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- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bloomingkales 2y agoI personally love this chef's kiss of a flip flop sam did here: https://blog.samaltman.com/trump https://blog.samaltman.com/trump https://www.reddit.com/r/YAPms/comments/1i7ry5m/sam_altman_glazes_trump/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/YAPms/comments/1i7ry5m/sam_altman_g... Only a truly talented piece of shit can be as prolific as this. "He is irresponsible in the way dictators are." Chef's kiss. Edit: Kids, don't aspire to be like Altman. We as a community need to espouse more values than tech is gonna tech.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> don't aspire to be like Altman And don’t aspire to be like those who saw what he is but made peace with it in exchange for silver.
- gadders 2y agoYou mean all of the YC management, including PG?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- istjohn 2y agoHey now, that's not very curious of you. /s
- buran77 2y agoWell, anyone who will flex their spine in every (im)possible position as required of them, just to get even more money and power. I could understand that from someone with an empty stomach. But so many people doing it when their pockets are already overflowing is exactly the kind of rot that degrades an entire society. We're all just seeing the results so much better now that they can't even be bothered to pretend they ever more than this. Later edit: The way this submission fell ~400th spots after just two hours despite having 1250 points and 550 comments, had its comments flagged and shuffled around to different submissions as soon as they touched too close to YC&Co is a good mirror of how today's society works.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoIt's an addiction. There's no amount of money that will be enough, there's no amount of power that will be enough. They'll burn the world for another hit, and we know that because we've been watching them do it for 50 years now.
- stackghost 2y agoYes.
- RIMR 2y agoYes. Especially them.
- toxic 2y agoYes.
- marxisttemp 2y agoPaul Graham now reposts right wing grift media on his Twitter profile, he’s cooked
- marxisttemp 2y agoWhy do you rightoid cucks downvote me every time I say facts about your cult leader
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SteveGerencser 2y ago> don't aspire to be like Altman Aspire to be like Aaron Schwartz.
- ponector 2y agoWhy should kids aspire to be like Aaron if it is not rewarded in our society? Comparing with such "kings" as Altman or Musk.
- barnabee 2y agoWhy should anyone aspire to do what is rewarded over what they believe in and what will satisfy them?
- gessha 2y agoNot everything virtuous is rewarded monetarily but we aspire to be virtuous, no?
- coliveira 2y agoModern society has stopped to aspire of being virtuous a long time ago. Unfortunately, that's nowadays a minority view.
- robotresearcher 2y agoAaron was not happy. Neither is Trump, or Musk. I don’t know if Bernie is happy, or AOC. Obama seems happy. Hilary doesn’t. Harris seems happy. Striving for good isn’t gonna be fun all the time, but when choosing role models I like to factor in how happy they seem. I’d like to spend some time happy.
- jncfhnb 2y agoI think it’s fairly crazy that you believe you have an authentic view into the happiness levels of these people.
- scotty79 2y agoI especially like how he quoted Napoleon or something framing himself as the heart of revolution and Deep Seek as a child of the revolution only to get a response from some random guy "It's not that deep bro. Just release a better model." https://x.com/hibakod/status/1883189126553596234 https://x.com/hibakod/status/1883189126553596234
- bloomingkales 2y ago[flagged]
- api 2y agoElon actually did engineering and had some good ideas. I'm talking pre-social-media-brain-rot Elon.
- IntelMiner 2y agoElon was fired from PayPal partially because he wanted to replace "old ugly mainframes" (Linux and UNIX machines) with the "cutting edge" Windows NT
- api 2y agoThis only looks stupid in hindsight. I worked on something back then that had to interface with payment networks. All the payment networks had software for Windows to accomplish this that you could run under NT, while under Linux you had to implement your own connector -- which usually involved interacting with hideous old COBOL systems and/or XML and other abominations. In many cases you had to use dialup lines to talk to the banks. Again, software was available for Windows NT but not Linux. Our solution was to run stuff to talk to banks on NT systems and everything else on Linux. Yes, those NT machines had banks of modems. In the late 90s using NT for something to talk to banks is not necessarily a terrible idea seen through the lens of the time. Linux was also far less mature back then, and we did not have today's embarrassment of riches when it comes to Linux management and clustering and orchestration software.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThat is particularly gross, but that really feels like the norm among all the tech elite these days - Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. all doing the most laughable flip flops. The reason the flip flops are so laughable to me is because they attempt to couch them in some noble, moralistic viewpoint, instead of the obvious reason "We own big companies, the government has extreme power to make or break these companies, and everyone knows kissing up to Trump is what is required to be on his good side." Profiles in Cowardice, every last one of them.
- jcgrillo 2y agoAnother point of view is that they never flopped or flipped. They were fascists the whole time and were just lying about it before.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoI think Tim Sweeney's (CEO of Epic Games) comment was spot on: > After years of pretending to be Democrats, Big Tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration. Beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors. This is exactly what OpenAI is trying to do with these allegations.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stevenAthompson 2y agoThose men and their companies are responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and a significant portion of the global economy. I'm actually thankful that they aren't shooting their mouths off to the new boss like spoiled children at their first job. It wouldn't make the world better, it would make their companies and the lives of those who depend on them, worse. There is a fine line between cowardice and common sense.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
- the_optimist 2y ago[flagged]
- hibikir 2y agoAs a society we might talk about virtue, but the reason we put it as a goal in stories is that in the real world, we don't reward it. It's not just that corruption wins sometimes, but we directly punish those that fight it. The mood of the times, if anything, comes from people realizing that what we called moral behavior leads to worse outcomes for the virtuous. A community only espouses good values when it punishes bad behavior. How do we do this when those misbehaving are very rich, and attempting to punish the misbehavior has negative consequences on you? There just aren't many available tools that don't require significant sacrifices.
- js8 2y ago> A community only espouses good values when it punishes bad behavior. This is the "beauty" of the free market ideology (see e.g. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ ). If all the transactions are voluntary, there is no way to punish anyone.
- stevenAthompson 2y ago> If all the transactions are voluntary, there is no way to punish anyone. This is obviously untrue at face value. See: Cancel Culture, Bud Light, and Freedom Fries for examples. Did you mean something more than what you stated here?
- ViktorRay 2y agoI don’t think your links are evidence of a flip flop. The first link is from mid-2016. The second link is from January 2025. It is entirely reasonable for someone to genuinely change his or her views of a person over the course of 8.5 years. That is a substantial length of time in a person’s life. To me a “flip-flop” is when one changes views on something in a very short amount of time.
- meowface 2y agoIMO it probably is and Altman probably still (rightly) hates Trump. He's playing politics because he needs to. I don't really blame him for it, though his tweet certainly did make me wince.
- bloomingkales 2y ago"I don't really blame him for it" That's the thing though right, that we all created this mess together. Like yeah, why don't you (and the rest of us) blame him?. We're all pretty warped and it's going to take collective rehab. Super pretentious to quote MLK, but the man had stuff to say so here it is (on Inaction): "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it" "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people"
- whatshisface 2y agoIt's not pretentious to quote Martin Luther King.
- benatkin 2y agoIt seems he was virtue signaling before. So it would be more accurate to blame him for having let himself become an ego driven person in the past. Or to put it nicely and to add the context of Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, who has also been showing public support for Trump, a mission-driven person.
- 2y ago
- belter 2y ago"Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to America, and voting for Hillary is the best way to defend our country against it" - Sam Altman - 2016 "If you elect a reality TV star as President, you can't be surprised when you get a reality TV show" - Sam Altman - 2017 "When the future of the republic is at risk, the duty to the country and our values transcends the duty to your particular company and your stock price." - Sam Altman - 2017 "I think I started that a little bit earlier than other people, but at this point I am in really good company" - Sam Altman - 2017 ( On his criticism of Trump ) "Very few people realize just how much @reidhoffman did and spent to stop Trump from getting re-elected -- it seems reasonably likely to me that Trump would still be in office without his efforts. Thank you, Reid!" - Sam Altman - 2020
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- meowface 2y agoAlthough I dislike him now glazing Trump, I understand why he's doing it. Trump runs a racket and this is part of the game. One of my most contrarian positions is I still like and support Altman, despite most of the internet now hating him almost as much as they (justifiably) hate Elon. Was a fan of Sam pre-YC presidency and still am now. (I also am a big fan of DeepSeek and its CEO.)
- CoastalCoder 2y agoIn the interest of helping avoid an echo chamber, would you mind giving some of the things you like about current Altman?
- benterix 2y agoI'd love to hear something positive about the current Altman, too. Anything would be good.
- robotresearcher 2y agoFor me, it’s the technical results. Same as for Musk. Tesla accelerated us forward into the electric car age. SpaceX revolutionized launches. OpenAI added some real startup oomph to the AI arms race which was dominated by megacorps with entrenched products that they would have disrupted only slowly. So these guys are doing useful things, however you feel about their other conduct. Personally I find the gross political flip-flops hard to stomach.
- whatshisface 2y agoWhy would you support someone you said was part of a racket in the sentence before? We're talking about real life, where actions have consequences, not a TV show where we're expected to identifiy with Tony Soprano.
- meowface 2y agoI do not support the runner of the racket (Trump). The victims of the racket who are forced to comply are who I'm sympathizing with. I don't support the mafia, but I sympathize with the local store that pays the mafia its racket dues to avoid being ransacked.
- breakyerself 2y agoIf you didn't sexually assault your sister you're already off to a good start.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 65 2y agoYeah I don't know, Altman is a sociopath who is now trying to get intertwined with local governments (SF) as well as the federal government. He's going to do a lot of weaseling to get what he wants: laws that forcibly make OpenAI a monopoly. Society will always have crazy sociopaths destroying things for their own gain, and now is Altman's turn.
- codr7 2y ago[flagged]
- api 2y agoI'm sure him lining up to kiss Trump's ring for some kind of bailout is not a coincidence.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI don’t care for Sam Altman and his general untrustworthy behavior. But DeepSeek is perhaps more untrustworthy. Models from American companies at least aren’t surprising us with government driven misinformation, and even though safety can also be censorship, the companies that make these models at least openly talk about their safety programs. DeepSeek is implementing a censorship and propaganda program without admitting it at all, and once they become good at doing it in less obvious ways, it can become very damaging and corrupt the political process of other societies, because users will trust the tools they use are neutral. I think DeepSeek’s strategy to announce a misleading low cost (just the final training run that optimizes a base model that in turn is possibly based on OpenAI) is also purposeful. After all, High Flyer, the parent company of DeepSeek, is a hedge fund - and I bet they took out big short positions on Nvidia before their recent announcements. The Chinese government, of course, benefits from a misleading number being announced broadly, causing doubt among investors who would otherwise continue to prop up American technology startups. Not to mention the big fall in American markets as a result. I do think there’s also a big difference between scraping the Internet for training data, which might just be fair use, and training off other LLMs or obtaining their assets in some other way. The latter feels like the kind of copying and industrial espionage that used to get China ridiculed in the 2000s and 2010s. Note that DeepSeek has never detailed their training data, even at a high level. This is true even in their previous papers, where they were very vague about the pre training process, which feels suspicious.
- dheera 2y ago> I bet they took out big short positions on Nvidia before their announcements Good for them! I hope this teaches Wall Street to not freak out about an unverified announcement. Wall Street lost billions, and I hope they learned their lesson and next time will not crash the market when unverified news comes out.
- tempusalaria 2y agoDeepSeek v3 (where the training cost claims come from) was announced a month ago and it had no impact outside of a small circle
- ryanisnan 2y ago
- tootie 2y agoThe coup against him is looking more and more like a huge "I told you so" moment.
- _gnad_ 2y ago[dead]
- Dansvidania 2y agoIndeed. First thing I thought was "call a wahmbulance!".
- benreesman 2y agoThe guy is a total fucking psycho and the rest of the board are no gems either. Their failure is important at a minimum to the future of the United States if not the world.
- dang 2y agoOk, but please don't break HN's rules when commenting here. You may not owe altmen better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stackghost 2y agoOnce again you abuse your moderator powers to enforce your personal vendetta against people who dare to speak ill of tech CEOs. I find your behavior repulsive and fervently wish you would quit.
- dang 2y agoThis is what people say when they don't want the rules to be applied even-handedly. It's not a borderline call—I'd post exactly the same thing regardless of who or what such a comment was about.
- stackghost 2y ago>This is what people say when they don't want the rules to be applied even-handedly. Not even close. This guy is actively ruining society while enriching himself in the process, but we somehow can't call a spade a spade? Pathetic.
- dang 2y agoI suppose my chances of getting a straight answer aren't too good right now but I'd love to hear your thoughts on something. HN's stated mandate is intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Do you feel that your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42866108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42866108 was curious (in that sense)? or was it rather that you feel something else is more important?