8 ms·
I'm betting against OpenAI. Sam Altman has proven himself and his company untrustworthy. In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out. If you disagree
by cynicalpeace 2y ago
I'm betting against OpenAI. Sam Altman has proven himself and his company untrustworthy. In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out.
If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation.
- caeril 2y ago> Sam Altman has proven himself and his company untrustworthy Did I miss a memo? This is one of the largest [citation needed] I've seen on this site in some time. Did he kick a puppy?
- latexr 2y agoHeard of Worldcoin, for starters? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-... https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
- cynicalpeace 2y agoA telling quote about Sam, besides the "island of cannibals" one. Is actually one Sam published himself: "Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions" This definition of success is founded on power and control. It's one of the worst definitions you could choose. There are nobler definitions, like "Successful people have many friends and family" or "Successful people are useful to their compatriots" Sam's published definition (to be clear, he was quoting someone else and then published it) tells you everything you need to know about his priorities.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThose are boring definitions of success. If you can’t create a stable family, your not successful at one facet, but you could be at another (eg musk.).
- cynicalpeace 2y agoBoring is not correlated with how good something is. Most of the bad people in history were not boring. Most of the best people in history were not boring. Correlation with evilness = 0. You could have many other definitions that are not boring but also not bad. The definition published by Sam is bad
- Grimblewald 2y agoSomeone born to enormous wealth is a bad example of someone being instrumental to their own success in influencing things.
- whamlastxmas 2y agoAs you said, Sam didn’t write that. He was quoting someone else and wasn’t even explicitly endorsing it. He was making a comment about financially successful founders approach making a business as more of a vision and mission that they drive to build buy-in for, which makes sense as a successful tactic in the VC world since you want to impress and convince the very human investors
- cynicalpeace 2y agoThis is the full post: ""Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions." I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is. It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. In general, the big companies don't come from pivots, and I think this is most of the reason why." Sounds like an explicit endorsement lol
- alfonsodev 2y agoWell, it’s an observation, intelectual people like to make connections, to me observing something or sharing a connection you made in your mind it’s not necessarily endorsing the statement about power. He’s dissecting it and connecting with the idea that if you a have a bigger vision and the ability to convince people, making a company is just an “implementation detail” … oh well .. you might be right after all … but I suspect is more nuanced, and is not endorsing religions as a means of obtaining success, I want to believe that he meant the visionary, bigger than yourself well intended view of it.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoI'm sure if we were to confront him on it, he would give a much more nuanced view of it. But unprompted, he assumed it as true and gave further opinions based on that assumption. That tells us, at the very least, this guy is suspicious. Then you mix in all the other lies and it's pretty obvious I wouldn't trust him with my dog.
- Mistletoe 2y ago> The most successful people create religions I don't know if I would consider being crucified achieving success. Long term and for your ideology maybe, but for you yourself you are dead. I defer to Creed Bratton on this one and what Sam might be into. "I've been involved in a number of cults, both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower, but you make more money as a leader."
- pfisherman 2y ago> This definition of success is founded on power and control. I don’t get how this follows from the quote you posted? My interpretation is that successful people create durable, self sustaining institutions that deliver deeply meaningful benefits at scale. I think that this interpretation is aligned with your nobler definitions. But your view of the purpose of government and religion may be more cynical than mine :)
- cynicalpeace 2y agoIf you want to create a company- makes sense. If you want to create a country- better have a good reason, many noble people have done it, many bad people have done it. If you want to create a religion- you're psycho (or you really are the chosen one) Notice how Sam's definition of success increases with the probability of psychopathy.
- ls_stats 2y ago>If you want to create a religion I think he is making an allusion to Apple's culture. There's successful companies because their product is good, there's more successful companies because they started early (and it feels like a monopoly: Google, Microsoft), and there's the most successful company that tells you what you are going to buy (Apple's culture).
- selimthegrim 2y agoThe other telling quote was him saying Admiral Rickover was his mentor.
- greenthrow 2y agoElon Musk alone disproves your theory. I wish I agreed with you, I'm sure I'd be happier. But there's just too many successful sociopaths. Hell there was a popular book about it.
- npinsker 2y agoSociopathy isn’t the same thing as duplicity.
- greenthrow 2y agoOf course. I never said they were. But sociopaths do tend to be very comfortable lying and backstabbing.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoMusk kicks butt and is taking us to space. He proves my theory.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ben_w 2y agoSpace Musk, Tesla Musk, and Everything Else Musk, act as though they're three different people. Space Musk promises a lot, has a grand vision, and gets stuff delivered. The price may be higher than he says and delivered later, but it's orders of magnitude better than the competition. Tesla Musk makes and sells cars. They're ok. Not bad, not amazing, glad they precipitated the EV market, but way too pricey now that it's getting mature. Still, the showmanship is still useful for the brand. Everything Else Musk could genuinely be improved by replacing him with an LLM: it would be just as overconfident and wrong, but cost less to get there.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoI don't think what you're saying is true, but even if it's true, it means Elon is doing a great service solely via Space Musk.
- tbrownaw 2y ago> If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation. Arguing what is based on what should be seems maybe a bit questionable?
- cynicalpeace 2y agoFortunately, I'm arguing they're 1 and the same. "in long running games, untrustworthy players lose out" That is both what is and what should be. We tend to focus on the bad, but fortunately most of the time the world operates as it should.
- fourside 2y agoYou don’t backup why you think this is the case. You only say that to think otherwise makes for a sad view of the world. I’d argue that you can find examples of companies that were untrustworthy and still won. Oracle stands out as one with a pretty poor reputation that nevertheless has sustained success. The problem for OpenAI here is that they need the support of tech giants and they broke the trust of their biggest investor. In that sense, I’d agree that they bit the hand that was feeding them. But it’s not because in general all untrustworthy companies/leaders lose in the end. OpenAI’s dependence on others for success is key.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoThere's mountains of research both theoretical and empirical that support exactly this point. There's also mountains of research both theoretical and empirical that argue against exactly this point. The problem is most papers on many scientific subjects are not replicable nowadays [0], hence my appeal to common sense, character, and wisdom. Highly underrated, especially on platforms like Hacker News where everything you say needs a double blind randomized controlled study. This point^ should actually be a fundamental factor in how we determine truth nowadays. We must reduce our reliance on "the science" and go back to the scientific method of personal experimentation. Try lying to business partner a few times, let's see how that goes. We can look at specific cases where it holds true- like in this case. There may be cases where it doesn't hold true. But your own experimentation will show it holds true more than not, which is why I'd bet against OpenAI [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- m3kw9 2y agoWhat makes you think MS is trustworthy, the focus on OpenAI and the media that spins things drives public opinions
- cynicalpeace 2y agoI said MS is trustworthy?
- m3kw9 2y agoYou should also say for simple games
- thorum 2y agoThere seems to be an ongoing mass exodus of their best talent to Anthropic and other startups. Whatever their moat is, that has to catch up with them at some point.
- alfalfasprout 2y agoThere is no moat. The reality is not only are they bleeding talent but the pace of innovation in the space is not accelerating and quickly running into scaling constraints.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoThe biggest improvements are coming from the diffusion models. Image, video, and voice models.
- epolanski 2y agoPeople are really trying to sell this idea that LLMs are anything but commodities. But they are, I don't care what model my applications use, I care about the results.
- swatcoder 2y ago> If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation. You're holding everyone to a very simple, very binary view with this. It's easy to look around and see many untrustworthy players in very very long running games whose success lasts most of their own lives and often even through their legacy. That doesn't mean that "lies and manipulation" trump "truth and cooperation" in some absolute sense, though. It just means that significant long-running games are almost always very multi-faceted and the roads that run through them involve many many more factors than those. Those of us who feel most natural being "truthful and cooperative" can find great success ourselves while obeying our sense of integrity, but we should be careful about underestimating those who play differently. They're not guaranteed to lose either.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cynicalpeace 2y agoI didn't say they're guaranteed to lose. I said I'd put my money on it. If you put your money otherwise, that's a sad view of the world.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fastball 2y agoThis sounds very Effective Altruism. "If you don't put your money towards the things with the most positive impact you're a bad/sad person".
- cynicalpeace 2y agoI didn't say positive impact. What I'm saying is you either think Sam's conniving will work out for him, or it won't. If you think it will, that's very cynical.
- lend000 2y agoThe problem is that they have no moat, and Sam Altman is no visionary. He's clearly been outed as a ruthless opportunist whose primary skill is seizing opportunities, not building out visionary technical roadmaps. The jury is still out on his ability to execute, but things do seem to be falling apart with the exit of his top engineering talent. Compare this to Elon Musk, who has built multiple companies with sizable moats, and who has clearly contributed to the engineering vision and leadership of his companies. There is no comparison. It's unlikely OpenAI would have had anywhere near its current success if Elon wasn't involved in the early days with funding and organizing the initial roadmap.
- mhuffman 2y ago>The problem is that they have no moat, and Sam Altman is no visionary. In his defense he is trying to fuck us all by feverishly lobbying the US Congress about the fact that "AI is waaay to dangerous" for newbs and possibly terrorists to get their hands on. If that eventually pays off, then there will be 3-4 companies that control all of any LLMs that matter.
- uxcolumbo 2y agoI think Tesla and SpaceX are successful despite his involvement. It seems the competent folks at Tesla / SpaceX know how to manage him. He's a good marketer and created a cult of personality. If he's so great at building businesses then just look at Twitter where there was no one who managed him.
- lend000 2y agoI get that people don't like Elon because he's a bit autistic and espouses political views that are unpopular on this platform, but if you can't acknowledge Elon's business acumen and technical vision, I feel like you aren't a serious person. He co-founded Paypal, SpaceX, and OpenAI (3 of the most influential companies of our time), has been the CEO of Tesla (the world's leading EV company) since before they were shipping product, and has arguably made Twitter exactly what he set out to -- an uncensored social media platform. I haven't had any problems with it, and he's substantially reduced its net operating less at the cost of lower revenue, mostly as a result of politics. 3 of his companies are HARD technology companies and basically the 3 most influential companies in the world today. Founded or co-founded 4 of the most significant organizations in the country. There is no one else in recent history who even comes close to his level of accomplishment. And you're telling me Elon's only notable skill is marketing and getting lucky with his executive hiring. Come on.
- KPGv2 2y ago> In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out. Amazon and Microsoft seem to be doing really well for themselves.
- Barrin92 2y agoBecause they're trustworthy. If you buy a package on Amazon or Craigslist, who do you trust to deliver it to your door tomorrow? People love the trope that their neighbor is trustworthy and the evil big company isn't, but in reality it's exactly the other way around. If you buy your heart medication you buy it from Bayer or an indie startup? Big, long lived companies excel at delivering exactly what they say they are, and people vote with their wallet on this.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoI don't know if Amazon or Microsoft are trustworthy or not. But I agree with your point. And it gets very ugly when these big institutions suddenly lose trust. They almost always deserve it, but it can upend daily life.
- justinclift 2y ago> Because they're trustworthy. Amazon are trustworthy? That's going to be news to the large number of people who've received counterfeit books, dodgy packages, and so on. This is not a new problem: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=amazon+counterfeit https://hn.algolia.com/?q=amazon+counterfeit
- fastball 2y agoAnd that is Amazon deliberately pawning counterfeits? Or is that other bad actors taking advantage of "Fulfilled by Amazon" infrastructure and its weakpoints? There is a difference between the two.
- justinclift 2y ago> There is a difference between the two. Amazon has been ignoring the problem for a long time, and is well aware of it. They're so aware of it that I'd personally (not a lawyer though) consider them culpable due to their inaction in making any substantial actions towards fixing the problems.
- mhuffman 2y ago>In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out. Telco, cable companies, Nestle, and plenty of others laugh while swimming in their sector leading pit of money and influence.
- pfisherman 2y agoWho are you betting on then? Anthropic? Google? Someone else? I mean Microsoft was not the friendliest company. But they were good enough at serving their customers needs to survive and prosper.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoAt one end are the chip designers and manufacturers like Nvidia. At another end are the end user products like Cursor (ChatGPT was actually OpenAI's breakthrough and it was just an end-user product innovation. GPT-3.5 models had actually already been around) I would bet on either side, but not in the middle on the model providers.
- pfisherman 2y agoI can see the big chip makers making out like bandits - a la Cisco and other infra providers with the rise of the internet. They are facing competition from companies making hardware geared toward that inference that I think will push their margins down over time. On the other end of the competitive landscape, what moat do those companies have? What is to stop OpenAI from pulling a Facebook and Sherlocking the most profitable products built on their platform? Something like Apple developing a chip than can do LLM inference on device would completely upend everything.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoIt's a good question. I think the user facing stuff has things like brand recognition, customer support, user trust, inertia and other things on its side. Models don't have this benefit. In Cursor, I can even switch between models. It would take a lot of convincing for me to switch off of Cursor, however.
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- mplewis 2y agoI’m betting on the collapse of “LLM as replacement for human labor” because it fundamentally doesn’t solve that problem.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago> In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out. How long is long?
- derektank 2y agoAs John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run we're all dead"
- auggierose 2y ago> In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out. Is that a wish, or a fact, or just plain wrong? You know that just because you want something to be true, it isn't necessarily, right? I wouldn't trust somebody who cannot distinguish between wishful thinking and reality.
- lucasyvas 2y agoI'm also betting against - Meta alone will pass them within the year.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- asdflkajsdf 2y ago> If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation. I too am happy every day the good guys are winning today and always have won for all of history.