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Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
- milkglass 3y agoReally interesting how Sam gets compared to Steve Jobs quite often. Sam in some ways embodies the reality distortion field that Steve operated under, and has huge influence on those all that are part of that path.
- layer8 3y agoThe difference is that Sam Altman doesn’t seem to be an ideas man like Steve Jobs was. Both have been characterized as being manipulative liars though.
- milkglass 3y agoI think that's a fair statement. Manipulative leader bends reality to achieve results, perpetuating a culture where we have self fulfilling prophecies.
- smoothjazz 3y agoFull article: https://archive.is/10Rji https://archive.is/10Rji
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gwern 3y agoMany points of interest here, including the answer to an earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090 Why were the YC posts about Altman stepping down as YC president & becoming chairman so confusingly edited, and Altman seems to have either never been chairman or have quickly left? Well, because his post lacked candor about him becoming YC chairman: "To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."
- anotherhue 3y agoGun jumping seems to be his style.
- vorticalbox 3y agoNot that I agree with this method but it's a pretty effective way to force something.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kdwikzncba 3y agoNo, it's an attempt to force, and has the same flaw as all attempts to force, which is: the other side might just call your bluff. "Oh you think that going ahead before a decision is made and just publish a post will get us to decide in your favor because we're afraid of looking like we're backtracking? How about we don't decide in your favor and delete your post? What you gonna do now?"
- BeefDinnerPurge 3y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> How about we don't decide in your favor and delete your post? This response, the one YC went with, is milquetoast. It’s rational. But the true fuck you is to counter-programme and publicly call out the lie.
- kdwikzncba 3y ago[flagged]
- hutzlibu 3y agoAlso this other bit was news to me: "Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” "
- gumballindie 3y agoThe more we learn about this person the more we understand how dubious he is. I am not entirely sure what the end game is for those protecting and promoting him. He’s clearly not steve jobs. Behaves and talks more like a cheap imitation.
- jstummbillig 3y agoIs the idea that Steve Jobs never strong armed anyone?
- gumballindie 3y agoThe idea is that steve jobs built something. And those promoting altman try to somehow make him look like steve. But altman built nothing, has no plan whatsoever, and is an impostor. I think even he knows it, which explains his attempts at making something stick - be it dodgy crypto, corrupt business deals, an ai that fails to live to its hype, and so on.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI’m with you. I think the point here is that he _is_ like Steve Jobs, and everything that goes with that comparison.
- queuebert 3y agoNo, but he sure stinky feeted quite a few.
- CPLX 3y agoHis values are completely aligned with the ruling class. Billionaires need on the ground types like him to actually do stuff. It’s hard to find people who are young and ambitious and effective, and yet fundamentally and ruthlessly aligned with corporate hegemony. And I suspect he must be spectacularly good at flattery.
- fvbcds 3y agoRemember to use code words next time, this is getting flagged.
- gkoberger 3y agoYou don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way. If he followed the norms, he'd be a mid-level manager at FAANG company.
- richbell 3y agoThis comment reminds me of when Bird's CEO described their intentional subversion of municipal legislation as "innovating on the regulatory front." A lot can be accomplished by skirting pesky rules and regulations. It isn't something commendable.
- gkoberger 3y agoThis is a fallacy. You can't say "this other CEO did something" if you're trying to make a point about Sam. If you have a problem with Sam doing something illegal, say it. I'm not saying Sam has never done anything illegal, but most of the outrage seems to be that he doesn't follow social/business norms (not that he doesn't follow rules/regulations/laws).
- richbell 3y ago> This is a fallacy. You can't say "this other CEO did something" if you're trying to make a point about Sam. If you have a problem with Sam doing something illegal, say it. There is nothing fallacious about my comment. Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous. As another commenter said: he isn't unique.
- stale2002 3y ago> Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous You can compare him to other CEO but you have to justify why the comparison is valid. You didn't do that. If you want to directly claim that Sam did something illegal you need to show or say that. Instead, what you did, is just point to someone else who did something illegal, and then criticize that other person, while vaguely implying that the criticism applies to Sam. But the criticism doesn't apply to Sam, because you didn't demonstrate that Sam did anything illegal.
- wslh 3y agoAfter reading more articles about Sam it seems he is a genius in the game of power. Am I right? He is at the center of the stage and many powerful people and organizations trust on him beyond the "anecdotes". He will gain more power while he is an amplifier of capital and business opportunities. For an investor point of view he is a business ace and you just need to be careful about partnering with him because he will always be pursuing new opportunities, even ones that eat part of the company you invested in.
- bmitc 3y ago> business ace What business has he aced?
- wslh 3y agoHe helps business ace, not saying that he is a successful entrepreneur. We cannot say that OpenAI is unsuccessful either. We don't know if they will be as successful in the future but he helped in moving the gears.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BeefDinnerPurge 3y agoA combination of real drive and a tremendous amount of dumb luck. Never forget the dumb luck part though. Life isn't fair, ask Trevor Moore who wrote a song about that, oh wait, you can't, life isn't fair...
- wslh 3y agoIf Sam continues to have "luck" it is not survivorship bias. As I said before he is at the center of the stage.
- BeefDinnerPurge 3y ago
- throwaway778945 3y agoMy read - wildly successful business person, bad human being. So long as SV values what you do over how you got there (with criminal conduct being the obvious red line in how), Sam A and Steve Jobs types will continue to rise generation after generation.
- Timber-6539 3y ago> “The senior leadership team was unanimous in asking for Sam’s return as CEO and for the board’s resignation, actions backed by an open letter signed by over 95% of our employees. The strong support from his team underscores that he is an effective CEO,” said an OpenAI spokeswoman. This is where I stopped reading. At the risk of sounding defensive of Sam Altman. If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support? He's just one man, say that what this article alleges is true, how many tricks does he have up his sleeve to fool the entirety of Silicon Valley? I mean, we can beat around the bush all day but he managed to get his old/new?? job back at OpenAI. This means to me that his ouster was either unwarranted or the board was acting blindly and should have stepped aside just on account of being clearly incapable of making sound decisions. This article does not ask the right questions. Doesn't answer any questions either like the many articles written before it riddled with speculation about Sam's much belabored firing.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> why does he have such broad support? He makes people money. Plenty of terrible people commanded great loyalty. All the loyalty tells you is he’s a good leader. Not where he’s leading us. (Not saying anything about Sam. Just pointing out that loyalty is orthogonal.)
- Timber-6539 3y agoHe should be making investors money. That's his #1 job. Aside from that, who cares about loyalty to the CEO of a tech company. He's a replaceable employee and OpenAI should be able to continue without him. What were his actual crimes. It's not clear from the previous board nor anyone who's spoken about the matter what those were.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> What were his actual crimes Boards don’t judge crimes. And unlike courts, they have no disclosure obligation. Particularly for a private company.
- GCA10 3y agoI've seen variants of this in finance, where the strategy is called "outrunning your mistakes." There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation. Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming their successors for messing up a good thing. Also very good at cultivating a certain subset of journalists who will keep burnishing the legend, never stepping outside the bubble. Loosely related: does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? Because it seems as if Sam & Co. are quite determined to ignore it, deny it or minimize it, while continuing to push for breakneck growth of products with a very troubling design flaw.
- throwaway778945 3y agoYeah, have worked for/been burned by a few of these types. It can be really demoralizing and sets a bad example for how to be successful. Over time I've decided that how I accomplish things matters just as much, if not more than, what I accomplish, and outrunning your mistakes is a terrible "how."
- itake 3y agoThis is extremely common in big tech careers.
- kevinventullo 3y agodoes anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? I think this is akin to asking if anyone in the software engineering community has the patience and humility to try to solve the software bugs problem.
- voxl 3y agoSo more expressive type systems? Rust has made entire classes of bugs impossible, and you can do even better in Idris or some other dependent type theory. People don't do it because it's expensive and they're not trained it. No it never eliminated all bugs, but if we're conflating the two problems you don't need to eliminate all hallucinations either, you just need to make them very unlikely, or a consequence of your bad specifications.
- boucher 3y ago100+ upvotes in an hour and this story is falling off the front page already?
- dang 3y agoIt set off the flamewar detector. We eventually turned that off. It was also downweighted as a follow-up [1] because there had been a similar profile article / megathread the day before: "King of the Cannibals": How Sam Altman Took over Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38744021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38744021 - Dec 2023 (162 comments) In the absence of significant new information [2] people mostly just repeat what has already been said, and the more reptition there is in a thread, the dumber and nastier it gets. (Edit: I double checked that by skimming through the comments in this thread and I think it was the right call—they're generic, i.e. could just as easily have appeared in any similar thread, and range from ok-but-repetitive to outright-bad.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- boucher 3y agoI appreciate the response, thanks.
- paganel 3y agoAltman is the perfect 3-letter inside man, that photo with Nadella towards the end of the article is the perfect representation of that (MS having won the race of "which IT company will the System choose to represent its tech interests?", ahead of Amazon and Alphabet).
- throw7764228 3y ago[dead]
- odyssey7 3y agoI have to wonder, why is this criticism showing up now? Who would benefit from taking him down a peg at this current point in time, and how?
- baking 3y agoIt's called journalism. This is going to be happening for a while as journalists get more and more of the inside scoop. The new board also has a full slate ahead for it, including the investigation, recruiting a full board, and dealing with the non-profit and corporate structure which has a few holes showing. Plus there is all the stuff the company is actually doing with new products and the "Preparedness Framework" they are working on. Up until recently, the press about OpenAI has been mostly "look at the shiny lights" and now it's going to get the Elon Musk treatment.
- asadotzler 3y agoI benefit. You benefit. Everyone benefits when we learn more. Who fears these disclosures at the current point in time and why? What's your reason for questioning them? What do you have to lose?
- gwern 3y agoIt takes time to report these things, you can't just bang it out overnight. In addition, breaking a preference falsification cascade can take a lot of hits: a lot of people didn't want to talk about Altman, but with every article in WSJ/NYT/WaPo revealing some more, that reluctance fades a little bit. That is how you go from a few months ago, there being nothing but a whisper here or there that Altman had been fired from YC as one of the crown jewel secrets of YC known to a handful of people, to now Paul Graham casually confirming it to the WSJ. As for what the benefit is, the ongoing report is one benefit. If the law firm (named here for the first time, I believe) didn't know about, say, Sutskever's list of 20 incidents, well, they do now.
- MicolashKyoka 3y agoSam is great, some eggs might've been cracked along the way, but overall, very positive influence on the world. You could shine a light into most people's lives and find in most cases broken egg shells here & there. Fixating on them at the expense of the bigger picture is a mistake. Regarding the openai board, the problem imo is that too much weight was given to a nebulous & subjective mission, allowing those sitting to make up ridiculous positions and find them tenable (ie the company going kaput being in line with the mission, like srsly??)
- Gud 3y agoRegarding your last point, OpenAI going kaput might indeed be the best for humanity as a whole, only time will tell.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Geisterde 3y agoCould there be a more dangerous version of reality where we allow the government and a chosen monopoly to collude in controlling AI for the rest of society? Because that is precicely what he was/is attempting to do.
- MicolashKyoka 3y agoI may not personally like it, but it's the pragmatist thing to do if you're leading openai. The gov will eventually get involved, better to get in front of it. However, there won't be a monopoly or anything of the sort that will form, our society's institutions wouldn't be able to properly enforce it and it's too easy for weights to leak, too much alpha for people to not fight back against it. Not worried. The ai safety crowd's problem is that they're focused on a hypothetical entity that will take over humanity, imagining all sorts of scenarios in lalaland which are ridiculous (some of their "thought leaders" even advocating for strikes on datacenters to save humanity???), where the real risk is criminals/terros being empowered by the ai's cognitive ability. For that, we'll need the gov involved one way or another.
- haltist 3y ago[flagged]
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoThat honestly sounds like a faith based argument. Put your faith in the leader, pay no attention to the unbelievers! Now, it's possible that this time this argument is correct, but the odds are against you.
- haltist 3y agoSam Altman is not the hero we deserve but the one we need ♥
- psswrd12345 3y agoAltman is a classic sociopath, tread carefully.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago> There were complaints about Altman pursuing side projects, at one point diverting engineers to work on a gay dating app, which they felt came at the expense of the company’s main work. Who among us ...
- replwoacause 3y agoAre you saying this behavior is common and acceptable? Your remark strikes me as rhetorical in support of his actions but I’m not sure if I’m reading it right.
- aycaramba 3y agoAs Paul Graham says, Sam is a Pied Piper who plays his flute and will take the Geeks to the town lake and dump them when he is done
- maxlamb 3y agoSource?
- codingcroc20 3y agoIt’s revealing that Chesky just needed to know Altman hadn’t done anything illegal, and that was enough to start his campaign to defend him. “Not illegal” is a low bar. Those 20 instances of lying/being deceitful could have been consequential. It’s also amazing how much much support from investors can insulate an unscrupulous CEO.