alt Hacker NewsSam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
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Am I the only one that feels like Claude is clearly winning code generation, and Gemini in general LLM?
I just don’t feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning any of the AI battles.
Therefore, I feel like “Sam Altman may control our future” is a far stretch.
Can Sam "The board can fire me, I think that's important." Altman be trusted?
If for no other reason, given what happened when the board fired him... no. I'd say not.
Betteridge's law of headlines: no
Watch Altman's reaction in Tucker Carlson interview to the question about (alleged) murder of OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji.
The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.
Nope, never trust this man. His history proves why you cannot. Pure greed.
This whole situation goes to show that yesterday's conspiracy theorists are today's realists. What's happening to USA's leadership and as a country and what's happening with with their top companies is really scary for the rest of us. If this trend continues we're all definitely gonna end up in a kleptocracy.
Excellent work. I’ll have to wait until we get the print version delivered to finish as I’m not signed into the new Yorker on my phone.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Ronan Farrow’s journalism and willingness to speak truth to power. I think he’s pulling at exactly the right thread here, and it’s very important to counteract Altman’s reputation laundering given that we run a very real risk of him weaseling his way into the taxpayer’s wallet under the current administration.
Disclaimer: I have no association with any AI company and have never met Altman or any of the other top AI scientists.
The real question is: can anyone be trusted if the fever dreams of super-intelligence come true? Go ahead and replace Sam Altman with someone else - will it make a difference? Any other CEO is going to be under the same overwhelming pressure to make a profit somehow. I think the OpenAI story is messier because it was founded for supposedly altruistic reasons, and then changed.
Methinks many of Altman's detractors protesteth too much. He's doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) Nothing of substance in this article seemed to make him exceptionally "sociopathic" compared to any other tech CEO. It goes with the territory.
What depressed me most is that trillions of dollars are being raised for building what will undoubtedly be used as a weapon. My guess is the ROI on that money is going to be extremely bad for the most part (AI will make some people insanely rich, but it is hard to see how the big investors will get a return.) Could you imagine if the world shared the same vision for energy infrastructure (so we could also stop fighting wars over control of fossil fuels and spewing CO2?) A man can dream...
Rule of Headlines says "no"
> Lehane—whose reported motto, after Mike Tyson, is “Everyone has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth”
lol do you think these guys have ever been hit? Let alone in the face. They’d probably be less eager to mouth off as much as they do if so.
The guy called out for being a sociopath by a multitude of Silicon Valley CEOs of all people, sure we can trust him our future.
Seeing Sam Altman slowly degrade into the realization that he is in fact not as smart as others in this space has been fascinating to watch. He used to speak with enthusiasm and confidence and now he’s like a scared little boy who got in way too deep.
The last person that this happened to was Sam Bankman Fried as investors and regular folk finally realized he was full of complete shit and could only talk the game for so long until the truth emerged.
Hybris.
Looks like Betteridge's law of headlines applies here too.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "NO."
> The day that Altman was fired, he flew back to his twenty-seven-million-dollar mansion in San Francisco, which has panoramic views of the bay and once featured a cantilevered infinity pool, and set up what he called a “sort of government-in-exile.” Conway, the Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, and the famously aggressive crisis-communications manager Chris Lehane joined, sometimes for hours a day, by video and phone. Some members of Altman’s executive team camped out in the hallways of the house. Lawyers set up in a home office next to his bedroom. During bouts of insomnia, Altman would wander by them in his pajamas. When we spoke with Altman recently, he described the aftermath of his firing as “just this weird fugue.”
These sociopaths are so good at giving away nothing. He managed to engender sympathy instead of saying "I'm not gonna talk about anything that happened then".
Also very weird how many of these people are so deeply-linked that they'll drop everything they're doing just to get this guy back in power? Terrifying cabal.
Betteridge strikes again
Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell, no.
Well, no, obviously not. Not one bit.
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tl;dr
No, he cannot.
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>"Sam Altman may control our future"
TLDR but just the heading is already ugly. No single person no matter how nice they're should be able to control our future. Power corrupts, what fucking trust. We are supposed to be democratic society (well looking at what is going on around this is becoming laughable)
The New Yorker is owned by Conde Nast just as Reddit. Conde Nast has a deal with OpenAI:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...
This is a damage control piece, and you see that the most stinging comments here get downvoted.
He is cooked. Only a matter of time before the whole thing blows up. Once a scammer, always a scammer.
LOL, no.
No. Why is this a question?
1. No.
2. You cannot "control" superintelligent AI.
No.
"could", "may", "might" - these words do so much heavy lifting in "journalism". Almost always it's an invitation to worry and be miserable.
This article is just another typical New Yorker fluff piece that tries to look deep but misses the actual point.
The biggest flaw is that it spends way too much time on high-school level drama and "he-said-she-said" gossip about Sam Altman’s personal life instead of focusing on the actual technical and corporate capture of OpenAI.
The author treats the "nonprofit mission" like some holy quest that was "betrayed," when anyone with a brain in tech saw the Microsoft deal as the moment the original vision died. Instead of a hard-hitting look at how compute-monopolies are actually forming (MSFT AMZN NVDA and circular debt dealing inflating the AI bubble that could crash the economy), we get 5,000 words of hand-wringing over whether Sam is a "nice guy" or a "liar."
Who cares???????
The board failed because they had no real leverage against billions of dollars, not because they didn't write enough Slack messages. It's a long-winded way of saying "Silicon Valley has internal politics," which isn't news to anyone here.
OpenAI is like #3 or #4 of the AI companies right now in terms of power, and last place in the court of public opinion.
I’d be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good graces of the public and having access to all of our computers indirectly with Claude Code.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...