Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?(newyorker.com) |
Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?(newyorker.com) |
How is this even a question?
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.
Even after the uncountable shady things about big tech, people just fall for that convenience left and right. Paying $200/mo to outsource my thinking skill to some rent seeking cartel that steals and is territorial is wild
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.
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.
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.
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.
shamefully have to admit that my monkey-brain smirked because of an accidental 67-meme in a serious article.
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.
The only high profile person in AI I’d consider perhaps worthy of trust is Demis Hassabis.
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.
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.
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".
No, he cannot.
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.
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
2. You cannot "control" superintelligent AI.
I could more or less infer the rest from that.
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.
Sorry for the snark. But I genuinely think the way they did this was perfect.
Evidently we disagree. I responded about that to another commenter downthread.
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.
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.
Anyone who deliberately seeks power should not be given it.
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...
What? OpenAI was a non-profit until Sam made it for-profit.
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.
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.
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.
Looks like that's the only thing that happens in every war, according to useful westerners.
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.
We can theorize on motivations all day, but since the hitpiece didn't bother contacting any 'pro Sam' employees, it's a moot point.
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.
"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
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.
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.
And when you're dealing with a potential existential threat, this is an existential problem.
We have to deal with it. Or are you suggesting we should purchase a controlling interest and vote him off the board?
Probably a factor in the pro Sam camp. Hard to stand up against a big payday.
This is nonsense.
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.
That part right there implied you're ok with it
Altman SAYS he does not recall the exchange. Not the same thing.
P.S. Really enjoyed Catch and Kill.
That's not a stylistic choice, it's just incorrect use of English.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There is -- I call it "corpo sociopath." The corpo sociopath really comes out in the workplace, less so in personal life.
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.
I would have just fed it the text of chapters 1 to 14 from a non drm copy.
> 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.
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.
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.
Yes that is the core trait I highlighted in the 1st bullet.
No, the Google deal hasn't shipped yet.
Also, last time I played 20 questions with ChatGPT, it needed 97 turns and tons of my active hinting to get the answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not really- if you had examined the output closely you probably would have seen noticed it conflated chapter 13 and 14 or 14 and 15. Or you got very lucky on a generation. It definitely doesn't exactly know what happens in each chapter unless it has a reference to check.
Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.
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.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
He doesn't have anything comparable to, say, the operating system platform dominance of Microsoft Windows, or service platform dominance of YouTube.
The entire value proposition of OpenAI is that billions of people don't know that anything other exists than ChatGPT, which is rather tenuous and volatile.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Or if the person lying is in a position of power?
This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of power between a few organizations with untrustworthy incentives and leadership.
The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.
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.
Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting in your communities, and subscribe to investigative outlets when you can.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The threat of AI is, after all, driven by the people who use it.
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.
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.
> 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 coördinate 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 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.
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.
HR would like you to tell the difference between the two photos.
If for no other reason, given what happened when the board fired him... no. I'd say not.
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.
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.
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
That's actually the difference, most people don't want a billion
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.
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.
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>".
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.
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.
All the downsides without much upside...
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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?
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
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!
Sergey Brin is trying to change that lately, but Altman still has a sizable head start.
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.
The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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).
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!
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.
“Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in.” The next sentence.
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").
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?
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.
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?
Someone on HN claimed "This is why it [LLMs] 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". So, how many parenthesis are balanced in that quoted text?
● The string from the quote is ((((()))))) — 5 opening parens and 6 closing parens.
10 parentheses are balanced (5 matched pairs). There is 1 extra unmatched ).
Walking through it with a stack:
( ( ( ( ( ) ) ) ) ) )
1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 0 -1 ← depth tracker
↑ balanced ↑ unmatched
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.
A parrot that writes better code and English prose than I do?
I would like to buy your parrot.
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)
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.
Those who argue that AI is like a parrot don't know much about anything at all.
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...
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.
No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.
https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m
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.
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.
As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman's partners and what we found and didn't is as described.
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.
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?
You try to reach a critical mass of detailed, rounded understanding of a central question, integrating the most meaningful perspectives, interrogating the weak points and blind spots, and backing up the assertions with documentary evidence or strong sourcing. Eventually, you reach a point where enough sources and materials are reliably triangulating toward the same truths.
As you guessed, there's external pressures that figure in this analysis—whether competitors are closing in on the same leads; what's happening in the broader news cycle that might make a story feel more or less relevant. As you also guessed, I am more fortunate than most writers in the degree to which I get to hold off until something feels fully baked. Mostly, writers simply have to hit a deadline, and resources run out before ambition does. I have deadlines and constraints too, but I get a lot of say in how I organize all of the above.
Then there's the actual process of creating the story. Writing a densely evidence-based investigative piece is labor-intensive—in this case, weeks of initial drafting, and then much iteration. The fact-checking process at the New Yorker is exhaustive, and can span weeks. Every sentence, assertion, and piece of underlying sourcing get scrubbed by multiple independent pairs of eyes. This story had four fact-checkers working on it for the better part of a two week period, pulling very long hours. This is all brought together in a closing meeting where each sentence is revised and polished in a group.
This is all done as additional information comes in—in fact, with these large-scale bodies of reporting, there is very often a snowball effect, where a lot comes in at the end.
I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to do so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
> [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..
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?
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.
Long time HN lurker, made an account just to say that :)
It's not your responsibility to fund for every single one, just find the one you like the most and subscribe to that one.
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.
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!
I am just speculating but if @ronanfarrow is still checking the discussion here, it would be amazing to hear the actual reasons.
Every good journalist knows that when you say potentially damaging stuff about very powerful people, you must be able to prove everything you say. So, you don't say "Sam Altman is a fraudster" because you (likely) can't prove it in court. Instead you say "Person A said that Sam Altman promised X and then reneged" and if anyone challenges that you show "here's proof that person A did tell me that".
If you want to be extra cautious, you only report where you have multiple witnesses agreeing on it.
Do what, edit?
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."
Not small differences to me.
FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts hiring and other decisions at OpenAI.
It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.
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.
Can you share more about how this manifested?
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.
Then another dalton and Michael one can’t find.
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...
Given the initiative started circa 2017, much of the goods remain. It's a hijack of creative geniuses who got together, which is now turning into cow milking tech.
> cow milking tech
Fantastic reporting.
Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai...
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.
Noted on the critiques of the subscription options. I'll try to relay.
I just checked and I see: "This introductory offer is charged as $78 for the first year. Automatically renews at $195/year."
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?
> 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.
> “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.”
(* 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=false&qu....)
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
Thank you for fielding questions. And please don't stop, your work is great.
“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.”
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.
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
People want to focus on scape goats rather than systemic problems
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.
> 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.
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
It clarifies he did not fire Sam
I overall agree with your takeaway, but this is not a criticism of the article itself.
That is how pathological liars present.
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.
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).
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.
You're already paying for your library with your tax dollars. If you don't use it, you may lose it, but you will certainly lose out by subsidizing bums, vagrants, and other families who use the library to their heart's content.
The public library also features lots of streaming and CD music, videos, and video games, that you can freely check out without any cost. In fact, my local library staff told me that they've abolished overdue fees. Libby and the digital apps will automatically renew or return materials. My physical books even got auto-renewed three times before I needed to manually do it, or bring them back into the building.
> “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,”
What?
For anyone unfamiliar with this process, the New Yorker documentary is well worth the watch: https://www.netflix.com/title/81770824
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?
In light of that...
> "Texts from this period show Altman coördinating closely with Nadella"
Why did you make the odd choice of a diaresis on this word?
We're all here worried about calling the guy liar liar pants on fire, but maybe none of that matters to him as long as he comes away looking even more powerful? That's what he's so successful optimizing for.
How neo-medieval peasant of me to feel this awe - great piece. Insane world we live in.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If AI will indeed become superintelligent, we won't matter.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sam-altman-universal-basic-inco...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-wants-universal-ex...
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...
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?
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...
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.
I think as well if you look closer, many cyberpunk worlds imply AI through robots, computers with personality etc.
I liked that mental image a lot! (I try to maintain being uncertain whether Deckard was a replicant)
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.
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.
The people shaping the future have no taste.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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).
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.
Is this something you've thought about?
Also a good expose on accelerationists and e/accs and who among the elites fall in this group is direly needed as well
Or he's being dishonest about what he remembers.
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.
Incredible.
Here is the etymological definition of the word:
persuasion(n.) late 14c., persuasioun, "action of inducing (someone) to believe (something) by appeals to reason (not by authority, force, or fear); an argument to persuade, inducement," from Old French persuasion (14c.) and directly from Latin persuasionem (nominative persuasio) "a convincing, persuading," noun of action from past-participle stem of persuadere "persuade, convince," from per "thoroughly, strongly" (see per) + suadere "to urge, persuade," from PIE root *swād- "sweet, pleasant" (see sweet (adj.)).
Meaning "state of being convinced" is from 1530s; that of "religious belief, creed" is from 1620s. Colloquial or humorous sense of "kind, sort, nationality" is by 1864.
IMHO if you aim to convince people of something you are on the side of trying to control people's freedom to chose. That in itself is a form of being unethical to the idea of truth.
If you can't let people come to their own conclusions, you got problems and you shouldn't be in a position of power.
In my experience the people who spend the most time convincing are people with narcissistic personality disorders. I stay far away from those people because I know they dont really value truth and justice like I do.
The industry seems to attract people who can only be described as smooth opportunists, always a shy step away from becoming confidence artists. People with big dreams of material success, but with next to no ability or talent, and with a tragic lack of self knowledge (and often a lack of domain knowledge). Pure entitlement and greed, and a desire to use other people as a bridge to the stars[0].
I will say this, however: they do have a keen sense of what the incentives are. They will keep doing this, for as long as society keeps rewarding them, and refuses to punish them. And unhooking those incentives is not difficult: do not let them externalize blame, do not let small dishonesties pass, do not let them internalize praise that belongs to someone else, and, most importantly, do not look the other way, when they decide to cannibalize the career of someone else, in order to nourish their own.
Silicon Valley, since at least the Web-2.0 days, has been about nerds making frat-bros rich, in exchange for a livable wage (salaries tend to be only slightly in excess of cost-of-living, unless you are willing to live either far away from your workplace, or in a small moldy-smelling box of a studio). This is a bad deal. Silicon Valley idolizes Steve Jobs (even when he was alive), but gives little thought to Steve Wozniak (upon whose work, Apple and the PC industry were built). When I was in college, both Jobs and Dennis Ritchie died within a short time of each other. Silicon Valley mourned Jobs, but only a few of us nerds mourned Ritchie.
Silicon Valley chose to name the most innovative car company in the country "Tesla", but it attracts and cultivates legions of future Edisons and Morgans[1]. And that is perhaps the perfect allegory for Silicon Valley: a car company named after someone like Tesla, but owned and operated by someone like Elon Musk[2].
[0]: Maybe this is an ancient human affliction. Did the pharaohs not do the same in their day?
[1]: Funny parallel, that since 2009, SV has been trying to rent out compute and storage, instead of just selling it outright.
[2]: Another pretender, seduced more by the warm glow of gold, than the cool blue crackling lightning of a Tesla Coil.
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".
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.
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.
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.taylorfrancis.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.
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?
> 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"?
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.
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.”
That's the name of a different game.
OpenAI played the charity, coupled with a powerful altruistic card.
It didn't say: we believe a more effective for-profit business shall start as a non-profit in this field, because it would yield innovation which we can then skim money off down the road. That would have been transparent.
Not saying it was the intention at the start. But they flipped the game at some point. Let's play Chess, it's a better game. Oh I decided we are now playing Checkers, sorry, I won.
> But they flipped the game at some point.
i guess my (too nuance maybe) point was: the system we live in is like water; the urge to swim with the big fish is overwhelming... it was gonna happen eventually at the level they are playing at.
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.
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.
A: "Why isn't there more AI in cyberpunk media?"
B: "There's a decent amount already, as characters or tools."
A: "But why didn't those authors address its potential to be even bigger?"
B: "Some did, but that makes stories we don't categorize as cyberpunk."
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
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.
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).
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.
The greatest and often only check on power has always been competition or opposition by other great men.
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!
These soulless people exist out there and they don’t care that your dog just passed away or your close family member gets cancer.
They just move forward with their agenda and are experts at telling you what they think you want to hear. 200%
Sam seems like a fun guy to be around. /s
I am also aware that sincere people present that way.
I don't believe there is any rational way to consider the appearance of innocence as evidence of guilt.
What other point could you have been making? You made no reference to any other evidence.
>as much as I admire the creativity in your interpretation, Mr. Self-Described Altman Apologist).
I am unsure if this is deliberate irony, or poor comprehension.
Yes, but that doesn't work if you look for patterns selectively. There are large amount of people who will tell you vastly different experiences that they had with Altman. If you pick the right grouping, within it, you can find universal praise or condemnation. The article itself acknowledges that.
>The article also mentions many moments where apparently Altman straight out lied.
Does it? It has people saying he lied, and a few things he disputes that he said. If the lies were clearly apparent, I think his position would not be tenable. Which points in the article do they show statements that it clear that he has said them, that they were false, and that he knew they were false when he said them?
The points you list are not clearly apparent lies. At most they are allegations of lies. They might just be different interpretations of the same events. I have seen instances in my own life where someone has said "You said X" the other person says "No I didn't", The first then pulls up the minutes, and says "See you said X", the other responds with "That's not what that says". You see rage bait posts about terms and conditions that take that form all the time. Someone misreads a legal term as meaning something different to what it means in a legal sense and then refuses to acknowledge the commonly accepted definition.
Please respond to this, because I really am interested in the answer, but I did read the article and I didn't see what you appear to have seen.
I have made no claim to the merits of Sam Altman, I just don't like the idea of condemning someone on hearsay and insinuations. There are videos on YouTube claiming he's had people killed. At some point you have to point at something that everyone can agree on is an actual thing that happened and that it actually matters. At most what I have seen is people being able to provide one of those two points on any particular allegation.
I don't feel this should be that contentious. If it were clear there would be demands from all around saying "You did this bad thing, you must resign". Do you think that everyone dealing with OpenAI acknowledges some dark truth and is complicit?
The pieces in the article I was referring to are:
> 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.”)
> Amodei discovered that a provision granting Microsoft the power to block OpenAI from any mergers had been added. “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.)
I agree it's very easy for 2 different people to understand or to remember something differently, and that meeting minutes are not always a reliable source, but for me in the 2 scenarios above is almost impossible for 2 people in good faith to disagree:
In the first case, if you say something, and a big deal is made of it, and 5 minutes later the other person claims that you said some specific words and you deny it, then someone is lying, either you or the other person.
In the second case, if there is something written in a contract, and someone presents that contract to you, reads it out loud, and asks a collegue to confirm, either that person made up the provision, or you are lying, there is little room for misunderstanding.
Given there are no proofs, I can't say he's 100% culprit, and I appreciate your rigor on this because we don't want to result judging everyone by a sort of "trial by public opinion".
However, outside of trials, the judjment can be more nuanced than a boolean "culprit/innocent", and to me the reasons below(*) are enough to distrust Altman and to prefer he wasn't the person at the head of a revolutionary technology that could have huge negative consequences on the society, or on human kind as a whole.
(*) the reasons being:
- amount of people interviewed and their very similar experiences
- the author and the type of journalism he does
- the professionalism he shown in calling out in his article the not-backed allegations other rivals made(for example of murder and sexual assault)
- the power dynamic that is usually in place between someone with enormous power and whealth, and a journalist that could be intimidated by being sued multiple times
Of course the amount/type of reasons needed to distrust someone is very personal, so we might need to "agree to disagree" on this
To be frank, While I tend to think that Dario has good intentions, I'm not so sure about his judgement. He's made a lot of claims that haven't panned out. I haven't felt that it was due to dishonesty, but more because of hyperbole.
The phrasing "Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied." is very close to the pattern I described above where someone interprets a claim as something different from what was actually said and refuses to back down. Furthermore this was prefaced with "As one person briefed on the exchange recalled" so it isn't even a first hand account. We don't know who the person doing the briefing was, but if it was one of the participants of the exchange, they would have been afforded the opportunity to reframe it to put themselves in a better light.
The second claim is potentially even more of a match for the example I gave regarding people misreading legal documentation. Was this a denial about the existence of words in a document, or was it a denial that the words represented the provision that was claimed. I have seen people do this, they take the existence of the words as proof of their interpretation and take dismissal of the interpretation as a claim that the words do not exist. I don't rightly know why people do this, but I have seen it happen. I suspect you could find an abundant supply of cases like this from the records of the worlds town council meetings.
It is difficult to assess the reliability of claims made by the current administration (understating it somewhat), but one of the things that was said about the Government negotiations with Anthropic was that he wanted a gate to some AI abilities in national security circumstance by requiring a personal phone call to Amodei to clear it. No sane government on earth would agree to something like that. It would be an invitation to providing a corporate interest a massive point of leverage in a time of crisis.
But again I am in a similar position with Amodei. I don't have any direct knowledge of the person so I will reserve judgement. I generally like the approach Anthropic is taking but the exposure I have had to the statements made by Amodei himself has given me pause. I would not condemn him either, but I also wouldn't place a lot of stock in what he says unless I see more to create a more complete view of his character.
You note amount of people interviewed and their very similar experiences but it's the nature of how those claims are similar that concerns me. So many of the claims seem to fall into the pattern that requires the person reporting the claim to judge the sole meaning of what was said. How many confirmed direct quotes have been confirmed to be untrue? I'm open to the evidence, perhaps this article will draw some out, but right now I see people convincing themselves of a pattern and then interpreting their own experiences in terms of that pattern.
The thing is, if you were to ask, I think Altman would agree that he shouldn't be in charge of the world's AI. I don't think any one person should, and I would treat anyone who claimed that they were the right person for that job with massive suspicion. To say that's where he sits is to buy into the premise that whoever is the head of OpenAI controls our future. OpenAI is but one of many enterprises working on this, there are a lot of people claiming they already have lost too much ground, but then there have been many predicting their imminent collapse, like a doomsday cult rolling forward the calendar whenever it doesn't happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“I had the burden of impacting public affairs through my wildly succesful corporation”—poor them.
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.
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.
(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 (https://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.)
Can't wait until this is released!
https://theonion.com/anyone-else-have-those-weird-dreams-whe...
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.
What you are thinking of are people who do bad things. Most of those people are not sociopaths. Often they are hurting in some way, sometimes they are just living the only life they know. Most of them feel they are doing the best they can. It is extremely comforting to pathologize these people because then it's not something we could have prevented by providing a better society. It rules out the hard options of empathising with them, or reasoning with them to find common ground.
The term othering has come into use in recent years. The concept has existed through the ages, but that's the latest label for it.
This is what it looks like.
"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.
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.
Thank you I was just going to point this out.
I have other beefs with Amodei, including his pathetic, mewling appeals for regulatory capture and his forehead-slapping hypocrisy on copyright and ToS enforcement, but this seemed like a case where he was legitimately on the right side of the question and had the moral courage to stand by his position.
It may be more of a mental block than anything else.
Apologies, I didn't mean to highlight Amodei in those quotes, I just selected the sentence to have enough context but not be too long, it was a coincidence that they both started with Amodei. I'm not sure if those claims came from Amodei or not, nor I have any specific feeling about him.
> Furthermore this was prefaced with "As one person briefed on the exchange recalled" so it isn't even a first hand account
I'll admit I somehow missed that part, but we don't know how much of this event was in "Amodei's notes" and how much was from the "person briefed on the exchange"
> The phrasing "..." is very close to the pattern I described above where someone interprets a claim as something different
> The second claim is potentially even more of a match for the example I gave regarding people misreading legal documentation
I think our difference in point of view here lies on how much trust we put in the author, with what I seen so far I feel I have enough trust in the author to think he investigated these claims properly and made sure they weren't just misunderstandings, and that many of those checks he did weren't included in the article for any technical/legal reasons. Much more so reading some of his 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.
> You try to reach a critical mass of detailed, rounded understanding of a central question, integrating the most meaningful perspectives, interrogating the weak points and blind spots, and backing up the assertions with documentary evidence or strong sourcing. Eventually, you reach a point where enough sources and materials are reliably triangulating toward the same truths.
> The fact-checking process at the New Yorker is exhaustive, and can span weeks. Every sentence, assertion, and piece of underlying sourcing get scrubbed by multiple independent pairs of eyes. This story had four fact-checkers working on it for the better part of a two week period, pulling very long hours.
As I said I'm happy to agree to disagree on this point.
> So many of the claims seem to fall into the pattern that requires the person reporting the claim to judge the sole meaning of what was said
I guess that's the nature of communications between humans. Even examples of written discussions seem contentious. The only type of claims I can think about that could be outside this category are the ones about written contracts, but it's understandable we don't have access to the actual contracts, and even if we did we couldn't really prove what was verbally agreed to be put in the contracts.
> To say that's where he sits is to buy into the premise that whoever is the head of OpenAI controls our future. OpenAI is but one of many enterprises working on this
This might start a whole new discussion, but I think being the CEO of one of the companies that produce state of the are models is enough to have a high concern. My worry is that he(or any other company) won't say "stop" if a new AI is found to be more powerful but have considerable negative impacts on society. As an example it doesn't matter who has the "strongest" atomic bomb, any country that has one is a potential treat to humanity and should have rigid controls in place.
I commented specifically on Altman because the article seems to suggest he's more power-greedy, persuasive, possibly deceptive, and with strong-leverages/contacts than the average person, or even the average CEO.
(edits: formatting)
In developer communities often you can support individual developers or groups through a monthly subscription / donation on their github page or similar.
The Sam Altman piece can be read here: https://apple.news/APTX4OkywRWeJXIL7b8a7zQ
xcancel is a valid workaround for X links on Hacker News and is sufficient for original attribution.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
As for your #2, that seems reminiscent of "why are we going to space when there are so many problems here on Earth."
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
ADHD frequently co-occurs with other conditions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess my question was more, if the article author was the judge of fate or morality, what should happen?
As to AI and Sam, I think it’s too early to tell what effects will be. So we should adopt non judgement, build good ourselves and see what unfolds.
I.e. what I used to use Google for and when I don't want an AI to overly summarize / editorialize result data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the leadership doesn’t bend it might get replaced. It’s annoying. I think Claude is atm the best AI assistant, by far.
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.
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.
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.
It only showed they were marginally more ethical than OpenAI and XAI which isn't saying much.
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.
[1] "Unless Its Governance Changes, Anthropic Is Untrustworthy" https://anthropic.ml/
So much so that I worry they won't be Machiavellian enough to survive. Hope I am wrong.
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.
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.
Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems
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.
Is there one that you prefer for, i dunno, physics?
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.
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.
Last one is from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925
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.)
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.
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)
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.
There are two types of vaccine be coders. Those who review the code generated and those who don’t.
Either because they don’t understand code at all, or because they don’t have time and don’t care.
Code quality is only one factor. Naive vibe coders, who don’t code otherwise, rate performance based on output alone.
If you're picking on my vocabulary, that's fair. Fraud wasn't the point, I think you're smart enough to realize that.
I'm not sure some people understand how "normal" racism is.
Another comment suggested that Altman was once beat up by a black man. If true, it is possible Sam has developed a conditioned response that associates black men with danger and his reaction stemmed from that. However, that isn't the same thing as racism and to try and categorize it as such would be quite disingenuous.
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.
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.
> 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.”
"He damn near flagged down the police" tells us nothing about what actually happened. Did he back away? Did he look panicked? Did he say something dismissive? Did he literally call for police or security? You give all these pointless details like where you work and your height, and retreat to vagueness when coming to the actual behavior you're indicting him for.
A rich gay Jewish kid from St.Louis being weary, or even scared of black people is quite believable, a public figure screaming for police because a black guy he was next to said hi just beggars belief, especially when layered in emotionally charged nonspecific language.
And you don't even have the balls to admit you clearly think the guy who calls the cops on black people for saying hi to him, is racist, which you clearly do.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Just a couple of thoughts since it seems like the next issues in this space are rapidly arriving or already here.
It was also the product of perceived overmatch on both sides -- the Soviets believed they had superior mass of armored formations (and they did), while the US and allies believed they had technological supremacy (and they did). Ergo, neither needed tactical nukes.
It didn't hurt that it helped both in the eyes of the then vehemently anti-nuclear European movements.
Offensive bio and chemical weapon limitation is a more nuanced decision.
In both cases, their primary use was either local mass lethality or terrain denial, neither of which were important in the then-gelling American doctrines of maneuver.
The sole use case they seemed viable for was industry denial (e.g. contaminate a high capital cost industrial center), a task at which strategic sized nuclear weapons were equally adept (and more easily stored). So, if you had to have strategic nuclear weapons for deterrence, and they were capable of the same task, why have fiddly bio and chemical weapons?
But in both cases there was also a constant radiant pressure of scientists and the public campaigning against them, and being unwilling to work on or tolerate them.
Absent that, who knows how history would have turned out? Normalization is a powerful opinion shifter.
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.
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.
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.
Alas, this is not my experience of HN. About neutral topics, sure. Not a lot of flaming and irrationality about e.g. C# Union Types or audio reactive LED strips or whatever.
But assert something that a large fraction of people do not want to be true and you'll get, not just downvoted, but flagged and condescension.
I for one appreciated your perspective.
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)
Trading shares for GPUs is not corrupt either.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
In general, Claude was impressed by what Codex produced and noted the parts where it (i.e. Claude) had missed something vs. Codex "thinking of it".
From a "daily driver" perspective I still use Claude all the time as it has plan mode, which means I can guarantee that it won't break out and just do stuff without me wanting it to. With Codex I have to always specify "Don't implement/change, just tell me" and even then it sometimes "breaks out" and just does stuff. Not usually when I start out and just ask it to plan. But after we've started implementation and I review, a simple question of "Why did you do X?" will turn into a huge refactoring instead of just answering my question.
To be fair, that's what most devs do too (at least at first), when you ask them "Why did you do X" questions. They just assume that you are trying to formulate a "Do Y instead of X" as a question, when really you just don't understand their reasoning but there really might be a good reason for doing X. But I guess LLMs aren't sure of themselves, so any questioning of their reasoning obliterates their ego and just turns them into submissive code monkeys (or rather: exposes them as such) vs. being software engineers that do things for actual reasons (whether you agree with them or not).