The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

I've been wondering for a while if Sam is going to become an Elizabeth Holmes style figure with all of his talk about "a magic intelligence in the sky" and that in 5 years AI will replace 95% of marketing work. It seems like he's set up impossible promises, it'll be interesting to see what comes from their non-delivery.

Losing Apple as a customer is kind of a problem.

Words are cheap. I really wish there was a way to incentivize authors like this to put their money where their mouth is, before seeking attention for their ideas.

While general vibe of Sam and OpenAI losing steam is correct for me; I genially disagree with all “hate” of GPT-5. It was indeed not a crazy breakthrough, but, honestly, 5.2 model at extended thinking path in Pro version is utterly scary to me. I can give it some complicated multi-tier question which requires modeling, abstract thinking, computation, and rationality; it can walk away for 45 minutes, produce CoT with a length of Empire State Building and give me fairly good and well written response. I can’t speak for all industries, but 5.2-Pro-extended is really scarce when it comes to math and reasoning. Here I am a bit on Sam side when he said that most of people severely underutilize modern AI by using it same as in 2023. The capability of recent models sounds to me way beyond current typical use cases.

Why. Do. We. Keep. Posting. Gary. Marcus.

He's been writing variants of this kind of thing for decades and he's always been wrong.

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The man brought us LLMs and ever more capable models. I don’t know about the critics, but my work life completely changed from Dec 2022 on. Ever since chatgpt was released. I cannot imagine working without LLMs and agents anymore. They make me literally 10-100x more productive, transforming text, generating text, doing research, writing code, documenting systems, doing web search and so much more.

And for that I am forever thankful to Sam Altman and all the people who made this possible.

Do people actually find this kind of dunk content interesting? It's super popular but I wonder if people find it insightful or entertaining. I watched a little of Stephen Colbert and John Oliver and it's mostly boring stuff that is pretty much characterized as "This guy IS AN IDIOT!" and "They're LOSING" and whatnot. It seems like the equivalent of those "Charlie Kirk owns feminists with FACTS and LOGIC". If you go to /r/all you'll see that it's almost all dunk content.

I get the appeal in an abstract sense. I get a real kick out of watching yet another Manchester United manager cock it up. But all I do is see the scores and enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. The audience for these guys seems highly enthusiastic about their content. It's like if I watched every United game to get as much enjoyment out of watching them suck.

It's particularly annoying because people are clearly not posting this guy because he's right often or because he's good at predicting stuff. They're posting because he's dunking on people they dislike.