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I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI. He's not perfec
by gkoberger 3y ago
I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI.
He's not perfect, but behind the scenes he's a genuine and upstanding person. I've met lots of wealthy smart people, and he's the only exception. He was the only person I trusted in this situation, and I'm genuinely nervous that he's no longer running OpenAI.
- rogerkirkness 3y agoI agree. Have not heard a single concern about ethics in business ever raised about him before.
- Blackthorn 3y agoThat's usually how things work. They're aren't any complaints or concerns, until they're are. Obviously.
- bensecure 3y agoNot really, no. There will usually be allegations of malfeasance floating around a person for a while before any of them are brought to the wider public. To a complete outsider, it looks like these things come out of nowhere, but to someone who's relatively close to the person it seems like it was building up for years. I've also noticed in cases of false accusations that there will often be a number of other accusations made shortly after, all of which look relatively weak or unimportant; eg someone accused of sexual harassment will separately be accused of making a sexual advancement then backing off when turned down. By evaluating the sorts of other allegations about a person when some accusation is made against them, we can attempt to guess the legitimacy of those allegations collectively.
- Blackthorn 3y ago> Not really, no. There will usually be allegations of malfeasance floating around a person for a while before any of them are brought to the wider public. You mean, exactly like there been, from Sam Altman's sister?
- majesticglue 3y agoNone of that really matters. Look at Elon Musk, lots of weird spectacle. The man was lauded as one of the smartest man in the world...now he's kind of a bit of a loose cannon. People need to stop idol worship businessmen. They have a large motivation to make themselves into this human lovable charismatic person with no faults because it is very profitable to do so. Worse is when people buy into that.
- smsm42 3y agoActually no, it often is not how it works. For example, Harvey Weinstein's behavior has been "open secret" in certain circles way before the scandal exploded. Epstein has been known to be super shady way before he found his end in prison. Anthony "Carlos Danger" Weiner has been known for his exploits well before he finally was prosecuted. There are, of course, opposite cases, where certain sociopaths meticulously cultivate their benign image and hide their true colors. But often, the true colors are known if not widely, then at least by many people surrounding them. For a reasonably public person, it would be quite hard to lead a double life for a long time without anybody at all knowing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pphysch 3y agoThe OpenAI x Dota 2 stuff was a bit shady. They really wanted the crown of beating human players at one of the most complex real-time games, but to do so they had to drastically simplify the game rules (removing most heroes, changing courier mechanics). It would be like if AlphaGo could only win if the Go board was half as big. Not real fraud, but shows a clear willingness to cut corners and stretch ethics.
- hatthew 3y agoI was following their Dota project from the beginning, and I think what they did made sense. Their goal there was to demonstrate real time decision making and teamwork in a complex environment without perfect information. OpenAI Five did a splendid job of doing that. I would view it as the equivalent of making self-driving cars that are constrained to a single city. Sure, it doesn't have the full capability that a human would have. But who cares.
- epolanski 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bacheson1293 3y agohow do you know he's a good person if you don't know him well?
- stavros 3y agoBecause you can know someone non-well and think they're a really good person. It's not strong evidence, but it's not nothing.
- xwdv 3y agoI don’t know Sam Altman well but I do not think he’s a particularly good person, so there’s some counter-evidence. Personally I welcome this shake up. Some of the things I’ve seen Altman write about are troubling.
- earthboundkid 3y agoYou can know someone is a bad person from casual interaction, but not vice versa. There's basically no way to know if anyone intelligent is a good person without extremely intense surveillance. I guess with an unintelligent person, you can assume that they're not smart enough to hide if they're doing something really bad, but even then, maybe they're just playing dumb.
- koolba 3y agoI've had a positive opinion of sama as a human ever since this comment about him living with his two brothers well into their 30s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592010 It's a corollary to my theory that anybody that maintains close ties with their family and lives with them is a wholesome person.
- tashoecraft 3y agoHis sister would disagree with you.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoShe's voiced her allegations for years. Has something been brought up recently? Is she credible?
- danpalmer 3y agoIs she not credible?
- friend_and_foe 3y agowell id never heard of this, and im not a fan of the guy, but from my quick perusal online just now of the noise of this drama, id say no, shes not credible.
- swalkergibson 3y agoThis was my reaction as well. If a competent doctor had prescribed her medication and she took herself off of it without medical supervision, I think it is pretty reasonable to condition money on going back on medication (or at least going back to medical supervision). Many people who have family members struggling with mental health concerns take this approach.
- behnamoh 3y agoIsn't she not incredible?
- concordDance 3y agoEstranged family members of celebrities who need money normally aren't considered very credible. I have no good way of assessing what the likelihood is that her claims are true.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
- gkoberger 3y agoUpdate: Greg Brockman is also out, which makes me think it's more than just a Sam scandal.
- iandanforth 3y agoThe statement claims he is no longer board chair but will stay with the company. Do you have other info?
- gkoberger 3y agoThey're clearly related. He went from Chairman to "reporting to the CEO", meaning he either stepped down in protest or was also fired. He won't be there in 6 months; this is just a crumb of continuity.
- cmcaleer 3y agoCould also be pending investigation
- cloudking 3y agoConfirmation https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
- nebula8804 3y agoHe is the guy that built a bunker in New Zealand and has a ready made plan to escape on a motorcycle with his escape bag filled with guns, money and supplies when things collapse right? (At least I think he that guy) Is that normal person behavior?
- gkoberger 3y agoI didn't say he was normal. He's clearly not (normal people don't start OpenAI). That doesn't preclude him for being a thoughtful person who wants the best for the world around him.
- oth001 3y agoBy scanning eyeballs and doing who knows what with that data? Idk
- shipscode 3y agoI vote no because New Zealand seems like a poor choice for possessing arms in a bunker.
- seanw444 3y agoIf you have money and connections, the laws of the plebs are no longer relevant. You essentially have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere on Earth if you're rich enough.
- ChainOfFools 3y agountil locals with more guns and much deeper trust affiliations with other locals decide your money is best spent as they see fit.
- blangk 3y agoWould there be a better place or strategy?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- api 3y agoWorldcoin?
- arp242 3y agoI have zero knowledge of Sam Altman in any shape or form and literally the only thing I know about him is that he runs (or well, ran) OpenAI. But as a general point, you can be both a "good person" and still do bad things. Or you can be a good person in some areas, and a not-so-good person (or even horrible person) in some other areas. People are complex. Of course it's entirely possible that Altman is just a really good person, but I wouldn't be quick to make assumptions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ignoramous 3y agoUnless Sam has managed to fool a bucket load of smart people, your prediction is very unlikely to be true (or rather, I don't want it to be true). Fuck.
- parthianshotgun 3y agoSee, SBF
- dylan604 3y agoNew rule on hiring a tech leader, don't be named Sam.
- chefandy 3y agoCorporate malfeasance is not exclusive to tech and neither are collections of incredibly intelligent people.
- arp242 3y agoIt's not a prediction; it's a general comment that one shouldn't assume too much based on a limited number of datapoints, in this case someone who doesn't "know him well". This works in two directions, by the way. In 2001 few would have expected that Bill Gates would spend much of his time on philanthropy. Is he a "good" or "bad" person? Well, he's both.
- JohnFen 3y agoI first heard of him through the WorldCoin stuff, and nothing about that made him look like an upstanding person. That whole thing was/is shady as hell. I certainly don't know him, but I see more reasons not to trust him than to trust him.
- dataflow 3y agoI'd never heard of that, but that definitely sounds shady. Thanks for mentioning it. To save people a search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
- bredren 3y agoWhy would someone running OpenAI possibly be involved in something so unnecessarily speculative and unrelated? I ask that question leaving out any of the socio-economic and privacy concerns around that project.
- DirkH 3y agoWhat's so shady about it?
- JohnFen 3y agoI should have said "sketchy" instead of "shady", as "shady" implies a criminality I don't mean to imply. What's sketchy about it is that they were offering money to largely poor and technologically naive populations in exchange for gathering very sensitive biometric data from them. Identifying data that cannot be changed and can be used to track them without their knowledge. Their stated goal is to have every person on Earth take part, to boot. The whole idea couldn't set off more alarm bells if it tried. I give them style points for using truly dystopian-looking "orbs" to do it, though.
- kubrickslair 3y agoI know Sam even less, but when I first moved to Valley a decade ago he went out of the way to help. I wanted try out a crazy startup idea on a student visa with limited connections in the Valley - he loved what I was doing and went above and beyond to help me out. It forever tuned me in to the ethos of Silicon Valley. And I have tried paying back where I can.
- rcbdev 3y agoIf that ethos doesn't involve illegally overstaying student visas like Musk or burning millions of dollars then have you really truly embraced the SV lifestyle?
- kubrickslair 3y agoI think you misunderstood that he helped me overstay my student visa etc. I was in a Ph.D. program at a top CS school and there are ways to transition your visa when building a startup. It was that I was not sure if the transition or the startup would work out - that startup did not - but years later another one did. I would probably not have taken the plunge out of academia and not achieved much else had it not been for him. And I am deeply grateful for that.
- rcbdev 3y agoI was just making a joke about how Silicon Valley, to some people on this planet, seems like an awful place that ignores some awful behavior when convenient. Embracing the "ethos" of such a place seems funny to me. Never accused you of trying to illegally stay in the country or some such - I just referenced a famous South African Valley-man with a musky scent who did that.
- epolanski 3y agoThis sounds so naive, maybe google Worldcoin? A person I've known all my life I could swear and trust him with anything was found out to have violated extremely young children and other stuff. Stop pretending you know people, people don't even know themselves.
- dataflow 3y ago> I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI. "Good" is too blurry of a description, and I don't know Sam, but one thing I've learned (the hard way) is that you don't truly know someone unless you've had conflicts of interest with them and found mutually satisfying resolutions to them. If all you've had is mutually beneficial interactions, then of course everyone's going to be nice - it's in everyone's interests. You need to see how they act on nontrivial conflicts (either handling present ones, or mitigating/averting future ones) to really know if someone is a genuinely good person or not. While this could hypothetically happen within an hour of meeting someone, it's more likely to take years or even decades... or might never even happen.
- hilux 3y agoThis is so true - and thank you for the very important reminder! As I interview for new roles, it's a timely lesson, suggesting how to test what a new employer is -really- like.
- riwsky 3y agoAh yes—as the saying goes: “keep your friends at the Bayes-optimal distance corresponding to your level of confidence in their out-of-distribution behavior, and your enemies closer”
- ohbleek 3y agoThis is gold.
- chankstein38 3y agoNeeds to be on a t-shirt lol
- shruggedatlas 3y agoThis is too brilliant to be tucked away in the depths of a HN thread
- sci-genie 3y ago
- talldatethrow 3y ago[flagged]
- baby 3y agoOrganizations are systems, not people, if he put into place the right incentive structure then the company will go in a good direction with or without him. Arguably the structure is now set in stone with his departure.
- vonnik 3y agoI second this. As someone who's operated in the startup and YC ecosystems for years, I've seen Sam help a lot of people with no clear upside for himself. He's a net plus to Silicon Valley and SF by a long shot.
- ex3ndr 3y agoisn't this is an upside? a lot of fraudulent people are very nice and help everyone around.
- vonnik 3y agoYeah, well, if you're nice and helpful to enough people eventually you cross a threshold to just being a good guy, at which point, the deranged behavior of a couple poorly qualified board members ceases to matter.
- ChrisCinelli 3y agoSure, "good person" may sound generic. But he is still a good person trying to do the right things. To me it sounds like the board is afraid of being sued and needs to clearly appoint a scapegoat.
- marsupial 3y ago[flagged]
- kelnos 3y agoI do believe you are being genuine here, but good people still sometimes do bad things. Good people still have their blind spots, and the negative consequences of those blind spots are often exacerbated and have outsized (negative) impact on others when the person behind them is wealthy. I've never met the man, but I can say I have not been impressed by his words and attitude in public. I never got the sense or feeling that he's actually doing right by the world. Ultimately it doesn't matter if he's a good or bad person; what matters is what he's done.
- user3939382 3y agoDidn’t I just read a post about him abusing his sister? It seems impossible to judge people you don’t know well personally, and even then sometimes you can be surprisingly wrong.
- oth001 3y agoI don't want my eyeballs scanned though
- adl 3y agoWell, according to his sister, he used to molest her when he was 13, and she was 4, so... https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1635704398939832321?s=19 https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
- ctvo 3y agoPaul Graham saw this guy and immediately went “pattern matches my ideal genius”. My goodness.
- ammma 3y ago[flagged]
- qubit000 3y agoThe world is not binary - least of all human behavior which for overwhelming majority is more accurately described as shades of gray