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Sam Altman Is Losing His Grip on Humanity
- cranberryturkey 8mo ago[dead]
- noduerme 8mo agoI'd like to point out that this article seems to focus on minutiae like how much energy a human brain takes to solve a problem, when the obvious question is: Which is more worthwhile to us as a species - even assuming the same inputs and energy and planetary damage? Spending that energy on fostering humans who can solve problems? Or on machines which render humans superfluous?
- bilekas 8mo agoIt's calling him out on his BS. That might work for mindless investors who want number go up. But he's actively making the world worse for people. Nevermind hoarding 40% of the worlds silicone 'just because'. It's like Musk's lofty and outright BS claims. "Well I'm rich so I can do and say what I like, give me your money". When did bald face lies become the norm in business ? Edit.. Im keeping silicone in there.
- rkomorn 8mo agoBut... what are they going to do with all that silicone?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- noduerme 8mo ago>> When did bald face lies become the norm in business ? When capital has nowhere to go, and the middle class become gamblers and speculators, and people who work become 'superfluous', lots of bad things start to happen. At least, that was my takeaway from "Origins of Totalitarianism". [edit] To be more specific: Lying (and foreign wars, too) become viable business models when the moneyed class has so much to invest that they no longer know what to do with it, and lack any new markets to pry open, or the education or creativity to produce anything new of value that isn't extractive, and even the extractive methods of generating wealth have begun to dry up locally. Call it a bubble, call it fascism; fascism is basically just a way of keeping a bubble from collapsing indefinitely by pirating neighboring peoples' wealth and cannibalizing one's own society. So there's not a great difference between that and the stated vision of the major AI companies ATM.
- bubblewand 8mo agoYeah, my semi-informed WAG for the core cause of many of the ills of our current situation is that we're wildly over-capitalized. The "trickle down" focus to put more of the "pie" on the investment side (setting aside whether the "trickle down" effect itself was meaningfully real, not relevant to this "take") was probably barely justified at the time, if at all, and we've just kept shoveling more fuel into that fire in the decades since. You can't have demand without spreading buying power around. If you just keep shifting toward investment, that capital gets up to some really stupid shit because there's not enough demand to provide anything useful for it to do. Build a factory? Why would I do that, the returns are terrible. No, I'll "invest" in bitcoin... or do an NFT startup... or reserve way more memory capacity than I'll plausibly need just to fuck with my competition, in ways and in an environment that's so bubbly that this activity likely won't provoke capacity build-out to compensate... We really, really needed some capital (by which I just mean investor-money, not real productive assets) destruction in the '08 crisis, and we didn't get it.
- bilekas 8mo agoEhhhh, you have some elementary points, but the market, is in theory, self adjusting right? So the 'idea' of trickle down is a real thing. It's not as dramatic or loud as something like OpenAI. But consider it as access to loans to fund a new business, the idea is you'll fund a company and gain some sales and employment, money moves around so happy. Basic stuff. You've shot too far and considered everything black and white. You build a factory if demand is high and it can increase supply while making profit.. > We really, really needed some capital (by which I just mean investor-money, not real productive assets) destruction in the '08 crisis, and we didn't get it. No, but that wasn't where the majority of money was locked up in poop, so maybe you might get at best a 90's dotcom bust. I'm old and I remember it was apocolyptic. But Maybe it's due.
- qmr 8mo agosilicon*
- noduerme 8mo agoIt was 40% more fun the first way you wrote it ;)
- sigwinch 8mo agoMaybe starting with WorldCom? The banking sector committed fraud along the way, and early after Lehman collapsed, observers wondered aloud about the moral hazard of bailing out everyone without making an example of someone. Worldcom had a different ending. Enron had a different ending. But Wells Fargo left 2008 with attitudes that tolerated widespread fraud.
- the_gipsy 8mo agoBecause we can't foster good humans, the latter is inevitable.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo agoThe issue is who is making the decision on where energy resources are spent - on people or machines. And it turns out efficiency or even humanity play a very small role in that decision matrix. Control, on the other hand, is important. Rich and powerful people tend to want to control things, and machines are better at that than people.
- noduerme 8mo agoThis is the conspiratorial mindset. It's not much better than the mindset of people who seek power. It's wrong, because it assumes that everything is about control. For example, if I told you that a certain rich and powerful person was spending resources on sending vaccines to poor countries, you might think that was because they wanted to control things. If I said that someone sent books and teachers to a poor country, you might say they were trying to control people. There's no way to have the conversation, in a conspiratorial mindset, about whether it's better or worse for humans or AI to do this stuff - because no matter what, the conspiratorial mindset will conclude that it's only about power for the humans involved, and always assume the worst. AND YET - there are things people can do which might be for their own self-gratification, but are definitely NOT as bad as some other things they could do. They hold back from doing the worst things. That's why, I know this lens of looking at the world seems like it's the only smart way to understand things, but looking at the whole world through that lens prevents you from making the important distinction between OK, BAD and REALLY FUCKING BAD.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo agoIf you told me an individual powerful person did a good thing, then I could believe it. But I'm speaking about the characteristics of groups of people and a very long history of human civilization teaches us that, as a group (individual exceptions exist both in people and in actions), that the rich and powerful do things primarily for the purpose of increasing their own power, wealth, status, and control. No conspiracy is required. Its just people in a position to gain power use that power to get more power. The people who do that the most and are the best at it are disproportionately the ones with the most power. So, as a group, the rich and powerful are much more likely to do things in self serving interest (even at the cost of wider spread harm and suffering) than a random group a people. The proportion of sociopaths in CEOs is many times that of the regular population.
- tempodox 8mo agoWhen you’re a psychopath, the choice is clear.
- ajross 8mo ago> the obvious question is: Which [of having babies vs. building datacenters] is more worthwhile to us as a species Uh... no, it's not. You're making an argument in the opposite direction as Altman, but recapitulating the same moral flaw. The point is that viewing human procreation as "worthwhile" or having "value" or being "expensive" is the logic of slavery. People are people, not assets. We don't have babies to make our lives better, we have babies to make THEIR lives better.
- satisfice 8mo agoAltman’s moral flaw stems partly from an identity failure: he does not see himself as human. He sees himself as The Chosen One. He is transhuman. He can sympathize with humans but never empathize.
- jalapenos 8mo agoAltman strikes me as a dude who came from a special tier of toxic upbringing.
- noduerme 8mo agoI wouldn't say he's much different or worse than certain BBS sysadmins I knew in the early 90s... just that I'd never want those guys to be endowed with enough money and hardware to wreak their vision on the world
- PacificSpecific 8mo agoThat's the problem though. One of those types did get that type of power.
- rob74 8mo agoNot only one of those types, I can think of at least another one that's (IMHO) far worse than Altman. You know, the one with the social network everyone used to use before he turned it into a cesspool of disinformation, the one with the alternate Wikipedia, the obsession with the letter X?
- PacificSpecific 8mo agoThat's my bad. I shouldn't have spoken in the singular tense. It's a rich tapestry of losers.
- noduerme 8mo agoYou're not wrong. But it's case, not tense. <3 Sorry, I'm not trying to be an asshole. I mean, I am one. But I'm not trying to be. Yes, those people did get some control. Yes - they are like the bad versions of us. We can be smarter. We'll win. Their dumb little utopias will collapse. Watch. Tense means past/present/future. Case is for single/multiple pronouns. I dropped out of school but I had a very mean grammar teacher ;)
- petesergeant 8mo agoStruggling to understand what this article is adding to the discourse other than a reflexive “Sam Altman bad” title.
- noduerme 8mo agoIt's not adding anything significant to the discourse if you read what we read all day, but it's of a piece with https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/ https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai... and other things that are filtering to the mainstream non-technical intellectual readership that are flashing red lights about the personal nature of the people blowing air into this bubble, and that itself is significant.
- BoredPositron 8mo agoIf he keeps digging there will be evermore articles about the last shovel of shit he digs up.
- mrweasel 8mo agoTo some extend I think people are putting way to much weight on his exact words, and not why he says them. Altman is a man who is quickly running out of lies, so now he starts slinging random arguments that can't stand up to even the briefest of scrutiny. OpenAI is burning cash and fuel. There are results, and they are, to some extend, impressive, but not impressive enough to justify the cost and Altman are no longer able to cover that up.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- LatencyKills 8mo agoI knew OpenAI was in trouble the instant they chose Altman over Ilya Sutskever.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago> I knew OpenAI was in trouble the instant they chose Altman over Ilya Sutskever. I am not so sure: This decision rather tells something important about the priorities of the string-pullers behind the curtain: They clearly want(ed) to monetize what is there, with the risk that only smaller improvements for the AI models will happen from OpenAI, and thus OpenAI might get outcompeted by competitors who are capable of building and running a much better model. If this is the priority (no matter whether you like or despise Sam Altman), you will likely prefer Sam Altman over Ilya Sutskever. If, on the other hand, a fast monetization is less important than making further huge leaps towards much better AI models, you will, of course, strongly prefer Ilya Sutskever over Sam Altman. Thus, I wouldn't say that choosing Sam Altman over Ilya Sutskever is a sign that OpenAI is in trouble, but a very strong sign where the string-pullers behind the curtain want OpenAI to be. Both Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever are just marionettes for these string pullers. When they have served their role, they get put back into the box.
- rustyhancock 8mo agoYes I agree. Altman was the rational choice if you realise that eventually the huge R&D bill will need to stop for atleast a moderate period (<5 years). You want to ride that out before capitalising on the eventual cheaper training costs once the rug has been pulled. Altman has already succeeded here as it seems inference for API and chat is profitable but offset with massive R&D costs.
- delaminator 8mo ago[flagged]
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- noduerme 8mo agoI mean, I disagree with the Atlantic's slant on politics, but FFS I can't even read or understand anything in that mashed up screenshot. Posting nonsense X-screenshots doesn't make a good case, it just looks like something my 86 year old father would send me.
- delaminator 8mo ago[flagged]
- cholantesh 8mo agoYes, and that Elon Musk: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk-epstein-files-island-visits https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk...
- delaminator 8mo agois the Elon in the room with you now?
- cholantesh 8mo agoNah, just in the Epstein email drop begging to be included in a child trafficking ring.
- delaminator 8mo agook, what does that have to do with Altman / The Atlantic ?
- bondarchuk 8mo ago[flagged]
- edgyquant 8mo agoAnthropic treating models like people is cringe and frankly just a PR stunt
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- bondarchuk 8mo agoI never denied that. I only said "It's really idiotic to posit that only things that eat and drink can suffer.". Don't just pattern-match everything to some vaguely related black/white issues.
- rockostrich 8mo agoIn the entire span of human history, the concept of suffering required sentience and the only things with sentience eat and drink.
- bondarchuk 8mo agoDo you really think that proves anything? It strikes me as a disingenuous argument.
- rockostrich 8mo agoIt doesn't prove anything. It provides context for why someone would make that statement. Can you prove that things that do not need to eat and drink to survive can suffer?
- zozbot234 8mo agoWhy? AI models were trained on the complete combined outputs and collective echos of billions of real human souls. They have a whole lot of humanity in them. If we can see the hidden humanity in a statue or a painting, why not an AI model that actually talks to us in humanly understandable terms?
- absynth 8mo agoI have a different perspective. You'll probably hate it. AI data centers should be operated according to two limiting factors. 1) No energy from grid. Can't use coal or fossil fuel energy sources. Must have plan to provide excess TO grid. 2) No use of fresh water from municipal or fresh groundwater for cooling. Can use waste water. Must transition to providing excess fresh water to common supply. No loopholes. Massive penalties for use of loopholes or breaking rules, not limited to but including complete shutdown of data center. Those two limits will spur innovation AND prevent AI being criticized for energy use. These rules would hard burn improvements in energy storage and renewables as well as other methods of energy production. Give them five years to comply to some useful progress percentage. Plenty of time to come up with a transition plan and show sufficient progress to justify further extensions. Realistically it will take 20 years at least to fully realize this plan. Don't bring up cost. If you do, let me remind everyone that the climate change issue is real enough to hurt now. There's the very real cost of not pursuing these rules. AI has had plenty of time to bootstrap off grid. Now it can begin to migrate to something else instead. Those with experience with energy generation will realize this plan has ridiculously high reward for those who follow it. Have your cake and eat it too definitely applies.
- rockostrich 8mo agoThe intent is good, but it will end up just pricing out everyone but Google, Amazon, and Microsoft (and the start-ups those companies bankroll).
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago> 1) No energy from grid. Can't use coal or fossil fuel energy sources. Must have plan to provide excess TO grid. This is easy: the companies will simply build some nuclear power plants near to their data centers. Perhaps even nuclear power plants that are vibe-designed by their AIs. :-)
- rickydroll 8mo agoFaster and cheaper than nuclear power would be building a virtual power plant, adding big-ass banks of batteries charged during times of low demand or excess power capacity, and peak-shaving consumption when the rest of us need power.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- randyrand 8mo ago> You don’t “train a human.” In this context, "train" a human makes perfect sense.
- zozbot234 8mo agoYes but this is the recurring "Two Minutes Hate, the Sam Altman Edition" HN thread. We all know it's a dumb criticism, we're just going along with it.
- noduerme 8mo agoYeah, it makes sense, and the Atlantic is typically adverse to confronting reality. I don't think they took this from exactly the right perspective. You DO train a human. But Altman says: >>It also takes a lot of energy to train a human as a caveat to the energy it takes to train GPTs. The question I believe the writer is trying to ask is: Why is it better to train a GPT than a human?
- swingboy 8mo agoI’m not a fan of Altman, but writing an entire article on the basis of what was clearly a joke is…reaching.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo agoYeah, but its the kind of joke that reveals a truth about the way Altman views the world and his place in it. Taken completely alone, sure its just a flippant statement. But taken with everything else about Altman and it reads different. Its joking-not-joking.
- bananaflag 8mo agoWell, this is the proposition the field of AI was founded on, that intelligence can be replicated by machines, it's not Sam Altman who "lost his grip". I know there are people in this world who believe humans are somehow special and non-materialist and non-replicable (it's a basic tenet of most religions), but this person doesn't advance or reference a single argument. The article is not very intellectually honest.
- JohnFen 8mo agoYou can't lose something you don't have.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108221
- Ms-J 8mo agoDid anyone expect different from an AI fraud? I took one look at this grifter's speech when I first heard his name and knew he was trash before he could finish his thought.
- josefritzishere 8mo agoWhy is this flagged?