amount, you get 100% taxes. So that
| instead of having billionaires who compete against each
| other on how rich they are or on the first one to go
| contaminate the surface of Mars or simply on power, maybe
| we would end up with people trying to compete on something
| actually constructive :-). Who knows, maybe even
| philanthropy!
| simonh wrote:
| So, who owns and runs the companies? How do new companies
| get formed?
|
| I'm not against higher taxation of the wealthy. I think
| inequality is a serious problem. The issue is what the
| wealth of these people isn't a big pile of cash they are
| wallowing in, it's ownership of the companies they build
| and operate. Is that what we want to take away? How, and
| what would we do with it?
|
| I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is
| converted into cash. I'm not clear how a wealth tax
| should work.
| palata wrote:
| > I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is
| converted into cash
|
| Yeah, that makes sense to me. And those are all good
| questions of course :-).
|
| > So, who owns and runs the companies?
|
| I guess ownership stays the same, we just need to prevent
| the companies from growing too big. Because the bigger
| they are, the more powerful their leaders get, for once
| (aside from all the problems coming from monopolies). But
| by taxing them, we prevent the people owning those
| companies from owning 15 yachts and going to space for
| breakfast :D.
|
| > How do new companies get formed?
|
| I don't know if that's what you mean, but I often hear
| "if you prevent those _visionaries_ from becoming _crazy
| rich_ , nobody will build anything, ever". And I
| disagree. A ton of people like to build stuff _knowing
| they won 't get rich_. Usually those people have better
| incentives (it's hard to have a worse incentive than
| "becoming rich and powerful", right?).
|
| Some people say "we need to pay so much for this CEO,
| because otherwise he will go somewhere else and we won't
| have a competent CEO". I think this is completely flawed.
| You will always find someone competent to be the CEO of a
| company with a reasonable salary. Maybe that person will
| not work 23h a day, maybe they won't harass their
| workers, sure. But will it be worse in the end? The
| current situation is that such tech companies are "part
| of the problem, not of the solution" (the problem being,
| currently, that we are failing to just survive on Earth).
| r14c wrote:
| Big agree, at a certain point a company is big enough that
| their impact has to be managed democratically. I don't have
| an issue with effective leaders, the problem is that we
| reward a certain kind of success with transferable credits
| that don't necessarily align with people's actual talents or
| skills.
|
| I want skilled institutional investors who have a track
| records of making smart bets. I don't want a random person
| who happened to get lucky in business dictating investment
| policy for substantial parts of the economy. I want
| accountability for abuses and mismanagement.
|
| I know China gets a bad rep, but their bird cage market
| economy seems a lot more stable and predictable than this
| wild west pyramid scheme stuff we do in the US. Maybe there
| are advantages for some people in our model, but I really
| dislike the part where we consistently reward amoral
| grifters.
| palata wrote:
| > Big agree, at a certain point a company is big enough
| that their impact has to be managed democratically.
|
| 100%. First, a company should not be that big. The whole
| point of antitrust was to avoid that. The US failed at
| that, for different reasons, and now end up with huge tech
| monopolies. And it's difficult to go back because they are
| so big now.
|
| BTW I would recommend Cory Doctorow's book about those tech
| monopolies: "Enshittification: why everything suddenly got
| worse and what to do about it". He explains extremely well
| the antitrust policies and the problems that arise when you
| let your companies get too big. It's full of actual
| examples of tech we all know. He even has an audiobook,
| narrated by himself!
| asK1ajsh wrote:
| The New Yorker is owned by Conde Nast just as Reddit. Conde Nast
| has a deal with OpenAI:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...
|
| This is a damage control piece, and you see that the most
| stinging comments here get downvoted.
| cake_robot wrote:
| What might feel like "damage control" is more likely to be the
| outcome of the even-handedness you get with serious, rigorous
| reporting. Something the New Yorker is known for.
| primer42 wrote:
| "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the
| word no."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| In this case, "Ick, no!"
| ambicapter wrote:
| I didn't have the mental energy to read the whole thing but man
| the final paragraph is some really good writing. Way to tie it
| all in together.
| krackers wrote:
| The entire thing is a joy to read, you should really set aside
| some time to cleanse your palette in this age of LLM prose. I
| mean just look at this juxtaposition
|
| >Altman continued touting OpenAI's commitment to safety,
| especially when potential recruits were within earshot. In late
| 2022, four computer scientists published a paper motivated in
| part by concerns about "deceptive alignment," in which
| sufficiently advanced models might pretend to behave well
| during testing and then, once deployed, pursue their own goals.
|
| (plus it finally resolves the mystery of "what Ilya saw" that
| day)
|
| Also since it wasn't stated clearly
|
| >"the breach" in India. Altman, during many hours of briefing
| with the board, had neglected to mention that Microsoft had
| released an early version of ChatGPT in India
|
| That was Sydney if I understand correctly.
| pharos92 wrote:
| We focus these critiques far too much on the face rather than the
| underlying mechanics. Just like in politics, we critique the
| personality/politician yet the underlying system architecture
| evades it.
|
| Sam Altman clearly has a long history of nefarious activity. But
| the underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and
| human freedom persists with or without his presence.
| xgulfie wrote:
| It's because we only really know one economic system but we've
| known many people
| j2kun wrote:
| Or perhaps, the underlying threat is personified by Altman, in
| that our country has repeated and widespread institutional
| failures to hold the wealthy accountable for wrongdoing.
|
| The threat of AI is, after all, driven by the people who use
| it.
| chii wrote:
| > underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and
| human freedom persists
|
| I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors
| who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described,
| but that is a threat from said actor, not AI - unless you're
| claiming that an AGI would be capable of such independent
| actions.
|
| AI is similar in transformative power to how the internet was a
| transformative power - might even be greater, if it is more
| commonly available for use through out the world. Whether that
| transformative power is doing good or bad really depends on the
| people doing it, not on the tech. I would bet that the future
| is going to be better because of AI, than to imagine a worse
| future and act to stunt the tech.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are
| actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you
| described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI
|
| Of course, it is popular to deny it. People constantly tell
| themselves "it is people, not tech". They make valid, yet
| banal and inconsequential statement. This distinction has no
| bearing on reality.
| chii wrote:
| So you're saying that if people hadn't invented weapons,
| there would be no violence?
|
| The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > So you're saying that if people hadn't invented
| weapons, there would be no violence?
|
| If anything, if people hadn't invented weapons, they
| would not use weapons to enact violence, and this in turn
| will impact the practical nature of violence.
|
| > The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.
|
| My claim is that considering any technology by _itself_
| is pointless. There is no such thing as _thing by
| itself_. Technology always exists in structural setting,
| and in turn shapes this structure.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| >But the underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy
| and human freedom persists with or without his presence.
|
| Without Sam Altman the compute and improvements for LLMs to be
| a threat wouldn't have readily existed at all. He was the one
| who got the ball rolling because of his desperation (SVB
| collapsed right before the hype bubble started), ego, and
| quasi-religious desires.
| giwook wrote:
| tl;dr
|
| No, he cannot.
| nickphx wrote:
| speak for yourself, he doesnt control my future.
| vntok wrote:
| Please don't leave us hanging; what makes you immune?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman
| on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted "money and
| power." Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time
| suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, "Happy to not become
| rich on this, so long as no one else is." In another, he asks,
| "So what do I _really_ want?" Among his answers is "Financially
| what will take me to $1B."
|
| I can't imagine having such uninspired thoughts and actually
| writing them down while in a role of such diverse and worthwhile
| opportunities. I'd like to ask "how the hell do these people find
| themselves in these positions", but I think the answer is
| literally what he wrote in his diary. What a boring answer. We
| need to filter these people out at every turn, but instead
| they're elevated to the highest peaks of power.
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| Sociopaths don't have much going for them in life other than
| winning status games.
| lokar wrote:
| Or, some fraction of otherwise good/normal people who "win"
| are turned into sociopaths by the power and sycophancy.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| Sociopath is the next word that people seem to want to
| entirely destroy the meaning of
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| [flagged]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Struck a nerve?_
|
| No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with
| the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the
| term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in.
| I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as
| useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus
| visible).
| greenchair wrote:
| Speaking of overinclusion, 'wild' is my nominee for 2026
| as I'm seeing it all over the place.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _' wild' is my nominee for 2026_
|
| I don't know how to define the delineation I'm about to
| propose. But there is a difference between
| overinclusivity trashing a morally-loaded, potentially
| even technical, term, and slang evolving.
| rexpop wrote:
| I'm sorry, we did _what_ with the word "racist"?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we did what with the word "racist"?_
|
| "Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the
| actual baddies to come in." The next sentence.
| hnbad wrote:
| While I agree that the word has been misused by some bad
| actors in the "Woke 1.0 era", it's worth pointing out
| that this isn't what most people complaining about the
| word being "diluted" are referring to as these are mostly
| people flat-out upset by any suggestion that they
| themselves might hold racist beliefs.
|
| That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth
| your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about
| people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".
|
| Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from
| two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely
| aligning with two different segments of the population:
| 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are
| extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and
| 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies
| downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as
| racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e.
| "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure.
| "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the
| word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates
| while still attempting to use it with the emotional
| weight and personal judgement of the former definition.
|
| I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism"
| just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can
| be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the
| latter definition requires a critique of systems, which
| is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those
| systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-
| racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging
| hierarchical power structures in general and thus
| necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say
| all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there
| are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still
| suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-
| racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold
| racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI
| seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that
| to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like
| Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups
| suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the
| BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics"
| policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate
| America leading up to and into the second Trump
| presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the
| current state of most US corporations and their
| subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their
| previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").
| rexpop wrote:
| Yeah, no shit. I was hoping for more specificity.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| I would be curious to hear you expand on that, walk me
| through it, maybe a small paragraph to explain what over
| inclusion happened with the weird fascist, what baddies
| you're vaguely referring to, and connect those dots?
| Ucalegon wrote:
| Racism and fascism have been used correctly, its just
| that people do not like to be have their beliefs
| associated with negative things and thus, rather than
| perform self-reflection about themselves, instead the
| problem exists elsewhere. I am sure you can come up with
| outliers that prove what you are saying is true, but
| across the vast majority of applications of the use of
| both words they are correct relative to definitions of
| both words.
| kakacik wrote:
| While true and we can see them literally everywhere where
| there is some money and/or power (even miniscule places like
| classic banks have easily 1/3 of the staff with clear
| sociopathic traits, I have to deal with them daily... or
| whole politics) - thats just human nature, or part of it.
|
| Its up to rest of society to keep them in check since classic
| morals are highly optional and considered nuissance blocking
| those games. And here we the rest fail pretty miserably,
| while having on paper perfect tool - majority vote.
| kevinqi wrote:
| it is disappointing, but is it shocking that people most driven
| by gaining money/power are the ones the most successful at
| achieving it?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| What sticks out to me most is that humanity consistently
| fails to weed these creatures out and regulate society. It's
| a bug in our social software; we seem to like these broken
| people rather than recognize that they're a liability.
| basket_horse wrote:
| This isn't a bug. It's the driving force of our capitalist
| society. We are not trying to weed them out. We are trying
| to encourage them. It's pretty simple, when they get rich,
| so do all their investors.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Trust is not a bug
|
| You need to accept that every generation some people are
| going to try and fuck things up.
|
| Then you get to decide to stop or help them
| sumedh wrote:
| Most people don't care as long as it does not affect them
| directly.
| chromacity wrote:
| Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman,
| Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader
| problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision
| to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to
| maximize personal wealth.
|
| The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of
| making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us
| don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser
| evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream
| of making a billion by any means necessary
|
| I hope that's not true. If it is, we live in a bleak world
| indeed.
|
| I can confidently say I've never once dreamed of having
| billions. I've never _wanted_ billions. Not even in a
| fanciful manner. What would I do with that money? Buy
| mansions and megayachts? That 's loser stuff
|
| Most of what I want out of life cannot be bought. The pieces
| that come with a price tag, like a comfortable home, do not
| require billions
|
| I think only sociopaths want billions because they don't
| understand spending your life seeking things that actually
| matter, like family and human connection
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't think it's all that hard to avoid working on anything
| shady. It's not as easy to avoid being _associated_ with
| anything shady due to widespread cynicism and a tendency to
| treat tech companies with thousands of projects as a
| monolith.
| ggregoire wrote:
| > The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream
| of making a billion by any means necessary
|
| That's actually the difference, most people don't want a
| billion
| azan_ wrote:
| Yeah, sure...
| ks2048 wrote:
| It's not surprising. I made this comment on HN before, but if
| you follow him on Twitter, it's pretty remarkable - the CTO of
| one of the most important technology companies in the world and
| he has never (that I've seen) posted something with some
| technical insight, or just anything interesting about
| technology. It's just boring truisms, cliches, empty
| statements, etc.
| morleytj wrote:
| 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 crosses
| my face at the thought of these sort of Marvel references and I'm
| not entirely sure why.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| They're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit
| from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that
| people working in such influential positions find them
| appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that
| lowest common denominator audience.
|
| The people shaping the future have no taste.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| When things reach a certain level of popularity they
| constitute "mental real estate". Your audience has heard of
| Groundhog Day, so there is an opening for a movie with that
| title to make money -- your film will start out already
| having name recognition and some understanding of what the
| movie is about.
|
| Thus it is a writer's job not to make references they find
| appealing to reveal their good taste, but to know what
| references their audience will find appealing and use them to
| help communicate concepts. If this bothers you it's because
| they're insulting you by saying you might be part of the
| audience that watches Marvel, and you had hoped reading the
| New Yorker would signal that you aren't.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| The writers of this piece didn't make the reference.
| halter73 wrote:
| No, but they chose to include it. Presumably there were a
| lot less apt references they chose not to include.
| eutropia wrote:
| There's a time and a place for everything, and rejecting
| popular media as "lowest common denominator" is the most
| uninspired form of cultural elitism.
|
| Is it cynical to want your <art project> to make a profit? Or
| for it to make enough profit to subsidize other projects?
|
| Is it cynical to make something accessible so more people who
| watch it are able to enjoy it?
|
| I agree that it's embarrassing and feels crass when movies
| both try to be broadly appealing and simultaneously fail to
| be entertaining or well executed ... but many of the marvel
| movies clearly surpass that bar.
|
| No one wants to make a bad movie that does poorly with
| critics and paying customers - but it does happen because
| making a movie is expensive and complicated and requires a
| lot of skilled people working together towards the same goal.
|
| Regarding taste: do you think a michelin star chef swears off
| cheap food like hotdogs or fish and chips? Doubtful - because
| those foods have their place and the chef is able to enjoy
| them for what they are rather than use them as an excuse to
| display a superiority complex.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| > There's a time and a place for everything
|
| Yeah, I'm saying professional communication isn't the place
| for Marvel references, and that those who choose to include
| references to those movies in their professional
| communications are revealing something about their media
| tastes.
|
| If I'm at a Michelin star restaurant I don't want to be
| served a ballpark hotdog.
| ianbutler wrote:
| That they relate to the common person and aren't overly
| snobby?
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| Exactly. They share the cultural sensibilities of the
| average person on the street, and yet they're making
| decisions that will shape the world for future
| generations. I think that's bad. I want those decisions
| being made by people who have a more extensive cultural
| education. Snobs, if you want to call them that.
| abustamam wrote:
| I'm confused as to what your point is. Employees refer to
| the incident as "the blip." I got no impression that
| there was a formal memo that went out to the company or
| the media at large that officially refers to the incident
| as the blip, merely that employees refer to it as a blip
| (likely to each other, not too dissimilar to a meme).
|
| And while I don't think someone's media tastes ought to
| preclude them from making important decisions, I also
| disagree with your point at large. I don't think the
| world should be shaped by snobs. The world is already
| being shaped by snobs in other sense of the word, and I
| don't see any indication that it's any better than the
| alternative.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Of course they're average people, why do you think tech
| or AI company employees are somehow above or beyond the
| average person? I'm not sure why you'd willingly say
| you'd want snobs controlling the world, that is somehow
| even worse and reeks of aristocracy which is why you see
| replies rejecting your thoughts, it is simply not a
| western ideal or one to strive towards.
| lmm wrote:
| > why do you think tech or AI company employees are
| somehow above or beyond the average person?
|
| They're supposed to be elite. They went to the best
| schools, many of them have PhDs, they are getting paid
| insane amounts of money.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Lol. I can tell you right now they're not elite.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Interestingly, the smartest people I know have the widest
| range of media consumption and understanding. To assume
| that because someone uses a marvel reference they might
| not have a deeper cultural education is rather...limited
| thinking.
| calf wrote:
| Ferran Adria drew culinary inspiration from a bag of
| potato chips
|
| As someone experienced with a privileged elite
| educational background, I can guarantee that
| intellectuals love the highbrow and lowbrow, the
| authentic and the kitsch; rather, it is a sign that
| someone is not acculturated if they have the
| stereotypical impression of the intelligentsia, which
| makes the OC's comment ironic, they are telling on
| themselves.
| klausa wrote:
| > If I'm at a Michelin star restaurant I don't want to be
| served a ballpark hotdog.
|
| This is a very funny quip.
|
| A famous anecdote about a 3* restaurant in NYC is about
| the servers overhearing a group of diners mentioning how
| they ran out of time try a "real NYC hot-dog", and the
| restaurant staff running out to grab one from the corner
| cart and plating it up nicely; and how this was a
| highlight of everyone's experience.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Marvel movies absolutely target the lowest common
| denominator of film watchers. To deny that is delusional.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| There is also elitism of lack of expectations. Common
| people should be helped to rise up over the mud produced by
| culture industry. Meeting them and staying with them in
| this mud is an _actual_ elitism.
| red369 wrote:
| I agree that these movies are really being cranked out. I
| hadn't even realised quite the extent of this until I went to
| look. But I think some of these movies are good enough that
| it shouldn't be disturbing that people in influential
| positions find them appealing:
|
| I know a lot of people are critical of the Rotten Tomatoes
| score, but I find that when a high enough percentage of
| reviews are positive, it is likely I will enjoy the movie.
| Some of the Marvel movies have a very high proportion of
| positive reviews (admittedly, those reviews could be just
| positive, not very positive). And for most in this list with
| a very high score, I think it's deserved.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Unive.
| ..
|
| Arguably, one indication of the limitations of the Rotten
| Tomatoes score is the number of these Marvel movies with high
| scores :)
|
| Btw, I'm not trying to convince you that if you watch the
| movies you'll like them. Just that they may not all be as bad
| as you think.
| abustamam wrote:
| 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 for someone to say that referring to one of the highest
| grossing films and franchises of all time, means their
| decisions should be questioned, is quite the stretch.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| > 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.
| sph wrote:
| I disagree with this characterisation. I loathe mass-media
| blockbusters, but a journalist has to be in touch with public
| culture in their goal to spread the truth and inform people,
| not just high-brow elites, but everybody. This is why their
| work is usually more influential, interesting and engaging
| than if it had been written by an academic.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I don't see anything bad about Altman in this article that cant
| be explained by the chaos of growing a billion dollar company in
| a few years.
| aduty wrote:
| LOL, no.
| 383toast wrote:
| if you have to ask if someone can be trusted, they usually can't
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| It's the golden rule of news article headlines: if the headline
| is a question, the answer to it is always a negative.
| danparsonson wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| And if you think you don't have to ask if someone can be
| trusted, you're usually wrong.
| quantified wrote:
| A bit of a feeling of "so what" here. Maybe he's less trustworthy
| than some. We have people of X trustworthiness running the
| government, crypto exchanges, a certain space exploration and
| satellite company, social media companies, and so on. We know
| their trustworthiness. Isn't the real issue how to cope?
| Boxxed wrote:
| Your point is that it's ok he's untrustworthy because lots of
| people in power are?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| No, it's that the entire ecosystem is rotten to the core, and
| it actively selects, rewards, and protects flawed personality
| types.
|
| And when you're dealing with a potential existential threat,
| this is an existential problem.
| Rury wrote:
| I don't disagree, but at some point, I think people need to
| understand we're dealing with laws of nature here. I mean
| just look at human history, this has been a problem since
| the dawn of civilization...
|
| I think if you truly understand social contract theory, how
| hierarchies are formed, and political theory, you'll
| realize that oligarchies tend to be nature's equilibrium
| point for setting social disputes, and all forms of
| governments regardless of whatever they claim to be,
| naturally devolve towards them as they tend to represent
| the highest social entropy (ie equilibrium) state. That's
| not to say you can't have or move further away from that
| point and towards another (supposed ideal) form of
| government, you absolutely can, but it takes work.
| Perpetual work - of which no set of "rules" can remedy
| people of having to do in order to sustain it.
|
| The problem however, is most people get complacent. They
| eventually tire of that work, or are ignorant, and by doing
| so create a power vacuum which allows things slide back
| towards that state.
|
| As so, people must decide for themselves one of several
| possible avenues to pursue:
|
| #1 - Try to convince others (the masses) to join and work
| together to take power from the few, back to them
|
| #2 - Find a way to join the ranks of the elite few (which
| thanks to the prisoner's dilemma, unscrupulous means tends
| to perform better in the short term, even if at the cost of
| the long term. And if the elite is already corrupt, well,
| cooperating with it works well)
|
| #3 - Settle for their lot in life
|
| Unfortunately #1 is such a difficult proposition given it
| requires winning agreement among many whilst many often
| decide to remain in camp #3 (for complacency/ignorance
| reasons). And #2 is often easier done without moral
| integrity, especially at the behest of those in camp #3
| whose behavior only helps enable these realities. Thus, is
| why I think the "ecosystem" as you say, will always tend
| towards this way - where society tends towards being
| controlled by an elite few who are rotten.
|
| Robert Michel's realized this and dubbed it the Iron Law of
| Oligarchy and embraced his own version of #2 for himself.
| Although, he came to this conclusion through his own
| observations and reasoning, rather than through historical
| political theory.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Your point is that it 's ok he's untrustworthy because
| lots of people in power are?_
|
| It's...weirdly a valid question. If Sam fibs as much as the
| next guy, we don't have a Sam problem. Focussing on him alon
| is, best case, a waste of resources. Worst case, it's
| distracting from real evil. If, on the other hand, as this
| reporting suggests, Sam is an outlier, then focussing on him
| _does_ make sense.
| quantified wrote:
| Not sure where I said it's OK? Please point it out.
|
| We have to deal with it. Or are you suggesting we should
| purchase a controlling interest and vote him off the board?
| boc wrote:
| What's the point of living in an advanced society if you just
| sit around watching it decay around you? Our ancestors fought
| for our indifference today, and with attitudes like yours we'll
| watch our children fight for it again tomorrow.
| quantified wrote:
| What's your proposal? We knew he's as trustworthy as the
| others, and it sounds like you agree. What are you doing
| about them? Legally or illegally?
|
| Mostly we don't need 3,000 words on how untrustworthy he is.
| We could use 3,000 words on how to remove his influence.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| The number of "Altman doesn't remember this" or "Altman denies
| this" is hilarious
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Life would be so much easier if I was that forgetful
| frm88 wrote:
| It really stands out and judging from the overall excellent
| quality of this article, that was very intentional. Answers the
| headline, too.
| ainch wrote:
| Great piece. And a good excuse to read up on the use of diaeresis
| in English (eg. coordination, reelection) to distinguish repeated
| vowels - I hadn't seen the New Yorker's usage before.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| It isn't for all repeated vowels; only for when the 2 vowels
| don't make a single sound. So "chicken coop" wouldn't have a
| dieresis
| OJFord wrote:
| Unless it _was_ a chicken coop... One of few cases it
| actually resolves an ambiguity!
| stavros wrote:
| It would if the chickens formed a business structure that was
| owned and democratically controlled by its member-owners.
| o0-0o wrote:
| That, is likely co-op.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's the joke.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| Great point :D
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's also to distinguish metal bands. Motorhead.
| mplanchard wrote:
| They also prefer some less common spellings. For instance, just
| noticed "vender" instead of "vendor" in an article this
| morning.
| jojobas wrote:
| The guy called out for being a sociopath by a multitude of
| Silicon Valley CEOs of all people, sure we can trust him our
| future.
| pdonis wrote:
| Does the article ever actually answer the title question?
| mohamedkoubaa wrote:
| The answer is no, he can't be trusted
| pdonis wrote:
| Oh, I agree that's the correct answer. I just don't see the
| article actually ending up with that answer. I see it
| waffling. Basically, the article ends up saying that, well,
| we told you about all this dodgy stuff, but what he's doing
| is working.
| mohamedkoubaa wrote:
| Trusted to increase shareholder value is also questionable
| Wyverald wrote:
| God forbid an article presents all the evidence from all
| parties and asks you to reach a conclusion by yourself...
|
| Sorry for the snark. But I genuinely think the way they did
| this was perfect.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I genuinely think the way they did this was perfect._
|
| Evidently we disagree. I responded about that to another
| commenter downthread.
| kubik369 wrote:
| I think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It
| can be debated whether the title should be such a question.
| Nevertheless, the article should just present information,
| ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you
| can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the
| balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is
| made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altman
| recalls the exchange differently/does not remember.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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--see
| next item.
|
| "Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to
| each side". But what if the two sides really are unbalanced?
| What if there's a huge pile of information pointing one way,
| and a few items that might point the other way if you believe
| them--and then the journalist insists on only showing you a
| few items from the first pile, so that the presentation is
| "balanced"? You never actually get a real picture of the
| facts.
|
| There's a story that I first encountered in one of Douglas
| Hofstadter's books, about two kids fighting over a piece of
| cake: Kid A wants all of it for himself, Kid B wants to split
| it equally. An adult comes along and says, "Why don't you
| compromise? Kid A gets three-quarters and Kid B gets one-
| quarter." To me, the author of this article comes off like
| that adult.
|
| In any case, all that assumes that this article is supposed
| to be just straight reporting, no opinion. For which, see the
| next item.
|
| _> It can be debated whether the title should be such a
| question._
|
| Yes, it certainly can. If this article is just supposed to be
| straight reporting--no editorializing--then that title is
| definitely out of place. That title is an editorial--and the
| article either needs to own that and state the conclusion
| it's trying to argue for, or it shouldn't have had that title
| in the first place.
| kubik369 wrote:
| > "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 those exchanges and him basically
| shrugging each time.
|
| The journalists credibility is doing quite a bit of lifting
| here as we have to trust that they put in the effort. One
| such example is the molesting accusations which the
| reporters say they heavily looked into and were not able to
| find any corroborating evidence.
|
| > You never actually get a real picture of the facts. Yes,
| it is a fundamental impossibility in lots of cases. That's
| why we trust the reporters that they did as good a job as
| they could to present all pertinent information.
|
| > That title is an editorial ... I do not perceive it to be
| editorialised. It states an arguably real possibility that
| Altman may/does have lots of real power. I am guessing that
| you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an
| editorialisation that points towards him being
| untrustworthy. If that is the case, I think those would be
| your biases knowing that he is probably not trustworthy. I
| see it just as an objective question.
|
| Imagine a different situation: you have local elections
| into your small town. There is a new mayor candidate and
| during the next term, there will be some money to be given
| to residents for renovations and such, but not enough for
| everyone. You don't know this candidate. A local reporter,
| whom you trust, writes an article "New mayor candidate
| favoured in polls - will he be fair with the renovation
| money?". It is a piece trying to shed light on who this
| candidate is as a person, what was his life before moving
| into your village, etc. so that voters like you can decide
| whether to give him your vote. It is not editorialised, as
| it does not point either way.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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".
| einrealist wrote:
| 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 power between a few organizations with
| untrustworthy incentives and leadership.
| stavros wrote:
| > All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks
| on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning'
|
| If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did
| it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly
| intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they
| work>".
| bigyabai wrote:
| That's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point.
| You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed
| full-body transplants or dismemberment.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| "The cure for cancer" as a phrase doesn't include those
| solutions. If the headline was "Pope discovers the cure for
| cancer" and those were his solutions you would say "No he
| didn't." OP was referring to AI discovering the cure for
| cancer that cancer research is working towards.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You 'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer
| entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment_
|
| That's not a cure. Like yes, I'd care if the AI says it
| cures cancer while nuking Chicago. But that isn't what OP
| said.
| stonyrubbish wrote:
| > "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent"
| doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
|
| It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine
| intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and
| amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical
| technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing
| pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine
| intelligence. It _should_ be worrying if people begin to
| believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.
| stavros wrote:
| If LLMs can come up with superhumanly intelligent
| solutions, then they're superhumanly intelligent, period.
| Whether they do this by magic or by stochastic whatever
| doesn't make any difference at all.
| davebren wrote:
| Like..a calculator?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Take a calculator to the International Math Olympiad and
| let's see how you do.
| einrealist wrote:
| I can slow down the compute by a factor of a thousand. It
| would not change the result. But it changes the economics.
| We only call it intelligent, because we can do the
| backpropagation, the inference (and training) fast enough
| and with enough memory for it to appear this way.
| bjacobel wrote:
| Has generative AI made material progress on curing cancer?
| Has it produced _any_ breakthroughs, at all?
| igggh wrote:
| In b4
|
| - it's the worst it'll ever be - big leaps happened the
| fast few months bro
|
| Etc.
|
| Personally I think llm's can be very powerful in a narrow-
| band. But the more substance a thing involves, the more a
| human is needed to be involved.
| shruggedatlas wrote:
| Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks
| on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence.
| You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and
| semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now
| with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute
| efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I get you're trying to do the whole "humans and LLMs are the
| same" bit, but it's just plainly false. Please stop.
| wil421 wrote:
| If you think this way then why not talk to LLMs exclusively.
| Don't let the oxytocin cloud your ability to problem solve.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| people like to say this like they're apples to apples but
| this comparison isn't remotely how the brain actually works -
| and even if it did, the brain does it automatically without
| direction and at an infitesimal percentage of the power
| required.
|
| And we're just talking about cognition - it completely
| ignores the automatic processes such as maintaining and
| regulating the body and it's hormones, coordinating and
| maintaining muscles, visual/spacial processing taking in
| massive amounts of data at a very fine scale, and informing
| the body what to do with it - could go on.
|
| One of the more annoying things about this conversation is
| you don't even need to make this argument to make the point
| you're trying to make, but people love doing it anyway. It
| needlessly reduces how amazing the human brain is to a bunch
| of catchy sci fi sounding idioms.
|
| It can be simultaneously true that transformer based language
| models can be very smart and that the human brain is also
| very smart. It genuinely confuses me why people need to make
| it an either/or.
| igggh wrote:
| Great post
| ch_fr wrote:
| Thank you, this comparison has been a huge annoyance of
| mine for the past 3 years of... this same debate over and
| over.
|
| I think it's the hubris that I find most offensive in this
| argument: a guy knows one complex thing (programming) and
| suddenly thinks he can make claims about neuroscience.
| stonyrubbish wrote:
| Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really
| bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the
| human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to
| give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot
| doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does
| it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is
| prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many
| parenthesis are balanced here ((((()))))) (you can test
| this), it doesn't have any kind of genuine cognition.
| chpatrick wrote:
| 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.
| stonyrubbish wrote:
| They aren't so vague that you would argue the parrot is
| thinking.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Why not?
| davebren wrote:
| 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.
| chpatrick wrote:
| 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.
| saxonww wrote:
| > Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition."
|
| I've wondered about this. Do we really know enough about
| what the human brain is doing to make a statement like
| this? I feel like if we did, we would be able to model it
| faithfully and OpenAI, etc. would not be doing what they're
| doing with LLMs.
|
| What if human cognition turns out to be the biological
| equivalent of a really well-tuned prediction machine, and
| LLMs are just a more rudimentary and less-efficient version
| of this?
| davebren wrote:
| Yes, we do. Humans share the statistical association
| ability that LLMs possess, but also conscious meaning and
| understanding. This is a difference in kind and means
| that we can generalize beyond the statistical pattern
| associations that we've extracted from data, so we don't
| require trillions of examples to develop knowledge.
|
| Theoretically a human could sit alone in a dark room,
| knowing nothing of mathematics and come up with numbers,
| arithmetic algebra, etc...
|
| They don't need to read every math textbook, paper, and
| online discussion in existence.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Our DNA does contain our pre-training, though. It's not
| true that we're an entirely blank slate.
| davebren wrote:
| Pre-training is not a good term if you are trying to
| compare it to LLM pre-training. Closer would be the
| model's architecture and learning algorithms which has
| been designed through decades of PhD research, and my
| point on that is that the differences are still much
| greater than the similarities.
| saxonww wrote:
| The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think we
| know, so we can't say either way.
|
| In your example, would the human have ever had contact
| with other humans, or would it be placed in the room as a
| baby with no further input?
| davebren wrote:
| They grew up in a tribe that hasn't discovered numbers
| yet.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Those who argue that AI is like human cognition don't
| know much about AI or human cognition.
|
| Those who argue that AI is like a parrot don't know much
| about anything at all.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a
| correct-looking response to any question._
|
| A parrot that writes better code and English prose than I
| do?
|
| I would like to buy your parrot.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I suspect we just continually overestimate the uniqueness
| of both our code and our vocabulary. We think we are
| pretty smart, and we are, but on these two measures
| 99.999% of us are pretty average, and the LLM just keeps
| surprising us anyway by proving it.
| sph wrote:
| > Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really
| bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the
| human mind does.
|
| This might sound callous, but I wonder if people saying
| this themselves have very limited brains more akin to
| stochastic parrots rather the average homo sapiens.
|
| We are very different, and there are some high-profile
| people that don't even have an internal monologue or self-
| introspection abilities (one of the other symptoms is
| having an egg-shaped head)
| staticman2 wrote:
| > This might sound callous, but I wonder if people saying
| this themselves have very limited brains more akin to
| stochastic parrots rather the average homo sapiens.
|
| I have a different theory.
|
| Aside from a few exceptions like Blake Lemoine few people
| seem to really act as if they believe A.I. is doing the
| same thing the human mind is doing.
|
| My theory is people are for some reason role-playing as
| people who believe human thought is equivalent to A.I.
| for undisclosed reasons they themselves may or may not
| understand. They do not actually believe their own
| arguments.
| fgfarben wrote:
| I love reading posts like this. When you were a child,
| learning math or grammar, do you not remember bouncing off
| the walls of incorrect answers, eventually landing on a
| trajectory down the corridor of the right answer? Or were
| you always instantly zero-shotting everything?
|
| In my experience, this is exactly how language models solve
| hard _new_ problems, and largely how I solve them too.
| Propose a new idea, see if it works, iterate if not, keep
| going until it works.
|
| Of course you can see how to solve a problem that you've
| seen before, like a visual puzzle about balanced
| parentheses. We're hyper specialized to visually identify
| asymmetries. LMs don't have eyes. Your mockery proves
| nothing.
| calf wrote:
| The mistake in these types of arguments is that natural,
| classical-artificial, and/or neural-net-artificial
| learning methods all employ some kind of
| counterexample/counterfactual reasoning, but their
| underlying methods could well be fundamentally different.
| Thus these arguments are invalid, until computer science
| advances enough to explain what the differences and
| similarities actually are.
| semiinfinitely wrote:
| calculator is superhumanly intelligent
| Rover222 wrote:
| Yeah and everything is just atoms. If you reduce anything
| enough it's not real.
| crazylogger wrote:
| If all they do is "just" brute-force problem solving, then they
| are already bound to take over R&D & other knowledge work and
| exponentially accelerate progress, i.e. the SciFi "singularity"
| BS ends up happening all the same. Whether we classify them as
| true reasoning is just semantics.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| krackers wrote:
| [1] is also good to read as a follow-up, and compare the
| personalities
|
| https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai...
| mplanchard wrote:
| This was a great article, and absolutely savage in some of its
| characterizations.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| The fact that this reads as deranged fantasy and yet I can
| believe is 100% real is insane lol
| rwmj wrote:
| I read this a few days ago, excellent article and an absolutely
| insane story.
| physicles wrote:
| Well there went a half hour of my day. What a fantastic read.
| ProAm wrote:
| Nope, never trust this man. His history proves why you cannot.
| Pure greed.
| Arubis wrote:
| This is unfair to the original article, which is well-researched
| and worth a read. But the answer this question is _always_ no.
| Nobody should have as much power as the oligarch class currently
| does, even if of inscrutable power.
| ycui1986 wrote:
| he won't. if anything, openai is falling behind recently. the
| trend won't change easily. it is like the old time Netscape.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I believe Annie Altman.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Annie Altman is more credible than a serial scammer
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Not enough people know about her and her allegations towards
| him. It's sad to see so much of the rich and powerful literally
| just can't stop raping people. Epstein, Trump, Elon, scam
| Altman. How many more people have to be implicated?
| stavros wrote:
| I found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that
| AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a
| supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person
| was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need
| humans any more.
|
| Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that
| they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.
| red369 wrote:
| I also find that interesting.
|
| And not intending to defend the motives of anyone involved, but
| I'm hoping we can not worry about literally all jobs being
| destroyed, and AI companies amassing all the wealth in the
| world.
|
| Don't we need at least some humans working and earning to buy
| these AI services? Am I not being imaginative enough? Is it
| possible for the whole economy to consist just of AI selling
| services to each other?
|
| I realise that even if AI destroys _most_ jobs, or even just _a
| lot of_ jobs, and amasses _most_ wealth, or _a lot of_ wealth,
| it would still be a terrible thing for humans. The word "all"
| could have just been hyperbole, and it is still a valid point.
| I just want to know people's thoughts on whether entire
| replacement is possible.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Do you need ants buying services from humans for the world
| economy to function?
|
| If AI will indeed become superintelligent, we won't matter.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's a huge if and honestly I don't believe in it.
|
| Actually, if it ends up like described, it really doesn't
| matter whether I believe in it. Either it happens and we
| all die, or it doesn't happen. Pascal's Wager I suppose.
| eloisius wrote:
| Why keep human consumers to buy your services when you could
| just amass all the wealth you desire, and have autonomous
| systems that can ensure your unassailable physical security?
| You would sit atop the most stratified dominance hierarchy
| ever achieved, and it would reduce other humans to mere pets
| or breeding stock. I don't think normal humans would desire
| that kind of power, and I don't believe LLMs will take us
| there, but I wouldn't put it past the perverted billionaire
| maniac.
| username223 wrote:
| Surely a Big Sur compound stocked with iodine and gold,
| protected by security goons fitted with exploding collars,
| is someone's definition of paradise.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| They could always visit lawnmower at the Lanai compound
| if they got bored of Big Sur.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I think fundamentally, the concern is misplaced. The fact you
| need to work for wealth is a convention of our constraints. The
| change in constraints would lead to other means of
| distribution. It's easy to see if someone who believes more
| productivity is good would not see making jobs obsolete a real
| problem. Thew would see us adapting to the new conditions in a
| relatively short while.
| chii wrote:
| Those who are concerned is implying that any new distribution
| mechanism is not going to favour them.
|
| And under the capitalist system, if nothing changes, the
| "new" distribution system is indeed not going to favour them
| - at best there would be some sort of UBI, and at worst you
| would be left to starve in the streets.
|
| However, i cannot see how one can transition to a new system,
| and yet have the existing powers in the current system agree
| and not be disadvantaged.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The new conditions almost surely being like the old
| conditions: slavery, sexual exploitation, etc.
| blargey wrote:
| > The fact you need to work for wealth is a convention of our
| constraints
|
| The current constraint is "you need to produce to have
| things".
|
| If one company's AI takes all the jobs, and thus does all the
| producing-to-have-things, the constraint transforms into "you
| need that company's permission to have things".
|
| Hence the top-level question.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >Thew would see us adapting to the new conditions in a
| relatively short while.
|
| Say ~5 million jobs in the next 10 years are automated away,
| which industries do those people move to?
|
| With college being exorbitantly expensive, that locks out
| many people from re-skilling in other fields.
|
| As people race to other industries, that forces down wages
| because now there is a larger pool to select from.
|
| How do we ensure people are taken care of when UBI is all but
| fiscally impossible in the US?
| tigershark wrote:
| If you are speaking about the world, hundreds of millions
| in the next 5 years is probably closer to reality in my
| opinion. And from your question I think that you already
| know the answer.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Yes, this poses political problems and it will have to be
| hashed out politically. Again, the problems with these are
| political not necessarily technological. And they are also
| tractable. There are many many possible ways this can play
| out and we should be careful which we choose. I just don't
| think the conclusion is foregone. There have been people's
| jobs displaced in the past. And things settled eventually.
| I won't argue they settled for "better" because many people
| are unhappy about many things, but I will say... the world
| is amazing.
|
| At the risk of sounding like a longtermist, I think that
| when all is done, the result will be a net positive one,
| but it WILL cause strife for many people - probably me
| included. But I refuse to keep my childern's future hostage
| because I might have to reskill.
| druskacik wrote:
| Altman is an advocate of Universal Basic Income, as far as I'm
| aware. That doesn't sound like he's not worried about massive
| job losses.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sam-altman-universal-basic-inco...
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-wants-universal-ex...
| latexr wrote:
| > Altman is an advocate of Universal Basic Income
|
| So he says. And the way he proposed reaching that was with a
| scam cryptocurrency under his control which has rightfully
| been banned in several countries.
|
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-.
| ..
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi.
| ..
| stavros wrote:
| If there's one thing that's clear from the article, it's that
| he's a proponent of anything that will benefit him, even
| multiple conflicting things at the same time.
| scruple wrote:
| It would be absolutely astounding to read TFA and then
| continue to take this weasel and his word at face value.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| It's easy to advocate for something when you know it's
| essentially impossible to implement.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Meaningfully?
|
| Is there an advocacy arm of OpenAI pushing for legislation
| for UBI? Or is this like Musk's supposed support for UBI
| while also insisting that welfare payments to the poor are a
| bad thing?
| 6Az4Mj4D wrote:
| I am in 40s and going to be made redundant this June. In future
| only people who can afford to keep things like Claude, OpenAI and
| most importantly create value using them more than what others
| can do be able to survive. Otherwise, game is more or less over,
| and I question what's next for my own future while I learn to use
| Claude in FOMO. I cannot trust Sam or others if they will have
| any interest to keep this tech affordable for common people like
| me.
| panzi wrote:
| No. Next question.
| brandonpollack2 wrote:
| I haven't read it yet. The answer is no.
| y1n0 wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines: no
| saeranv wrote:
| Greg Brockman honestly sounds like a psychopath:
|
| > In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest
| lawyer, to be OpenAI's policy and ethics adviser. In an early
| PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI
| might avert a "catastrophic" arms race--perhaps by building a
| coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coordinate with an
| international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology
| was deployed safely. As Hedley recalled it, Brockman didn't
| understand how this would help the company beat its competitors.
| "No matter what I said," Hedley told us, "Greg kept going back to
| 'So how do we raise more money? How do we win?' " According to
| several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered
| a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world
| powers--including China and Russia--against one another, perhaps
| by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the
| thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for
| A.I.?
| the_arun wrote:
| The main animated picture reminded me of evil king Ravan from
| Ramayan with 10 heads. Not sure it is intentionally done that
| way.
| sumedh wrote:
| This is the problem with propaganda, you have been told that he
| was evil as most Indians are led to believe but for people in
| Sri Lanka he was a great leader.
| smcg wrote:
| Rule of Headlines says "no"
| tw04 wrote:
| I don't even need to read the article to know that he
| unequivocally can't be trusted. Every action he's taken to this
| point have shown he will say literally anything to get what he
| wants.
| bootload wrote:
| "By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman's
| behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and
| Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a
| frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling
| people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he
| was resisting in practice"
|
| This statement rings true.
|
| JL, PG has mentioned often, is his weapon to test the "people"
| integrity aspect of YC / Startups. It's not lost on me both
| Altman and Thiel both associated with YC were useful short term
| only, highlighting how regular "character" evaluations are
| required at higher levels of responsibility.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't think they were useful at all. If anything they pulled
| down YCs up to that point stellar reputation.
| argee wrote:
| At least two of YC's early (mid-aughts) "huge" successes come
| down to PG unilaterally (or with some help from JL) making
| some kind of "weird" call. AirBnB and Reddit come to mind.
| Even Stripe can be traced to him since he basically created
| the Auctomatic team (Patrick Collison's previous YC entry).
|
| In other words, PG had the "knack" for sometimes encouraging
| the right weird thing. I'm not sure it's been the same since
| he handed off the reins, like any other formerly-founder-led
| company. Nowadays it really gives off the vibe of bean-
| counting and hype-chasing.
|
| I don't think it's gotten quite as bad as this [0] article
| suggests, though.
|
| [0] https://stanfordreview.org/is-yc-for-cowards/
| bootload wrote:
| "Today's news comes at an interesting time. Last week,
| Business Insider's Jonathan Marino reported that YC is close
| to raising several billion dollars for a new fund, with the
| goal of possibly expanding its scope to later stage funding.
| It said it's still in preliminary discussions for this new
| strategy, but if true, Thiel could definitely play a big role
| there."
|
| My recollection was Thiel was injecting cash, a money deal.
| [0] There was another less advertised play. An established
| path for the Thiel "Boy Wonder Fellows". [1]
|
| "In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the
| first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many
| of the most important technology companies of the last 15
| years, both personally and through Founders Fund, and the
| founders of those companies will generally tell you he has
| been their best source of strategic advice. He already works
| with a number of YC companies, and we're very happy he'll be
| working with more."
|
| Guess who was involved in the Thiel / YC deal? [2] You are
| not the only one seeing this as a reputation hit for YC. [3]
| Even I, disconnected across the other side of the world could
| see this as an issue.
|
| [0] https://www.inc.com/business-insider/peter-thiel-is-
| joining-...
|
| [1] https://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/peter-thiel-y-
| combinator-f...
|
| [2] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-peter/
|
| [3] https://qz.com/810778/y-combinator-has-no-problem-with-
| partn...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Having Thiel on board of YC would probably turn off a lot
| of potentially successful founders. Or maybe it's a way to
| select for those with a lack of ethics. Having Musk and
| Thiel visibly associated probably is good from a monetary
| perspective but it sends all kinds of bad signals.
| mayhemducks wrote:
| I would really appreciate it if someone in the know could explain
| to me how a markov chain with some backpropagation can surpass
| human cognition. Because right now I call BS.
| tines wrote:
| Two "insure" typos?
| o0-0o wrote:
| Dictation likely and not caught by editing.
| Wyverald wrote:
| In American English, "insure" can also mean "to make sure" as
| in "ensure", in additional to meaning "to take out insurance
| for".
| tines wrote:
| TIL!
| mplanchard wrote:
| The New Yorker prefers insure to ensure. They have a unique
| house style. I commented on another thread about alternative
| spellings like vender instead of vendor, too.
| pch00 wrote:
| > The New Yorker prefers insure to ensure. They have a unique
| house style.
|
| That's not a stylistic choice, it's just incorrect use of
| English.
| mplanchard wrote:
| Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insure
| pch00 wrote:
| That M-W entry literally says they're different words
| with different meanings:
|
| > They are in fact different words, but with sufficient
| overlap in meaning and form as to create uncertainty as
| to which should be used when.
|
| > We define ensure as "to make sure, certain, or safe"
| and one sense of insure, "to make certain especially by
| taking necessary measures and precautions," is quite
| similar. But insure has the additional meaning "to
| provide or obtain insurance on or for," which is not
| shared by ensure.
| mplanchard wrote:
| Definition 2: "to make certain especially by taking
| necessary measures and precautions"
|
| From the article:
|
| > He sent the final memos to the other board members as
| disappearing messages, to insure that no one else would
| ever see them.
|
| > Others were uncomfortable sharing concerns about Altman
| because they felt there was not a sufficient effort to
| insure anonymity.
|
| > [...] to insure that the technology was deployed safely
|
| All of these work just fine with that definition of
| "insure." Your comment that it's "incorrect use of
| English" is wrong.
|
| The bit you quoted says there's substantial overlap
| between the two. The New Yorker style is to prefer
| "insure" in cases where either could work.
| pch00 wrote:
| I'm unconvinced but I'll ensure I do my homework before
| grammar-policing again :)
| mplanchard wrote:
| To be fair, I use "ensure" myself, but it's just one of
| several quirky elements of the New Yorker's style, along
| with the diaeresis on repeated vowels with different
| sounds (like in reemerge or cooperate), several uncommon
| spellings, and unusual conjoinings like "teen-ager" and
| "per cent." It's part of the charm, I suppose
| o0-0o wrote:
| Hey, Ronan. Did the IPO come up at all in the research or
| interviews for this article? A yes or no will suffice, and color
| it if you want. ~_^
| jrflowers wrote:
| I hope somebody just publishes The Ilya Memos. Sounds like a fun
| read
| thewileyone wrote:
| [flagged]
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| "Good luck, have fun, don't die."
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| No
| slibhb wrote:
| It is disconcerting how Altman has used "AI safety" as a
| marketing tool. The more people imagine the universe turned into
| paperclips, the more they invest. Obviously Altman doesn't care
| about safety (I don't either; I'm not an AI-doomer). But he truly
| does come across as someone incapable of telling the truth. Are
| you even a liar if honesty is not in the set of possible
| outcomes?
|
| Still, there's something oddly reassuring here: if you believe
| "AI safety" is essentially a buzzword (as I do), then this whole
| affair comes down to people squabbling over money and power.
| There really is nothing new under the sun.
| sobellian wrote:
| "This thing might destroy humanity - we need to build it ASAP"
| does not really make sense. But it enthrall[s/ed] many smart
| researchers who would normally demand specific, testable claims
| and logical responses to those claims.
|
| We have drastically escalated what claims are necessary to
| motivate startup employees. It used to be that you could merely
| dangle an interesting problem in front of a researcher. Then
| you could earn millions, then billions. TAMs in the trillions.
| AGI will destroy humanity unless _you, personally_ step in.
| Elon is talking about Kardashev III civilizations. The universe
| cannot bear the hype being loaded upon it.
| brap wrote:
| I agree with you completely, but the way I see it Anthropic are
| x100 worse when it comes to amplifying this doomer bs for
| marketing. It's their whole shtick.
| drob518 wrote:
| [flagged]
| andrewrn wrote:
| "By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman's
| behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and
| Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a
| frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling
| people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he
| was resisting in practice"
|
| You can subtly see residue of this frustration in Dalton and
| Michael's videos when Sam Altman comes up. It's only thinly
| veiled that Sam was a snake while at YC.
| mi_lk wrote:
| video link?
| isolay wrote:
| That guy is a snake, not just while at YC.
| jjallen wrote:
| I do wonder exactly what he was doing to be considered a snake.
| I know he was working on other things, but what else was going
| on?
| ambicapter wrote:
| Read the article?
| elAhmo wrote:
| Quite interesting to see that PG basically indirectly enabled
| all of this by putting Sam in the position of a president of
| YC.
| lizhang wrote:
| i think im shadowbanned :(
| dang wrote:
| Fixed now.
| b8 wrote:
| Sam failed upwards.
| thrwaway55 wrote:
| We need only ask the dead. Aaron Schwartz knew what Altman is.
| The answer to the topic is no.
| mastazi wrote:
| I'm interested in knowing more about this topic, do you have
| any resources about the relationship between Swhartz and
| Altman?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| It's not difficult to find these, Aaron always said that Sam
| was not to be trusted.
| palmotea wrote:
| Apparently Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman were classmates at
| the original 2005 Y Combinator class. This article has a
| picture of them literally standing next to each other:
| https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/throwback-photo-
| of-f...
|
| The OP says this:
|
| > The board member was not the only person who, unprompted,
| used the word "sociopathic." One of Altman's batch mates in
| the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant
| but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now
| remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not
| long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about
| Altman to several friends. "You need to understand that Sam
| can never be trusted," he told one. "He is a sociopath. He
| would do anything."
| input_sh wrote:
| It's mentioned in the submitted article (about half way
| through), you should read it.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Quite frankly, if he went and scrubbed (or had scrubbed) a
| Facebook thread I got in an argument with him on in 2018 (about
| the last time someone did an article about him) I can only
| imagine how obsessive he is about controlling his past and info
| about it.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Of course not. No one can be trusted to control our future.
| avaer wrote:
| Who would you trust more: Sam Altman, or a council of 1000
| representative AI models?
| imagetic wrote:
| No.
| jablongo wrote:
| For me, the attempted productization of Sora was conclusive proof
| that 1) OAI was overcapitalized and desperate for revenue 2)
| safety didn't matter to them much 3) improving the world didn't
| matter much either.
|
| At one point you mentioned an interaction with OpenAI staff where
| you were looking to interview AI Safety researchers. You were
| rebuffed b/c "existential safety isn't a thing". Does this mean
| that you could find no evidence of a AI Safety team at OAI after
| Jan Leike left? If you look at job postings it does seem like
| they have significant safety staff...
| hirako2000 wrote:
| 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.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Meh. I'm no particular fan of Altman but there's nothing in this
| article particularly surprising or terrible.
|
| The whole AI safety thing has always seemed extreme to me and has
| turned out to be a storm in a teacup. All those prominent people
| who used to tell us how AI will end humanity seem to have stopped
| talking about it.
|
| I get the sense that Altman is not particularly like-able person
| but Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both seem to have scored a 10/10 on
| their "is this guy a jerk" rating, it's common for tech CEOs.
|
| So, the article and headline are dramatic but not much really
| there.
|
| I think all the AI safety obsessed people turn out to have been
| the ones off course.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > 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
| adopt to make sure access doesn't become direct or indirect
| manipulation and how do you fight against that in your own
| reporting?
| ahahahahah wrote:
| 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.
| nerdyadventurer wrote:
| Why would anyone trust him at all? their tech is used to bomb
| children, all of these rich folks are immoral only about their
| selfish gain.
| jedberg wrote:
| > their tech is used to bomb children
|
| If you're talking about the school in Iran, that wasn't OpenAI.
| That was a Palantir system that pre-dates OAI by a few years,
| and was due to a bad entry in a spreadsheet, that showed the
| building as military housing. Which it was a few years ago.
|
| 180 people lost their lives because of bad data in spreadsheet,
| but not AI.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Palantir was using anthropic and its use is being replaced by
| openai.
| jedberg wrote:
| Yes but not for the system that decided to bomb a school.
| That was a Palanter in house system.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Afaik the palantir system utilized ai.
| jedberg wrote:
| Yes, their own in house AI. That system doesn't use
| Anthropic or OpenAI.
| steinvakt2 wrote:
| Many years ago. Not "a few years ago". Also you could make
| the sentence that 180 people lost their lives because of an
| evil war, of which USA and Israel are the aggressors. And we
| definitely don't talk enough about that part.
| hnbad wrote:
| 180 _children_ lost their lives because of _decisions by
| people_ in the US military (and ultimately the US government
| / the POTUS).
|
| Let's not fall into the trap of adopting narratives created
| to waive accountability. The spreadsheet didn't launch a
| missile, the spreadsheet didn't authorize the strike and the
| spreadsheet didn't select the target.
|
| Not to mention that "outdated spreadsheet" is also a
| hilariously anachronistic excuse for a war crime if you
| consider what kind of satellite technology the US has
| publicly acknowledged to have access to, let alone what kind
| of technology it is likely to have access to.
|
| The difference between intentional premeditated murder and
| reckless endangerment resulting in a killing is not guilt and
| innocence but merely the severity and nature of a crime. Both
| demonstrate a callous disregard for the sanctity of human
| life, one just specifically seeks to extinguish it, the other
| merely accepts death and suffering as an acceptable outcome.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Please talk to your criminal defense lawyer.
|
| This is nonsense.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| > bomb children
|
| Looks like that's the only thing that happens in every war,
| according to useful westerners.
| brap wrote:
| He's a grown ass man tweeting in all lowercase, that's all I
| needed to know.
|
| I could more or less infer the rest from that.
| rupi wrote:
| 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 the page."
|
| I saw that before I read the article and it made me read the
| article in a very different way than I normally do. As I was
| reading, I found myself thinking, "Why is it worded that way?
| What else is the writer trying to say, or not say?"
|
| It made reading this a lot more interactive than I normally
| associate with passive reading. Great job, Ronan!
| ipsum2 wrote:
| I don't get why writers do this. It makes sense for fiction,
| but why a factual, non-fiction article?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| It keeps it shorter.
| rupi wrote:
| 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
| point of paranoia.
|
| I am just speculating but if @ronanfarrow is still checking
| the discussion here, it would be amazing to hear the actual
| reasons.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| > I don't get why writers do this.
|
| Do what, edit?
| cedws wrote:
| Sounds like a snake pit. None of them can be trusted. If we have
| to rely on companies to self appoint a benevolent 'AI dictator'
| we're fucked.
|
| The only high profile person in AI I'd consider _perhaps_ worthy
| of trust is Demis Hassabis.
| latentframe wrote:
| It's less about trusting one person but more about the structure
| indeed AI is concentrating capital and compute and talent into a
| few hands so we've seen this before with railroads, oil,
| semiconductors. It brings innovation and also pricing power and
| political influence.
| trakkstar wrote:
| Girls and boys, this is a prime example of a rhetoric question.
| eximius wrote:
| Fuck no! Of course he can't be trusted. We know that. Nobody
| questions that. We know that about most of the "elites" running
| the show.
|
| We're just in this shitty pit of despair where people are
| desperate. It's difficult to campaign for good when you're
| struggling and capital can jerk people around.
|
| People pursue good for the sake of good at cost to themselves
| when times are very good or times are very, very bad.
|
| Right now times are only merely very bad.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I don't trust him. He already made statements that convinced me I
| don't want to touch anything he controls. In a way it is similar
| to Meta and co. For some reason the US corporations behave very
| suspiciously once past a certain threshold size. With Win11 from
| Microsoft I always wonder whether there is a not so hidden
| subagenda in place.
| CyborgUndefined wrote:
| ugh, i don't understand why only altman scares you? what about
| google, china, and other players?
|
| for me, the answer >>> we need to create our own systems.
| decentralized agent networks and etc.
|
| if you don't want to depend on one person or one company
| controlling your AI, build your own infrastructure.
|
| the concentration of power in one/two persons is the problem.
| aryehof wrote:
| I might expect such a subjective, gossipy expose of a public
| official, but this of a private individual in a non-public sector
| commercial company?
| AbuAssar wrote:
| no
| hirako2000 wrote:
| tautology
| isolay wrote:
| A contradiction in terms is _not_ called a tautology.
| sph wrote:
| Excellent article, truly well-researched. As someone close to a
| pathological liar [1], the idea that one could be at the
| forefront of the creation of an artificial superintelligence
| confirms all the existential risks of such a piece of technology
| and how naive, if not ignorant, the average starry-eyed tech
| worker and investor is about this whole endeavour. It's easy to
| believe there is a lot of idealism and wish for a better world,
| but underneath the greedy drive for money and power is
| excellently summarized in Greg Brockman's own thoughts: "So what
| do I _really_ want? [...] Financially what will take me to $1B."
|
| Literally, the only hope for humanity is that large language
| models prove to be a dead-end in ASI research.
|
| ---
|
| 1: "He's unconstrained by truth," the board member told us. "He
| has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The
| first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any
| given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of
| concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving
| someone." -- I guess now I know of two people with these traits.
| snakeboy wrote:
| 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 upfront) for one
| year, or even just $10 for one month.
| netcan wrote:
| My tendency is to believe that the individuals do not what matter
| as much, when it comes to the biggest risks. I'm not sure if this
| is a bias or a theory... but I lean to some sort of "medium is
| the message" determinism.
|
| >"He acknowledged that the alignment problem remained unsolved,
| but he redefined it--rather than being a deadly threat, it was an
| inconvenience, like the algorithms that tempt us to waste time
| scrolling on Instagram."
|
| Before "don't be evil" was a cliche, I think it was a real
| guiding principle at Google and they built a world class business
| that way.
|
| Facebook's rival ad platform didn't have search queries to target
| ads at. Aggressive utilization of user data was the only way they
| could build an Adwords-scale business. As they pushed this norm,
| Google followed.
|
| Doomscroll addiction gets a lot of attention because engineers
| and journalists have children and parents. There are other risks
| though. Political stability, for example.
|
| By early 2010s, smartphones were reaching places that had almost
| no modern media previously. Often powered by FB-exclusive data
| plans. The Arab spring happened, then ISIS. FB-centric propaganda
| seemingly played a major role in a major conflict/atrocity in
| Burma. Coups in Africa powered by social media based propaganda.
| Worrying political implications in the west. Unhinged uncle
| syndrome. Etc. Social media risks/implications were more than
| just "inconvenience."
|
| At no point did we really see tech companies go into mitigation
| mode. Even CYA was relatively limited. There was no moment of
| truth. It was business as usual.
|
| So... I think OpenAI's initial charter was naive. Science fiction
| almost. It was never going to withstand commercial reality,
| politics, competition and suchlike. I think these are greater
| than the individuals involved.
|
| That doesn't mean we should ignore, excuse or otherwise tolerate
| lack of integrity. But, I don't think it is a way of reducing
| risk.
|
| Whether the risk is skynet, economic turmoil, politics, psych
| epidemics or whatever... I don't think the personal integrity of
| executives is a major factor.
| Rover222 wrote:
| I don't know, but any time I see an interview of Altman and I
| look at those eyes, I get creeped out.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| could someone please give a tldr? this was way too long
| askl wrote:
| The answer to the question in the title is "no".
| valianteffort wrote:
| [flagged]
| tomhow wrote:
| We've banned this account.
|
| We detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668579 and marked off-
| topic.
| bkummel wrote:
| Without having read the article, reacting on the headline: no
| single person should be allowed to control our future. Democracy
| is a thing in large parts of the world, and we should try very
| hard to keep that functioning and even improve it.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| People are voting with their wallets
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Thats not democracy.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| It's also not not democracy. It has little to do with a
| form of government.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >People are voting with their wallets
|
| A handful of people's wallets are much deeper than vast
| swaths of the population. None of this AI shit would be
| happening without their funding.
| afh1 wrote:
| The only part of the world where _democracy_ is a thing is
| Switzerland. Rest of the western world is utterly ruled by
| politicians, governments with ever more control over _their_
| population's private life and money, and some who shout out
| "democracy", deluded they have any control over anything
| through voting lol.
| ernsheong wrote:
| I bet Satya Nadella is regretting defending Altman now.
| firemelt wrote:
| obviously not
| rambambram wrote:
| Any idea how stupid this title sounds!? It's past exaggeration.
| mvkel wrote:
| > Many technology companies issue vague proclamations about
| improving the world, then go about maximizing revenue. But the
| founding premise of OpenAI was that it would have to be
| different.
|
| Isn't this really what everything is about? A pure research non-
| profit transitioned to a revenue generating enterprise because it
| had to, and a lot of people don't like that. Does that make it
| evil?
|
| It's romantic to think that the magic of science and research can
| stand on its own, but even Ilya has admitted more recently that
| SSI needs to ship something consumer facing.
|
| Anthropic, the lab that put all of its social capital in the
| safetyism basket, is having the exact same realization, with
| Claude Code being a mess of technically reckless vibe coded slop
| that nevertheless is the cash cow for the company.
|
| Maybe it's time for everyone to realize that for an innovation
| this big to come to bear, it either needs to be state funded, or
| privately funded, the latter requiring revenue and a plausible
| vision of generating ROI.
| keepamovin wrote:
| YC invests in people, not ideas. They have vetted him. They are
| always right about people. It's probably nothing.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Altman does not recall the exchange._
|
| Altman SAYS he does not recall the exchange. Not the same thing.
| locust101 wrote:
| It's hard to know what's the new information here. Altman's
| history has been reported on exhaustively.
|
| Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments,
| non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much
| money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people
| involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners,
| saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But
| as long as they have the money, we have to dance to their tune.
|
| We really really need a way for our society to be more equitable
| and hold these people responsible.
| willis936 wrote:
| >PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes
|
| HR would like you to tell the difference between the two
| photos.
| olalonde wrote:
| I still don't understand how the transformation from non-profit
| to for-profit was possible legally.
| batshit_beaver wrote:
| Anything is possible with a big enough bank account.
| tim333 wrote:
| The non-profit still exists and has the for profit as a
| subsiduary.
| olalonde wrote:
| It owns only like 25% of the for-profit and was essentially
| stripped off of all its assets (IP, trademarks, employees,
| etc.).
| RagnarD wrote:
| No.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| https://archive.is/Cd0Yl
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Another Mirror on archive.org for archival purpose:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260407180452/https://serjaimel...
| basyt wrote:
| he doesn't control his own future... chatgpt implodes in 18
| months max depending upon how the strait of hormuz play goes...
| isolay wrote:
| As for the titular question, Betteridge's law of headlines
| applies. The answer is: No, we can't trust Sam Altman.
| laylower wrote:
| Reading this makes me even happier to pay for Anthropic.
|
| Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out.
|
| " "Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed," Amodei
| recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision
| existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and
| ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to
| Altman directly. (Altman doesn't remember this.) Amodei's notes
| describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months
| later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who
| worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he
| had it on "good authority" from a senior executive that they had
| been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, "lost it," and
| brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As
| one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied
| having made the claim. "I didn't even say that," he said. "You
| just said that," Daniela replied. (Altman said that this was not
| quite his recollection, and that he had accused the Amodeis only
| of "political behavior.") In 2020, Amodei, Daniela, and other
| colleagues left to found Anthropic, which is now one of OpenAI's
| chief rivals."
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| 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.
| AdamN wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| 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 like talking to a person, so
| maybe they really did think AGI was around the corner!
| ahepp wrote:
| Behold! Plato's man
| sunkeeh wrote:
| The only foundation model CEOs I trust are Demis and Yann
| jjallen wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| > 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 see how you
| possibly could be, unless you've taken the PR at face
| value, before it was all quietly swept away under the next
| headline.
| jjallen wrote:
| Yes I am sure of the second part based on the
| government's own publicly available tweets and lawsuits
| that have been filed.
| n4r9 wrote:
| The problem with Altman isn't that he's "furthering his own
| interests". It's the deceitful behaviour he employs in the
| process.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| 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.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| It seems unlikely OpenAI can survive long term with Sam at the
| helm. Challenge is folks already realized that once and yet here
| we are.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| You come at the king, you best not miss. Unfortunately, having
| survived a coup, his odds of surviving the next have improved.
| Now he knows how they go, what to look for and how he might
| handle them. I wouldn't bet on him being kicked out, at least
| while OpenAI is still on top. If OpenAI stumbles and Anthropic
| or another starts to prevail, only then would I bet on Sam
| getting pushed out.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| "If I don't destroy humanity someone far worse will do it" -Sam
| Altman
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
| charlescearl wrote:
| The very idea of "trusting" monopoly capitalism.
| kazinator wrote:
| I place my trust in Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Beyond the question of should we trust Sam Altman to control our
| future - why on Earth should we want any single individual to
| control our future at all?
| calf wrote:
| The last quote, to a layperson, may sound completely sinister,
| but therein lies a deep and open computer science question: AIs
| really do seem to get their special capabilities from having a
| degree of freedom to output wrong and false answers. This
| observation goes all the way back to some of Alan Turing's
| musings on how an AI might one day be possible. And then there
| were early theorems related to this e.g. PAC learning. I'd love
| to know about what's happened since on this aspect, such as the
| role of noise and randomness, and maybe even hallucinations are a
| feature-not-bug in a fundamental sense, etc.
| mt18 wrote:
| Altman's character is almost irrelevant next to how frictionless
| it is for a handful of people to set defaults for millions.
| strgrd wrote:
| I remember reading these direct quotes from SA in 2016 from the
| New Yorker and thinking, yeah, this guy is just miserable:
|
| > "Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens
| and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over
| California. Oh, and one odd one--I prep for survival. My problem
| is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the
| world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu
| virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of
| a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years
| became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be
| A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce
| resources. I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns,
| gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks
| from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big
| Sur I can fly to."
|
| > "If you believe that all human lives are equally valuable, and
| you also believe that 99.5 per cent of lives will take place in
| the future, we should spend all our time thinking about the
| future. But I do care much more about my family and friends."
|
| > "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to
| zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion
| to work and electricity is free, then transportation is
| substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through
| to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now,
| but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your
| phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy
| thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often
| hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of
| magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost
| of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars
| could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life."
|
| > "...we're going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of
| job displacement, so basic income really makes sense. Plus, the
| stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create
| the next Apple."
| goolz wrote:
| Funny you bring this up because I always think back to a story,
| in the New York Times if I recall correctly but perhaps the
| Journal or SFC, talking about how him and his friends got upset
| when asked to leave a high end french restaurant due to him
| wearing sneakers. They pulled a "Do you know who he is?" well
| before he was even tied to OAI. Always left a bad taste in my
| mouth and stuck with me a decade on.
|
| Tangentially, without being too specific, I have someone
| incredibly close to me that has recently had interactions with
| the upper echelons of OAI's exec team and... the stories are
| not kind. I imagine when your company is being run by a morally
| bankrupt tech bro you are short on integrity.
|
| After 10+ years of hearing anecdotes about sama I am starting
| to wonder if maybe the word on the street is true and he really
| is just as selfish and blind as people make him out to be. At
| this point, the optics surrounding OAI vs. Anthropic are just
| plain bad. They should have gotten rid of him before when they
| had the chance.
| cm2012 wrote:
| This doesn't seem like someone who's miserable at all to me.
| They seem like someone who has a wide variety of hobbies and is
| and is intellectually interested in futurism
| tyleo wrote:
| Yeah, I have an half baked thought about billionaires like
| this that they truly want the best for this world even if
| they have to seek it by immoral means.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I don't follow public figures or news anywhere near enough to
| have a meaningful opinion on Sam Altman, but I find one
| interesting snippet here, which is that there is a
| straightforward prediction in there. He did say ten _to twenty_
| years and it 's only been ten, but still, I can't think of a
| single good or service that families need or commonly want that
| is an order of magnitude cheaper. It makes me wonder if he's
| become any less confident of this or any other prediction.
|
| I don't want to be holier than him or thou or anyone else, but
| it is the kind of thing I've found of myself quite a bit. I
| made a lot of confident predictions about the future 15-25
| years ago on the Internet, and even though I'm not a public
| figure and nobody will ever hold me to task for being wrong, I
| can see it for myself. The predictions are still there. They
| weren't universally wrong, but I didn't do much better than
| chance. It's a big reason I no longer bother to make
| predictions. I have no idea what the future will bring and I'm
| comfortable with the uncertainty. It doesn't feel like very
| many people on the Internet are.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Perhaps naive, but he sounds like an optimist to me. Because
| govt/social stuff can often negate technological advancements
| as it already has.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > while Y.C. took a six- or seven-per-cent cut
|
| shamefully have to admit that my monkey-brain smirked because of
| an accidental 67-meme in a serious article.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Yet when he was fired, 99% of OpenAi employees backed him and
| were ready to resign. That actual event/evidence is more telling
| than any hit piece article.
| goolz wrote:
| I imagine most of them were motivated by money. OpenAI was
| supposed to be Open. As I understand it, it was not created for
| shareholder profits and instead was made to benefit everyone?
| Hence the Open name. Then someone like Sam comes along who can
| make you incredibly rich by casually ignoring the initial
| mission. Would you go against this incredibly powerful
| billionaire who by many accounts is not encumbered by ethical
| quandaries? In doing so you risk your financial freedom, and
| for what? OAI is already a husk of its intended purpose. Mine
| as well get paid to be a sellout.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Like I said, as it currently stands the evidence is 5,000
| with Sam and like 5-15 against him (from the article).
|
| We can theorize on motivations all day, but since the
| hitpiece didn't bother contacting any 'pro Sam' employees,
| it's a moot point.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| > OpenAI was on the verge of closing a large investment
| from Thrive, a venture-capital firm founded by Josh
| Kushner, Jared Kushner's brother, whom Altman had known for
| years. The deal would value OpenAI at eighty-six billion
| dollars and allow many employees to cash out millions in
| equity.
|
| Probably a factor in the pro Sam camp. Hard to stand up
| against a big payday.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Yet when he was fired, 99% of OpenAi employees backed him and
| were ready to resign. That actual event/evidence is more
| telling than any hit piece article.
|
| It's not telling. The article documents a massive pressure
| campaign to get that result. There are a lot of reasons why
| OpenAi employees could have publicly backed him, an example is
| fear, and there are many others that aren't an endorsement of
| Altman's character.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Would you trust a guy who controls a magical orb that answers
| everyone's questions for free and satisfactorily enough that
| people basically pay money to talk more to it, to use it
| responsibly? I won't.
| ertucetin wrote:
| People call him Scam Altman for a reason.
| owlcompliance wrote:
| Control + Altman + Delete
| flippyhead wrote:
| No
| yamamura_thinks wrote:
| This Sam Altman video is addictive. I could watch it over and
| over.
| NickC25 wrote:
| I think the answer is a resounding "no".
|
| Anyone who deliberately seeks power should not be given it.
| benliong78 wrote:
| that animation of Altman with a thousand faces is oddly
| unsettling. Good job, new yorker.
| k-almuraee wrote:
| No
| Lev1a wrote:
| Simple: NOOOOOOO!
|
| How is this even a question?
| oyebenny wrote:
| Interesting!
| curiouscat2026 wrote:
| Really solid piece of journalism. I understand some stuff ends up
| on the cutting room floor in the editing process as length is
| eventually a factor. What was the one thing you most regret
| having to cut out of the final piece?
| curiouscat2026 wrote:
| I assume stuff gets cut for length in the editing process. What
| was the thing you wish had remained that was edited out?
| Aeroi wrote:
| Suchir Balaji deserves to have his death investigated further.
| sp3ktrum wrote:
| Negative Ghost Rider, the pattern is full. Sorry Sam, ain't
| happening!!
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