7 ms·

Phase 2, of Sam playbook to a take over a company. See what he did at Reddit below. He even admits to it in the thread. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co

Phase 2, of Sam playbook to a take over a company. See what he did at Reddit below. He even admits to it in the thread. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_best_long_con_you_ever_pulled/cszwpgq/?context=99 https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Wow. This is something else. No wonder I couldn't make it in the VC funded world.
SeanAnderson 3y ago
Do you feel this is a bad strategy? Or what? Liquidity for employees is great. Nobody is forcing them to sell.
- iAMkenough 3y ago
  I think it makes sense. As long as Microsoft is cool with it, they'll keep providing the compute power necessary to keep OpenAI alive.
  - barkingcat 3y ago
    Of course microsoft is cool with it. They reinstalled sam as ceo specifically so he could do this.
- random99292 3y ago
  It's not a bad strategy. It's keeping an eye on Sam Altman's agenda. He is a political animal that few people on HN seem to realize. What makes him great at his job isn't the typical techie path of becoming great at technical and building a great product. His ability is the ability to influence and gain power through good and bad means. Today's strategy may be good for employees; tomorrow maybe not. And no, he isn't thinking of what's best for employees. They just happen to be aligned at the moment. He is goal oriented regardless of the means. That's just my ill-informed opinion though.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    If you had to speculate, what is the end goal? Power for power’s sake?
    - baq 3y ago
      Cyberpunk utopia, by his words. Cyberpunk dystopia, by those who understand what he’s saying.
    - bottlepalm 3y ago
      He wants to be in the tech billionaire club, that's validation that he didn't fall ass backwards into success.
    - bamboozled 3y ago
      Money, power just helps him get more.
      - Yiin 3y ago
        I always thought it's the other way around.
        bamboozled 3y ago
        I think people like power because it helps them get more money. You can easily get more power with money because you just buy people.
        hiddencost 3y ago
        There is a point at which marginal money is worthless. Usually it's nation states that reach that point...
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Purpose in life. Give yourself hundreds of millions of dollars. What now? Many people might say they'd go retire on a beach, and that's really fun for like a year or two. But even endless self indulgence of that sort becomes quickly pointless. For all of us stuck in the hamster wheel, purpose is easy - because it's forced upon us. But for those who manage to step outside of the wheel, what now? Taken to extremes you even see things like 90+ year old Warren Buffet deciding to step back in the wheel, continuing to show up to grind his days away at the office. If you appreciate that lots of behaviors of people are them simply looking for a purpose in life - a lot of things start to make much more sense, running the gamut from political extremism, activism extremism, or people who already have practically infinite wealth just turning life into a game of 'make number go up.'
golergka 3y ago
“Take”? More like “buy for a very good price”, nothing wrong with that.
joseph_grobbles 3y ago
[dead]
Aurornis 3y ago
I don’t see the parallels at all. Reddit was floundering and struggling to find revenue and funding. OpenAI is thriving and people are desperate to invest in it (hence this offering at an incredible valuation). Liquidity for startup employees is a good thing, not a conspiracy maneuver.
- larodi 3y ago
  well, in light of this groq.com, more to come Im sure, and the fact that people absolutely take it for the same thing that chatgpt is... well - they are indeed in for some downfall, and your comment may be very on spot.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  It will be interesting to see if this ends up reading as a preemptive play. If OpenAI hits a wall and the LLM/GPT trail runs dry, or if regulation somehow stifles the industry, it would be a very smart move to offer liquidity now while the fortunes are there for the taking.
  - sigmoid10 3y ago
    I think it's less about LLMs suddenly hitting a theoretical ceiling or politics getting a grip on the industry. But there is a very real threat from actual open AI research. Free models have advanced remarkably and if you choose to, you can run something between GPT3.5 and GPT4 all by yourself right now. With the spread of cloud GPU providers, this could become cheaper than anything OpenAI offers very soon. I fully expect a GPT-4 (or better) level open weights model before this year is over. Right now OpenAI is desperately trying to differentiate itself from other chat model providers by offering tons of side features on the backend that have little to do with the LLM itself. That might lock in some of the bigger customers for a while, but this strategy isn't sustainable for long in the current climate.
    - rvnx 3y ago
      Also open weights models, even if not open-source, allow to get rid of censorship and alignment. Most US models are so heavily censored, that even Chinese (and supposedly censored) models like Qwen-VL feel like open-minded.
bluefinity 3y ago
[flagged]
- empathy_m 3y ago
  I think there are 2-3 different things going on here: (1) Yishan is a master troll in the style of some of the very best from Usenet and old Slashdot. Every few months you'll see him pop out a other banger tweet with 2M+ views just for the glee of the engagement. (He wrote the 'best Paris baguette' counterfactual tweet for example.) (2) Yishan is also very good at using those troll style skills to shift the Internet user media zeitgeist. Think like Paul G's "submarine PR" but for the median reddittor opinion instead of the press. He famously shifted the opinion on /u/ekjp with just 2 or 3 well crafted posts. Hard to remember how much that crowd hates her and how they've mellowed now. (3) Yishan has also said, I think with total sincerity and outside any kayfabe, that his wife has long covid and that he's very sensitive to the serious long term health issues she developed. See e.g. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1571393616928714752 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1571393616928714752 I don't doubt the sincerity of his beliefs here.
  - bluefinity 3y ago
    (1) You can't really go based off "views" on Twitter. They don't really mean anything, just that someone scrolled past the tweet. I found that baguette tweet you were talking about, and it only had a couple thousand likes. Nothing about him seems like a master troll, that's a cop out in the style of "joke's on them I was only pretending". (2) I think that was more down to him being the former CEO with access to inside information rather than a master manipulator... (3) His wife having long COVID doesn't give him a free pass to promote literal conspiracy theories, where all the world's governments and press are working together to hide the truth from everyone.
neilv 3y ago
Was this conspiracy theory ever tested in court? Or by an investigative journalist?

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Wow. This is something else. No wonder I couldn't make it in the VC funded world.

SeanAnderson 3y ago

Do you feel this is a bad strategy? Or what? Liquidity for employees is great. Nobody is forcing them to sell.

iAMkenough 3y ago
I think it makes sense. As long as Microsoft is cool with it, they'll keep providing the compute power necessary to keep OpenAI alive.
- barkingcat 3y ago
  Of course microsoft is cool with it. They reinstalled sam as ceo specifically so he could do this.
random99292 3y ago
It's not a bad strategy. It's keeping an eye on Sam Altman's agenda. He is a political animal that few people on HN seem to realize. What makes him great at his job isn't the typical techie path of becoming great at technical and building a great product. His ability is the ability to influence and gain power through good and bad means. Today's strategy may be good for employees; tomorrow maybe not. And no, he isn't thinking of what's best for employees. They just happen to be aligned at the moment. He is goal oriented regardless of the means. That's just my ill-informed opinion though.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  If you had to speculate, what is the end goal? Power for power’s sake?
  - baq 3y ago
    Cyberpunk utopia, by his words. Cyberpunk dystopia, by those who understand what he’s saying.
  - bottlepalm 3y ago
    He wants to be in the tech billionaire club, that's validation that he didn't fall ass backwards into success.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    Money, power just helps him get more.
    - Yiin 3y ago
      I always thought it's the other way around.
      - bamboozled 3y ago
        I think people like power because it helps them get more money. You can easily get more power with money because you just buy people.
      - hiddencost 3y ago
        There is a point at which marginal money is worthless. Usually it's nation states that reach that point...
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Purpose in life. Give yourself hundreds of millions of dollars. What now? Many people might say they'd go retire on a beach, and that's really fun for like a year or two. But even endless self indulgence of that sort becomes quickly pointless. For all of us stuck in the hamster wheel, purpose is easy - because it's forced upon us. But for those who manage to step outside of the wheel, what now? Taken to extremes you even see things like 90+ year old Warren Buffet deciding to step back in the wheel, continuing to show up to grind his days away at the office. If you appreciate that lots of behaviors of people are them simply looking for a purpose in life - a lot of things start to make much more sense, running the gamut from political extremism, activism extremism, or people who already have practically infinite wealth just turning life into a game of 'make number go up.'

golergka 3y ago

“Take”? More like “buy for a very good price”, nothing wrong with that.

joseph_grobbles 3y ago

[dead]

Aurornis 3y ago

I don’t see the parallels at all. Reddit was floundering and struggling to find revenue and funding. OpenAI is thriving and people are desperate to invest in it (hence this offering at an incredible valuation). Liquidity for startup employees is a good thing, not a conspiracy maneuver.

larodi 3y ago
well, in light of this groq.com, more to come Im sure, and the fact that people absolutely take it for the same thing that chatgpt is... well - they are indeed in for some downfall, and your comment may be very on spot.
_heimdall 3y ago
It will be interesting to see if this ends up reading as a preemptive play. If OpenAI hits a wall and the LLM/GPT trail runs dry, or if regulation somehow stifles the industry, it would be a very smart move to offer liquidity now while the fortunes are there for the taking.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  I think it's less about LLMs suddenly hitting a theoretical ceiling or politics getting a grip on the industry. But there is a very real threat from actual open AI research. Free models have advanced remarkably and if you choose to, you can run something between GPT3.5 and GPT4 all by yourself right now. With the spread of cloud GPU providers, this could become cheaper than anything OpenAI offers very soon. I fully expect a GPT-4 (or better) level open weights model before this year is over. Right now OpenAI is desperately trying to differentiate itself from other chat model providers by offering tons of side features on the backend that have little to do with the LLM itself. That might lock in some of the bigger customers for a while, but this strategy isn't sustainable for long in the current climate.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    Also open weights models, even if not open-source, allow to get rid of censorship and alignment. Most US models are so heavily censored, that even Chinese (and supposedly censored) models like Qwen-VL feel like open-minded.

bluefinity 3y ago

[flagged]

empathy_m 3y ago
I think there are 2-3 different things going on here: (1) Yishan is a master troll in the style of some of the very best from Usenet and old Slashdot. Every few months you'll see him pop out a other banger tweet with 2M+ views just for the glee of the engagement. (He wrote the 'best Paris baguette' counterfactual tweet for example.) (2) Yishan is also very good at using those troll style skills to shift the Internet user media zeitgeist. Think like Paul G's "submarine PR" but for the median reddittor opinion instead of the press. He famously shifted the opinion on /u/ekjp with just 2 or 3 well crafted posts. Hard to remember how much that crowd hates her and how they've mellowed now. (3) Yishan has also said, I think with total sincerity and outside any kayfabe, that his wife has long covid and that he's very sensitive to the serious long term health issues she developed. See e.g. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1571393616928714752 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1571393616928714752 I don't doubt the sincerity of his beliefs here.
- bluefinity 3y ago
  (1) You can't really go based off "views" on Twitter. They don't really mean anything, just that someone scrolled past the tweet. I found that baguette tweet you were talking about, and it only had a couple thousand likes. Nothing about him seems like a master troll, that's a cop out in the style of "joke's on them I was only pretending". (2) I think that was more down to him being the former CEO with access to inside information rather than a master manipulator... (3) His wife having long COVID doesn't give him a free pass to promote literal conspiracy theories, where all the world's governments and press are working together to hide the truth from everyone.

neilv 3y ago

Was this conspiracy theory ever tested in court? Or by an investigative journalist?