23 ms·
Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
- k-almuraee 6mo agoNo
- ihsw 6mo ago[dead]
- danielszlaski 6mo ago[dead]
- pdonis 6mo agoDoes the article ever actually answer the title question?
- mohamedkoubaa 6mo agoThe answer is no, he can't be trusted
- pdonis 6mo agoOh, I agree that's the correct answer. I just don't see the article actually ending up with that answer. I see it waffling. Basically, the article ends up saying that, well, we told you about all this dodgy stuff, but what he's doing is working.
- mohamedkoubaa 6mo agoTrusted to increase shareholder value is also questionable
- Wyverald 6mo agoGod forbid an article presents all the evidence from all parties and asks you to reach a conclusion by yourself... Sorry for the snark. But I genuinely think the way they did this was perfect.
- pdonis 6mo ago> I genuinely think the way they did this was perfect. Evidently we disagree. I responded about that to another commenter downthread.
- kubik369 6mo agoI think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Nevertheless, the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altman recalls the exchange differently/does not remember.
- pdonis 6mo ago> the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem is that it's impossible. There isn't time or space to present all the information; the journalist has to filter. And filtering is never unbiased. Even the attempt to be "balanced" is a bias--see next item. "Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". But what if the two sides really are unbalanced? What if there's a huge pile of information pointing one way, and a few items that might point the other way if you believe them--and then the journalist insists on only showing you a few items from the first pile, so that the presentation is "balanced"? You never actually get a real picture of the facts. There's a story that I first encountered in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books, about two kids fighting over a piece of cake: Kid A wants all of it for himself, Kid B wants to split it equally. An adult comes along and says, "Why don't you compromise? Kid A gets three-quarters and Kid B gets one-quarter." To me, the author of this article comes off like that adult. In any case, all that assumes that this article is supposed to be just straight reporting, no opinion. For which, see the next item. > It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Yes, it certainly can. If this article is just supposed to be straight reporting--no editorializing--then that title is definitely out of place. That title is an editorial--and the article either needs to own that and state the conclusion it's trying to argue for, or it shouldn't have had that title in the first place.
- kubik369 6mo ago> "Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". I agree with you that this seems to be the idea people have when "balanced" is mentioned. I don't think this is correct. You can easily have a balanced article which has lots of evidence pointing one way or the other. I think that this article is like that. Boatload of pointers towards Altman being a sly person with reporters asking him about those exchanges and him basically shrugging each time. The journalists credibility is doing quite a bit of lifting here as we have to trust that they put in the effort. One such example is the molesting accusations which the reporters say they heavily looked into and were not able to find any corroborating evidence. > You never actually get a real picture of the facts. Yes, it is a fundamental impossibility in lots of cases. That's why we trust the reporters that they did as good a job as they could to present all pertinent information. > That title is an editorial ... I do not perceive it to be editorialised. It states an arguably real possibility that Altman may/does have lots of real power. I am guessing that you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an editorialisation that points towards him being untrustworthy. If that is the case, I think those would be your biases knowing that he is probably not trustworthy. I see it just as an objective question. Imagine a different situation: you have local elections into your small town. There is a new mayor candidate and during the next term, there will be some money to be given to residents for renovations and such, but not enough for everyone. You don't know this candidate. A local reporter, whom you trust, writes an article "New mayor candidate favoured in polls - will he be fair with the renovation money?". It is a piece trying to shed light on who this candidate is as a person, what was his life before moving into your village, etc. so that voters like you can decide whether to give him your vote. It is not editorialised, as it does not point either way.
- thm 6mo agoHybris.
- Cheyana 6mo agoHarvey Dent…
- the_doctah 6mo agoThe brighter the picture, the darker the negative
- adrianhon 6mo agoArchive link: https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.c...
- ronanfarrow 6mo agoRonan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
- saberience 6mo agoThe article is paywalled, where can we read it?
- loloquwowndueo 6mo ago[flagged]
- LoganDark 6mo agoMany browsers let you disable autoplay globally.
- loloquwowndueo 6mo agoSure, there are a couple of buttons I can press to stop the video. Why do I have to? Find me one person who likes auto playing videos. The page was created with a deliberate annoying choice that I have to go out of my way to override.
- LoganDark 6mo agoI'm not talking about pausing the video after it starts playing. I'm talking about a global setting to prevent videos from playing before you manually unpause them. Safari has such a setting, for instance.
- loloquwowndueo 6mo agoExactly what “I have to go out of my way to override” covers, from my comment.
- 6mo ago
- ahartmetz 6mo agoWell, no, obviously not. Not one bit.
- huflungdung 6mo ago[dead]
- LetsGetTechnicl 6mo agoNo
- gonzo41 6mo agojust like Zuck.
- neya 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- catigula 6mo ago1. No. 2. You cannot "control" superintelligent AI.
- ekjhgkejhgk 6mo agoNo.
- drivingmenuts 6mo agoShort answer: No. Long answer: Hell, no.
- sumeno 6mo agoBetteridge strikes again
- covercash 6mo ago[flagged]
- _bypa 6mo agoI feel the "always have been" meme might be a suitable insert here.
- seba_dos1 6mo agoI'm not 100% sure if it's strictly necessary to be a villain in order to become and remain a billionaire, but it seems like it could be and even if it's not it surely helps.
- burnt-resistor 6mo agoMoney often changes people's attitude in a fashion similar to chronic substance abuse. Plus, there's a insular and detached bubble effect that grows around them. Also, there's the psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies of greedier people and the false "virtue" "greed is good" that is contrary to the values espoused by Adam Smith. We need standard income tax brackets of 90% after $20M/y and 99% after $100M/y.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago> Why are all billionaires (especially tech) such villains? Not all billionaires are villians. But it is long-known in organizational psychology that dark triad [1] traits are very "helpful" if one wants to climb career ladders fast. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
- runevault 6mo agoIt is, at best, incredibly hard to accumulate that much wealth without doing shady things. Microsoft's monopolistic practices in the 90s for example. The only person I can think of that ever cracked a billion without their money coming through dirty means was, funny enough, JK Rowling who has her own set of issues separate from the value she got out of Harry Potter.
- 6mo ago
- gchokov 6mo agoHe is cooked. Only a matter of time before the whole thing blows up. Once a scammer, always a scammer.
- Aboutplants 6mo agoSeeing Sam Altman slowly degrade into the realization that he is in fact not as smart as others in this space has been fascinating to watch. He used to speak with enthusiasm and confidence and now he’s like a scared little boy who got in way too deep. The last person that this happened to was Sam Bankman Fried as investors and regular folk finally realized he was full of complete shit and could only talk the game for so long until the truth emerged.
- therobots927 6mo ago[flagged]
- throwawayq3423 6mo agoI have a feeling he might be angling for a pardon if he ends up bringing the whole global economy down.
- jjtheblunt 6mo agowhich of the two are you referring to as possibly angling for a pardon?
- Findecanor 6mo agoBankman-Fried has already done it.
- jjtheblunt 6mo agoWow. His parents incredibly are not in jail but were, I read, extraordinarily complicit. What a mess.
- the_doctah 6mo agoAnd they both peddle the same altruism smokescreen. Sociopath leader playbook.
- tim333 6mo ago
- therobots927 6mo agoExcellent work. I’ll have to wait until we get the print version delivered to finish as I’m not signed into the new Yorker on my phone. I’ve always been a huge fan of Ronan Farrow’s journalism and willingness to speak truth to power. I think he’s pulling at exactly the right thread here, and it’s very important to counteract Altman’s reputation laundering given that we run a very real risk of him weaseling his way into the taxpayer’s wallet under the current administration.
- bookofjoe 6mo agoThis is above your comment: https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.c...
- throw4847285 6mo agoI suspect that they are perfectly capable of clicking an archive link or better yet logging in as they are already a subscriber. Maybe, like me, they enjoy reading the physical magazine.
- bookofjoe 6mo agoI LOVED the physical magazine, read every word, from the time I started subscribing as a college freshman in 1966 until they started to pile up unread around 2015. Nearly 50 years seems like a good run.
- lnenad 6mo agoThis whole situation goes to show that yesterday's conspiracy theorists are today's realists. What's happening to USA's leadership and as a country and what's happening with with their top companies is really scary for the rest of us. If this trend continues we're all definitely gonna end up in a kleptocracy.
- isolay 6mo agoEnd up? It already is.
- seba_dos1 6mo agoLooks like Betteridge's law of headlines applies here too.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- josefritzishere 6mo agoBetteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "NO."
- just_once 6mo agoAmazing that this article and an actual comment from Ronan Farrow is this far down the list while...Scientists Figured Out How Eels Reproduce (2022) has 6 times the points.
- dang 6mo agoThis thread set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector.* I turned that off as soon as I saw it. (* This was predictable from the title, because the question in it was inevitably going to trigger an avalanche of crap replies. Normally we'd change the title to something less baity, and indeed the article is so substantive that it deserves a considerably better one. But I'm not going to change it in this case, since the story has connections to YC - about that see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....)
- pupppet 6mo agoAsk Condé Nast if he can be trusted.. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VWJVBNzc2u https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VWJVBNzc2u
- simoncion 6mo agoUncrappified link: <https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_best_long_con_you_ever_pulled/cszjqg2/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...>
- preisschild 6mo agoAltman even replied to that post funnily enough
- HardwareLust 6mo agoOf course he cannot be trusted. Anyone whose motivation is based on greed is by nature untrustworthy.
- throwway120385 6mo agoEven if your motivation is some utopian vision of the future, you should not be trusted. Utopia is a thought experiment in a philosophy of living taken too far, not something to be reached for earnestly.
- dns_snek 6mo agoWhy is it that criticism of people's insatiable greed for wealth and power often gets dismissed with this thought-terminating cliche about utopias? Desire to live in a society that's less greedy, that rewards compassion and punishes sociopathy is completely valid. We should be pursuing that earnestly because survival of our species depends on it. The people in charge are so drunk on wealth and power that they would rather drive our entire species off a cliff than sacrifice even 10% of their effectively bottomless wealth. But instead of criticizing our current philosophy that's actively being taken too far and threatens to destroy us, you criticize people who express their frustration with this state of affairs.
- Arch-TK 6mo agoThe criticism is not of the idea that the world has problems, and that we should look at those problems with the aim of fixing them. The criticism is of the assumption that a world without problems theoretically could exist. You may disagree, but you will not find a definition of such a world that everyone can agree on. Regardless, of whether you agree (that such a definition doesn't exist) or not, if you do plan on bringing about such a utopia, and you begin to meet resistance, the question you will inevitably need to answer is: How do those who resist fit into this utopia? The historical answer for this question, which by all appearances seems like an inevitable answer, is the reason why people criticise utopian thinking.
- jesterson 6mo agoWatch Altman's reaction in Tucker Carlson interview to the question about (alleged) murder of OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji. The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.
- kmfrk 6mo agoGobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone's wondering. Fantastic reporting.
- ronanfarrow 6mo agoAs is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.
- kmfrk 6mo agoOne of the decidedly eerier parts of this story as you keep reading are all the gaps between what people are saying about Altman, and what they clearly want to say about Altman but can't.
- devmor 6mo agoThroughout my life, what colleagues/friends are unwilling to remark plainly on has been the most telling factor of someone’s character to me.
- dugidugout 6mo agoThis can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critical element to their broader character. Perhaps you mean to distinguish social groups without much intimacy? To which I'm sure we could provide some convincing cases, but this seems like a silly heuristic generally.
- 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- GlibMonkeyDeath 6mo agoDisclaimer: I have no association with any AI company and have never met Altman or any of the other top AI scientists. The real question is: can anyone be trusted if the fever dreams of super-intelligence come true? Go ahead and replace Sam Altman with someone else - will it make a difference? Any other CEO is going to be under the same overwhelming pressure to make a profit somehow. I think the OpenAI story is messier because it was founded for supposedly altruistic reasons, and then changed. Methinks many of Altman's detractors protesteth too much. He's doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) Nothing of substance in this article seemed to make him exceptionally "sociopathic" compared to any other tech CEO. It goes with the territory. What depressed me most is that trillions of dollars are being raised for building what will undoubtedly be used as a weapon. My guess is the ROI on that money is going to be extremely bad for the most part (AI will make some people insanely rich, but it is hard to see how the big investors will get a return.) Could you imagine if the world shared the same vision for energy infrastructure (so we could also stop fighting wars over control of fossil fuels and spewing CO2?) A man can dream...
- tim333 6mo agoPeople do vary even if none are perfect. Demis Hassabis has a pretty good reputation amongst the AI leaders. Altman seems unusually shifty.
- laserlight 6mo ago> He's doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) What? OpenAI was a non-profit until Sam made it for-profit.
- almostdeadguy 6mo agoSeems this got buried from the front page very quickly
- ronanfarrow 6mo agoThere is dwindling space for sincere independent accountability reporting on big tech like this to a) be created, since it's incredibly resource-intensive and so many resources flow from Silicon Valley, and b) actually reach people, since more platforms are now owned or otherwise influenced by interested parties. Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting in your communities, and subscribe to investigative outlets when you can.
- big_toast 6mo agoYou can see the vote history here[1]. It's always hard to know exactly why something gets buried. I was a little sad to see the story down-ranked when I saw that you were here in the comments. But the discussion is generally pretty low quality with these sort of posts. People react without having read the story, or with whatever was on their mind already, or are insubstantive, or simply low effort. I don't think you'll lose k-factor not having a bigger post here. Sometimes if you talk to the mods, they'll let you know their perspective. I generally find they're correct that people are much better at contributing/disseminating new knowledge to the world on more technical topics here. [1]: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47659135 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47659135
- throw4847285 6mo agoBut isn't that circular? If the ranking algorithm used by the mods tends to devalue articles like this because they don't trust the user base to comment intelligently, doesn't that alter the culture of this site to make that more true?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- surcap526 6mo ago[dead]
- innocenttop 6mo agoWhy is the story so downranked? Folks at HackerNews have something to do with it ?
- randycupertino 6mo agoHN generally downvotes and/or flags anything that paints ycombinator in a bad light. As Altman was president of yc from 2014 to 2019 that could be why this is getting downvoted. Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.
- dang 6mo agoI'm not sure whether you meant this about moderator interventions or not, but our actual practice is the opposite: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN moderation from the beginning. See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20pg%20chair&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
- lovich 6mo agoI don’t think the poster you responded to was claiming that moderators directly did this. The flagging system is open to bias from the community at large and certain types of articles(ex. Anything critical of the current admin) get a bunch of real users organically flagging them.
- dang 6mo agoYes, it's hard to tell sometimes but I've at least learned not to automatically take these personally. Well, partly learned. I don't think anyone familiar with this community would assume positive bias towards Sam, Airbnb, or even YC anymore - it's quite the contrary, from my perspective, but of course everyone notices different things and has their own view. Ditto for political slants.
- throw4847285 6mo agoA new Ronan Farrow piece is a rare gift (and Marantz is no slouch). Can't wait to read this in the physical magazine when it arrives!
- geokon 6mo agoI hadn't heard of him before. The wiki article is worth a look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Farrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Farrow It's got to be one of the most unusual biographies of a living person that I've ever come across. Nearly every sentence is a head-turner. If you made it up no one would believe you
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- throw4847285 6mo agoTruly a unique individual on every level.
- guzfip 6mo ago> Lehane—whose reported motto, after Mike Tyson, is “Everyone has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth” lol do you think these guys have ever been hit? Let alone in the face. They’d probably be less eager to mouth off as much as they do if so.
- game_the0ry 6mo agoFor those curious about how sama got to where he got and stayed on top for so long, I recommend you read the book: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting. Some concepts from the book: > Core trait: The defining characteristic is the absence of conscience, meaning they feel no guilt, shame, or remorse. > Identification: Sociopaths can be charming and appear normal, but they often lie, cheat, and manipulate to get what they want. > The Rule of Threes: One lie is a mistake, two is a concern, but three lies or broken promises is a pattern of a liar. > Trust your instincts over a person's social role (e.g., doctor, leader, parent) Check and check. OpenAI is too important to trust sama with. He needs to go. In fact, AI should be considered a public good, not a commodity pay-as-you-go intelligence service.
- unsupp0rted 6mo agoI suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have a good definition for. We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they're in that third category we haven't named, where they're very good at manipulating people, but also can feel conscience, guilt, remorse, etc, perhaps just muted or easier to justify against. E.g. if you think you're doing something for the betterment of mankind, it doesn't really matter if you lie to some board members some year during the multi-decade pursuit.
- xg15 6mo agoThat's not a third category, that's just a sociopath as seen by themself.
- unsupp0rted 6mo agoI doubt most sociopaths, when they’re honest, would agree they feel much guilt or remorse at all. Whereas the people in the category I’m describing might feel those things, but prioritize those feelings far below the benefits of achieving what they set out to achieve.
- KellyCriterion 6mo agoNa, it will be Dario instead of Sam, Id say? :-))
- neonate 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/hOYMn https://archive.ph/hOYMn
- nafey 6mo agoI hope ronan farrow doesn't mind his article being shared like this
- stevenwoo 6mo agoIt’s also available via public libraries in USA via Libby if your local library system pays for a subscription, so it’s a way to support the magazine indirectly, since your local taxes pays for your library. The downside for weekly is you have to read it that week, no archive access.
- rhubarbtree 6mo agoWhich edition? I looked at April 6th and can’t see the article.
- throw4847285 6mo agoThe New Yorker posts digital articles in advance of the release of the print edition. At the bottom of this article it says: Published in the print edition of the April 13, 2026, issue, with the headline “Moment of Truth.” As someone who reads the print magazine every week, I always scroll down to check if the article will be published and skip it if so (so I can read it when my magazine arrives).
- rhubarbtree 6mo agoThanks. Can confirm the print edition is assigned a date that is 5 days after it becomes available in the Press Reader app in the UK (not sure why) and the article is in that edition.
- sph 6mo ago
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- aksss 6mo ago"could", "may", "might" - these words do so much heavy lifting in "journalism". Almost always it's an invitation to worry and be miserable.
- lenerdenator 6mo agoIf you are asking if a single human can be trusted with such a responsibility, the answer is, by default, no.
- romeroej 6mo agoCan anybody tho?
- morleytj 6mo agoYeah, some people can more than others.
- jader201 6mo agoAm I the only one that feels like Claude is clearly winning code generation, and Gemini in general LLM? I just don’t feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning any of the AI battles. Therefore, I feel like “Sam Altman may control our future” is a far stretch.
- dominotw 6mo agohow is gemini winning in general llm. what is general llm .
- SwellJoe 6mo agoGeneral LLM is what Apple is paying Google for.
- tartoran 6mo agoI noticed that Apple speech to text has gotten pretty good lately. Is that because they’re paying Google? Not sure I use other AI features from Apple as I have my Siri turned off.
- laserlight 6mo ago> Is that because they’re paying Google? No, the Google deal hasn't shipped yet.
- guelo 6mo agoWell I just canceled my Claude Pro subscription because of the mysterious limits that I don't experience with codex, even after paying for "extra usage". If Anthropic can't figure out their capacity problems they are in trouble.
- chrisjj 6mo agoI doubt Anthropic see this as their capacity problem. They like "extra usage", and users who don't, well its their capacity problem.
- slg 6mo agoOne thing that stands out when reading profiles like this is the number of positive and negative descriptions of the subject that agree. For example, there seems to be little dispute that Altman will happily say something that he knows/believes isn't true, there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any lies if the lies are in service of something they themselves agree with.
- palata 6mo ago> there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any lies if the lies are in service of something they themselves agree with. Or if the person lying is in a position of power?
- ambicapter 6mo ago> The day that Altman was fired, he flew back to his twenty-seven-million-dollar mansion in San Francisco, which has panoramic views of the bay and once featured a cantilevered infinity pool, and set up what he called a “sort of government-in-exile.” Conway, the Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, and the famously aggressive crisis-communications manager Chris Lehane joined, sometimes for hours a day, by video and phone. Some members of Altman’s executive team camped out in the hallways of the house. Lawyers set up in a home office next to his bedroom. During bouts of insomnia, Altman would wander by them in his pajamas. When we spoke with Altman recently, he described the aftermath of his firing as “just this weird fugue.” These sociopaths are so good at giving away nothing. He managed to engender sympathy instead of saying "I'm not gonna talk about anything that happened then". Also very weird how many of these people are so deeply-linked that they'll drop everything they're doing just to get this guy back in power? Terrifying cabal.
- arionhardison 6mo agoHi @ronanfarrow — I have only had one interaction with Sam Altman in person, and I was advised to keep it to myself. I know this crowd may not care, but Altman is absolutely terrified of Black people — not in any contextual sense, but in a visceral, instinctive way. For someone who, as you put it, "controls our future," this should matter. FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts hiring and other decisions at OpenAI.
- edbaskerville 6mo agoCan you give more details? It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.
- arionhardison 6mo agoYes, but first I want to be very clear on some things. 1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim. 2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer. 3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs I was working for a company called NationBuilder and I had the opportunity to go on a work trip. Outside of a talk he had just given I was waiting for my ride and I looked over like...damn thats the speaker. I wanted to say Hi; he damn near flagged down the police. I apologized and just decided to move on. Note: It was in Reno, and no I don't want to go into details; the others are not hard to find because I happened upon them via blog posts so i'm sure if someone with the accumen of RF wants to know, he will find. I have heard similar stores from several people in the years since. I AM NOT CALLING THIS PERSON RACIST. I am saying; he is observably scared of black people and that is not someone I want making descions about how the world moves foward.
- arionhardison 6mo agoNote: To all the downvotes; I did this publicly and not anon for a reason, if you will do the same I am more than willing to provide evidence for all of these claims as long as its done publicly and in the open.
- wk_end 6mo agoThis anecdote is so absurd it sounds like satire. This is the guy with the $23M mansion? > Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied.
- simoncion 6mo agoHe's a liar and untrustworthy. Based on their public statements, that's a big part of why the board fired him. Of course, (despite the fact that Altman previously publicly stated that it was very important that the board can fire him) he got himself unfired very quickly.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 6mo ago[flagged]
- FpUser 6mo ago>"Sam Altman may control our future" TLDR but just the heading is already ugly. No single person no matter how nice they're should be able to control our future. Power corrupts, what fucking trust. We are supposed to be democratic society (well looking at what is going on around this is becoming laughable)
- damnesian 6mo agoAny one person can't.
- nielsbot 6mo agoNo one person control our future. Stop there.
- mikkupikku 6mo agoYeah, but one person can fuck a lot of shit up.
- _moof 6mo agoSome people have far, far more power over our lives than others. More than they deserve, frankly.
- nielsbot 6mo agoUgh. It’s a typo. “No one person SHOULD control our future”.
- swingboy 6mo agoIt's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.
- 0x3f 6mo agoIt's because they're really good at the kind of busywork the average white collar job requires. Most people are out there writing documents and making presentations. Only when you use them for actual complexity does the shortfall become clear.
- red369 6mo agoI'm going to write a silly comment here: For a moment I thought you wrote "... LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that they're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon." I liked that mental image a lot! (I try to maintain being uncertain whether Deckard was a replicant)
- m4rtink 6mo agoI find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.
- rwmj 6mo agoHyperion has a pretty well-developed view of AGI.
- Trasmatta 6mo agoDeus Ex is an outlier, AI is a core part of that plot
- staticman2 6mo agoThe first Cyberpunk book, Neuromancer, has a plot which revolves around A.I recruiting human agents to forward its plans...
- ninjahawk1 6mo agoOpenAI is like #3 or #4 of the AI companies right now in terms of power, and last place in the court of public opinion. I’d be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good graces of the public and having access to all of our computers indirectly with Claude Code.
- 0x3f 6mo agoOpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.
- aduffy 6mo agoI'm not sure how much of that converts to revenue. If it's free plan users, that's just cost. You can say what you want about "creating a training data moat" but that doesn't seem like it's prevented the other labs from putting out excellent models.
- 0x3f 6mo agoWell we were talking about power and reputation and being well-known and all that. Being more ubiquitous is surely a big part of that. GP seems to think Anthropic is doing better because of the DoD thing. In my estimation, 90% of people do not care about that at all.
- hellojimbo 6mo agoAround the same revenue due to Anthropics strong enterprise strategy
- 0x3f 6mo agoPerhaps, but I'd venture the ear of the regime is even more valuable.
- ninjahawk1 6mo agoThey’re all in the negative excluding subsidies, hard core coders are more valuable than high schoolers cheating on homework.
- killbot5000 6mo agoNo. Why is this a question?
- bijowo1676 6mo agoThis article is just another typical New Yorker fluff piece that tries to look deep but misses the actual point. The biggest flaw is that it spends way too much time on high-school level drama and "he-said-she-said" gossip about Sam Altman’s personal life instead of focusing on the actual technical and corporate capture of OpenAI. The author treats the "nonprofit mission" like some holy quest that was "betrayed," when anyone with a brain in tech saw the Microsoft deal as the moment the original vision died. Instead of a hard-hitting look at how compute-monopolies are actually forming (MSFT AMZN NVDA and circular debt dealing inflating the AI bubble that could crash the economy), we get 5,000 words of hand-wringing over whether Sam is a "nice guy" or a "liar." Who cares??????? The board failed because they had no real leverage against billions of dollars, not because they didn't write enough Slack messages. It's a long-winded way of saying "Silicon Valley has internal politics," which isn't news to anyone here.
- simoncion 6mo agoCan Sam "The board can fire me, I think that's important." Altman be trusted? If for no other reason, given what happened when the board fired him... no. I'd say not.
- ergocoder 6mo agoI wonder if Sam might abandon the ship soon. Other co-founders already did. The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't. If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already. This is probably one of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with relatively low reward.
- raincole 6mo agoAnd OpenAI's influence is hugely exaggerated compared to, say, Google.
- ergocoder 6mo agoYes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-founders, for example. All the downsides without much upside...
- georgemcbay 6mo ago> Yes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-founders, for example. Sergey Brin is trying to change that lately, but Altman still has a sizable head start.
- 0x3f 6mo agoBut nobody is going to just gift him the same valuation on the next company. It's not like his execution is OpenAI's moat right now. So where would he be going that's a better deal for him?
- asK1ajsh 6mo agoThe New Yorker is owned by Conde Nast just as Reddit. Conde Nast has a deal with OpenAI: https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-cond-nast-2024-08-20/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co... This is a damage control piece, and you see that the most stinging comments here get downvoted.
- cake_robot 6mo agoWhat might feel like "damage control" is more likely to be the outcome of the even-handedness you get with serious, rigorous reporting. Something the New Yorker is known for.
- primer42 6mo ago"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- B1FF_PSUVM 6mo agoIn this case, "Ick, no!"
- ambicapter 6mo agoI didn't have the mental energy to read the whole thing but man the final paragraph is some really good writing. Way to tie it all in together.
- krackers 6mo agoThe entire thing is a joy to read, you should really set aside some time to cleanse your palette in this age of LLM prose. I mean just look at this juxtaposition >Altman continued touting OpenAI’s commitment to safety, especially when potential recruits were within earshot. In late 2022, four computer scientists published a paper motivated in part by concerns about “deceptive alignment,” in which sufficiently advanced models might pretend to behave well during testing and then, once deployed, pursue their own goals. (plus it finally resolves the mystery of "what Ilya saw" that day) Also since it wasn't stated clearly >“the breach” in India. Altman, during many hours of briefing with the board, had neglected to mention that Microsoft had released an early version of ChatGPT in India That was Sydney if I understand correctly.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- tylerchilds 6mo ago[dead]
- pharos92 6mo agoWe focus these critiques far too much on the face rather than the underlying mechanics. Just like in politics, we critique the personality/politician yet the underlying system architecture evades it. Sam Altman clearly has a long history of nefarious activity. But the underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and human freedom persists with or without his presence.
- xgulfie 6mo agoIt's because we only really know one economic system but we've known many people
- j2kun 6mo agoOr perhaps, the underlying threat is personified by Altman, in that our country has repeated and widespread institutional failures to hold the wealthy accountable for wrongdoing. The threat of AI is, after all, driven by the people who use it.
- chii 6mo ago> underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and human freedom persists I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI - unless you're claiming that an AGI would be capable of such independent actions. AI is similar in transformative power to how the internet was a transformative power - might even be greater, if it is more commonly available for use through out the world. Whether that transformative power is doing good or bad really depends on the people doing it, not on the tech. I would bet that the future is going to be better because of AI, than to imagine a worse future and act to stunt the tech.
- wolvesechoes 6mo ago> I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI Of course, it is popular to deny it. People constantly tell themselves "it is people, not tech". They make valid, yet banal and inconsequential statement. This distinction has no bearing on reality.
- giwook 6mo agotl;dr No, he cannot.
- nickphx 6mo agospeak for yourself, he doesnt control my future.
- vntok 6mo agoPlease don't leave us hanging; what makes you immune?
- steve_adams_86 6mo ago> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't imagine having such uninspired thoughts and actually writing them down while in a role of such diverse and worthwhile opportunities. I'd like to ask "how the hell do these people find themselves in these positions", but I think the answer is literally what he wrote in his diary. What a boring answer. We need to filter these people out at every turn, but instead they're elevated to the highest peaks of power.
- dolebirchwood 6mo agoSociopaths don't have much going for them in life other than winning status games.
- lokar 6mo agoOr, some fraction of otherwise good/normal people who “win” are turned into sociopaths by the power and sycophancy.
- buzzerbetrayed 6mo agoSociopath is the next word that people seem to want to entirely destroy the meaning of
- dolebirchwood 6mo ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Struck a nerve? No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in. I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus visible).
- morleytj 6mo agoWow, this is an incredibly detailed piece. Really in depth reporting and the kind of detailed investigation we need more of on important topics like this. > "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence." This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace crosses my face at the thought of these sort of Marvel references and I'm not entirely sure why.
- ytoawwhra92 6mo agoThey're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that people working in such influential positions find them appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that lowest common denominator audience. The people shaping the future have no taste.
- Noumenon72 6mo agoWhen things reach a certain level of popularity they constitute "mental real estate". Your audience has heard of Groundhog Day, so there is an opening for a movie with that title to make money -- your film will start out already having name recognition and some understanding of what the movie is about. Thus it is a writer's job not to make references they find appealing to reveal their good taste, but to know what references their audience will find appealing and use them to help communicate concepts. If this bothers you it's because they're insulting you by saying you might be part of the audience that watches Marvel, and you had hoped reading the New Yorker would signal that you aren't.
- ytoawwhra92 6mo agoThe writers of this piece didn't make the reference.
- halter73 6mo agoNo, but they chose to include it. Presumably there were a lot less apt references they chose not to include.
- cm2012 6mo agoI don't see anything bad about Altman in this article that cant be explained by the chaos of growing a billion dollar company in a few years.
- aduty 6mo agoLOL, no.
- 383toast 6mo agoif you have to ask if someone can be trusted, they usually can't
- hungryhobbit 6mo agoIt's the golden rule of news article headlines: if the headline is a question, the answer to it is always a negative.
- danparsonson 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- stinkbeetle 6mo agoAnd if you think you don't have to ask if someone can be trusted, you're usually wrong.
- quantified 6mo agoA bit of a feeling of "so what" here. Maybe he's less trustworthy than some. We have people of X trustworthiness running the government, crypto exchanges, a certain space exploration and satellite company, social media companies, and so on. We know their trustworthiness. Isn't the real issue how to cope?
- Boxxed 6mo agoYour point is that it's ok he's untrustworthy because lots of people in power are?
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo agoNo, it's that the entire ecosystem is rotten to the core, and it actively selects, rewards, and protects flawed personality types. And when you're dealing with a potential existential threat, this is an existential problem.
- Rury 6mo agoI don't disagree, but at some point, I think people need to understand we're dealing with laws of nature here. I mean just look at human history, this has been a problem since the dawn of civilization... I think if you truly understand social contract theory, how hierarchies are formed, and political theory, you'll realize that oligarchies tend to be nature's equilibrium point for setting social disputes, and all forms of governments regardless of whatever they claim to be, naturally devolve towards them as they tend to represent the highest social entropy (ie equilibrium) state. That's not to say you can't have or move further away from that point and towards another (supposed ideal) form of government, you absolutely can, but it takes work. Perpetual work - of which no set of "rules" can remedy people of having to do in order to sustain it. The problem however, is most people get complacent. They eventually tire of that work, or are ignorant, and by doing so create a power vacuum which allows things slide back towards that state. As so, people must decide for themselves one of several possible avenues to pursue: #1 - Try to convince others (the masses) to join and work together to take power from the few, back to them #2 - Find a way to join the ranks of the elite few (which thanks to the prisoner's dilemma, unscrupulous means tends to perform better in the short term, even if at the cost of the long term. And if the elite is already corrupt, well, cooperating with it works well) #3 - Settle for their lot in life Unfortunately #1 is such a difficult proposition given it requires winning agreement among many whilst many often decide to remain in camp #3 (for complacency/ignorance reasons). And #2 is often easier done without moral integrity, especially at the behest of those in camp #3 whose behavior only helps enable these realities. Thus, is why I think the "ecosystem" as you say, will always tend towards this way - where society tends towards being controlled by an elite few who are rotten. Robert Michel's realized this and dubbed it the Iron Law of Oligarchy and embraced his own version of #2 for himself. Although, he came to this conclusion through his own observations and reasoning, rather than through historical political theory.
- ycui1986 6mo agohe won't. if anything, openai is falling behind recently. the trend won't change easily. it is like the old time Netscape.
- dmitrygr 6mo agoThe number of "Altman doesn’t remember this" or "Altman denies this" is hilarious
- jcgrillo 6mo agoLife would be so much easier if I was that forgetful
- frm88 6mo agoIt really stands out and judging from the overall excellent quality of this article, that was very intentional. Answers the headline, too.
- replwoacause 6mo agoStraight out of the Trump playbook
- ainch 6mo agoGreat piece. And a good excuse to read up on the use of diaeresis in English (eg. coördination, reëlection) to distinguish repeated vowels - I hadn't seen the New Yorker's usage before.
- goodoldneon 6mo agoIt isn’t for all repeated vowels; only for when the 2 vowels don’t make a single sound. So “chicken coop” wouldn’t have a dieresis
- OJFord 6mo agoUnless it was a chicken coöp... One of few cases it actually resolves an ambiguity!
- stavros 6mo agoIt would if the chickens formed a business structure that was owned and democratically controlled by its member-owners.
- o0-0o 6mo agoThat, is likely co-op.
- satvikpendem 6mo agoThat's the joke.
- goodoldneon 6mo agoGreat point :D
- Cthulhu_ 6mo agoIt's also to distinguish metal bands. Motörhead.
- mplanchard 6mo ago
- jojobas 6mo agoThe guy called out for being a sociopath by a multitude of Silicon Valley CEOs of all people, sure we can trust him our future.
- einrealist 6mo agoI don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of power between a few organizations with untrustworthy incentives and leadership.
- stavros 6mo ago> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
- bigyabai 6mo agoThat's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point. You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment.
- Noumenon72 6mo ago"The cure for cancer" as a phrase doesn't include those solutions. If the headline was "Pope discovers the cure for cancer" and those were his solutions you would say "No he didn't." OP was referring to AI discovering the cure for cancer that cancer research is working towards.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment That's not a cure. Like yes, I'd care if the AI says it cures cancer while nuking Chicago. But that isn't what OP said.
- stonyrubbish 6mo ago
- krackers 6mo ago[1] is also good to read as a follow-up, and compare the personalities 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...
- mplanchard 6mo agoThis was a great article, and absolutely savage in some of its characterizations.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoThe fact that this reads as deranged fantasy and yet I can believe is 100% real is insane lol
- rwmj 6mo agoI read this a few days ago, excellent article and an absolutely insane story.
- physicles 6mo agoWell there went a half hour of my day. What a fantastic read.
- ProAm 6mo agoNope, never trust this man. His history proves why you cannot. Pure greed.
- Arubis 6mo agoThis is unfair to the original article, which is well-researched and worth a read. But the answer this question is _always_ no. Nobody should have as much power as the oligarch class currently does, even if of inscrutable power.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- zoklet-enjoyer 6mo agoI believe Annie Altman.
- s5300 6mo ago[dead]
- zoklet-enjoyer 6mo agoAnnie Altman is more credible than a serial scammer
- Der_Einzige 6mo agoNot enough people know about her and her allegations towards him. It’s sad to see so much of the rich and powerful literally just can’t stop raping people. Epstein, Trump, Elon, scam Altman. How many more people have to be implicated?
- stavros 6mo agoI found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need humans any more. Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.
- red369 6mo agoI also find that interesting. And not intending to defend the motives of anyone involved, but I'm hoping we can not worry about literally all jobs being destroyed, and AI companies amassing all the wealth in the world. Don't we need at least some humans working and earning to buy these AI services? Am I not being imaginative enough? Is it possible for the whole economy to consist just of AI selling services to each other? I realise that even if AI destroys most jobs, or even just a lot of jobs, and amasses most wealth, or a lot of wealth, it would still be a terrible thing for humans. The word "all" could have just been hyperbole, and it is still a valid point. I just want to know people's thoughts on whether entire replacement is possible.
- gpt5 6mo agoDo you need ants buying services from humans for the world economy to function? If AI will indeed become superintelligent, we won't matter.
- Cthulhu_ 6mo agoIt's a huge if and honestly I don't believe in it. Actually, if it ends up like described, it really doesn't matter whether I believe in it. Either it happens and we all die, or it doesn't happen. Pascal's Wager I suppose.
- eloisius 6mo agoWhy keep human consumers to buy your services when you could just amass all the wealth you desire, and have autonomous systems that can ensure your unassailable physical security? You would sit atop the most stratified dominance hierarchy ever achieved, and it would reduce other humans to mere pets or breeding stock. I don’t think normal humans would desire that kind of power, and I don’t believe LLMs will take us there, but I wouldn’t put it past the perverted billionaire maniac.
- 6Az4Mj4D 6mo agoI am in 40s and going to be made redundant this June. In future only people who can afford to keep things like Claude, OpenAI and most importantly create value using them more than what others can do be able to survive. Otherwise, game is more or less over, and I question what's next for my own future while I learn to use Claude in FOMO. I cannot trust Sam or others if they will have any interest to keep this tech affordable for common people like me.
- panzi 6mo agoNo. Next question.
- brandonpollack2 6mo agoI haven't read it yet. The answer is no.
- y1n0 6mo agoBetteridge's law of headlines: no
- saeranv 6mo agoGreg Brockman honestly sounds like a psychopath: > In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI’s policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology was deployed safely. As Hedley recalled it, Brockman didn’t understand how this would help the company beat its competitors. “No matter what I said,” Hedley told us, “Greg kept going back to ‘So how do we raise more money? How do we win?’ ” According to several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world powers—including China and Russia—against one another, perhaps by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for A.I.?
- 40aKshl 6mo ago[flagged]
- the_arun 6mo agoThe main animated picture reminded me of evil king Ravan from Ramayan with 10 heads. Not sure it is intentionally done that way.
- sumedh 6mo agoThis is the problem with propaganda, you have been told that he was evil as most Indians are led to believe but for people in Sri Lanka he was a great leader.
- smcg 6mo agoRule of Headlines says "no"
- tw04 6mo agoI don't even need to read the article to know that he unequivocally can't be trusted. Every action he's taken to this point have shown he will say literally anything to get what he wants.
- bootload 6mo ago“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice” This statement rings true. JL, PG has mentioned often, is his weapon to test the “people” integrity aspect of YC / Startups. It’s not lost on me both Altman and Thiel both associated with YC were useful short term only, highlighting how regular “character” evaluations are required at higher levels of responsibility.
- jacquesm 6mo agoI don't think they were useful at all. If anything they pulled down YCs up to that point stellar reputation.
- argee 6mo agoAt least two of YC's early (mid-aughts) "huge" successes come down to PG unilaterally (or with some help from JL) making some kind of "weird" call. AirBnB and Reddit come to mind. Even Stripe can be traced to him since he basically created the Auctomatic team (Patrick Collison's previous YC entry). In other words, PG had the "knack" for sometimes encouraging the right weird thing. I'm not sure it's been the same since he handed off the reins, like any other formerly-founder-led company. Nowadays it really gives off the vibe of bean-counting and hype-chasing. I don't think it's gotten quite as bad as this [0] article suggests, though. [0] https://stanfordreview.org/is-yc-for-cowards/ https://stanfordreview.org/is-yc-for-cowards/
- bootload 6mo ago“Today’s news comes at an interesting time. Last week, Business Insider’s Jonathan Marino reported that YC is close to raising several billion dollars for a new fund, with the goal of possibly expanding its scope to later stage funding. It said it’s still in preliminary discussions for this new strategy, but if true, Thiel could definitely play a big role there.” My recollection was Thiel was injecting cash, a money deal. [0] There was another less advertised play. An established path for the Thiel “Boy Wonder Fellows”. [1] “In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies of the last 15 years, both personally and through Founders Fund, and the founders of those companies will generally tell you he has been their best source of strategic advice. He already works with a number of YC companies, and we’re very happy he’ll be working with more.” Guess who was involved in the Thiel / YC deal? [2] You are not the only one seeing this as a reputation hit for YC. [3] Even I, disconnected across the other side of the world could see this as an issue. [0] https://www.inc.com/business-insider/peter-thiel-is-joining-y-combinator-as-an-advisor.html https://www.inc.com/business-insider/peter-thiel-is-joining-... [1] https://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/peter-thiel-y-combinator-fun.html https://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/peter-thiel-y-combinator-f... [2] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-peter/ https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-peter/ [3] https://qz.com/810778/y-combinator-has-no-problem-with-partner-peter-thiel-funding-donald-trump-sam-altman-says https://qz.com/810778/y-combinator-has-no-problem-with-partn...
- mayhemducks 6mo agoI would really appreciate it if someone in the know could explain to me how a markov chain with some backpropagation can surpass human cognition. Because right now I call BS.
- tines 6mo agoTwo "insure" typos?
- o0-0o 6mo agoDictation likely and not caught by editing.
- Wyverald 6mo agoIn American English, "insure" can also mean "to make sure" as in "ensure", in additional to meaning "to take out insurance for".
- tines 6mo agoTIL!
- mplanchard 6mo agoThe New Yorker prefers insure to ensure. They have a unique house style. I commented on another thread about alternative spellings like vender instead of vendor, too.
- pch00 6mo ago> The New Yorker prefers insure to ensure. They have a unique house style. That's not a stylistic choice, it's just incorrect use of English.
- mplanchard 6mo agoWell that’s just, like, your opinion, man. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insure https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insure
- pch00 6mo agoThat M-W entry literally says they're different words with different meanings: > They are in fact different words, but with sufficient overlap in meaning and form as to create uncertainty as to which should be used when. > We define ensure as “to make sure, certain, or safe” and one sense of insure, “to make certain especially by taking necessary measures and precautions,” is quite similar. But insure has the additional meaning “to provide or obtain insurance on or for,” which is not shared by ensure.
- o0-0o 6mo agoHey, Ronan. Did the IPO come up at all in the research or interviews for this article? A yes or no will suffice, and color it if you want. ~_^
- jrflowers 6mo agoI hope somebody just publishes The Ilya Memos. Sounds like a fun read
- thewileyone 6mo ago[flagged]
- davidmurdoch 6mo ago"Good luck, have fun, don't die."
- wileydragonfly 6mo agoNo
- slibhb 6mo agoIt is disconcerting how Altman has used "AI safety" as a marketing tool. The more people imagine the universe turned into paperclips, the more they invest. Obviously Altman doesn't care about safety (I don't either; I'm not an AI-doomer). But he truly does come across as someone incapable of telling the truth. Are you even a liar if honesty is not in the set of possible outcomes? Still, there's something oddly reassuring here: if you believe "AI safety" is essentially a buzzword (as I do), then this whole affair comes down to people squabbling over money and power. There really is nothing new under the sun.
- sobellian 6mo ago"This thing might destroy humanity - we need to build it ASAP" does not really make sense. But it enthrall[s/ed] many smart researchers who would normally demand specific, testable claims and logical responses to those claims. We have drastically escalated what claims are necessary to motivate startup employees. It used to be that you could merely dangle an interesting problem in front of a researcher. Then you could earn millions, then billions. TAMs in the trillions. AGI will destroy humanity unless you, personally step in. Elon is talking about Kardashev III civilizations. The universe cannot bear the hype being loaded upon it.
- brap 6mo agoI agree with you completely, but the way I see it Anthropic are x100 worse when it comes to amplifying this doomer bs for marketing. It’s their whole shtick.
- drob518 6mo ago[flagged]
- andrewrn 6mo ago“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice” You can subtly see residue of this frustration in Dalton and Michael’s videos when Sam Altman comes up. It’s only thinly veiled that Sam was a snake while at YC.
- mi_lk 6mo agovideo link?
- isolay 6mo agoThat guy is a snake, not just while at YC.
- jjallen 6mo agoI do wonder exactly what he was doing to be considered a snake. I know he was working on other things, but what else was going on?
- ambicapter 6mo agoRead the article?
- 6mo ago
- lizhang 6mo agoi think im shadowbanned :(
- dang 6mo agoFixed now.
- b8 6mo agoSam failed upwards.
- thrwaway55 6mo agoWe need only ask the dead. Aaron Schwartz knew what Altman is. The answer to the topic is no.
- mastazi 6mo agoI'm interested in knowing more about this topic, do you have any resources about the relationship between Swhartz and Altman?
- stingraycharles 6mo agoIt’s not difficult to find these, Aaron always said that Sam was not to be trusted.
- palmotea 6mo agoApparently Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman were classmates at the original 2005 Y Combinator class. This article has a picture of them literally standing next to each other: https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/throwback-photo-of-former-openai-ceo-sam-altman-interim-ceo-emmett-shear-as-classmates-goes-viral-101700563161183.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/throwback-photo-of-f... The OP says this: > The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word “sociopathic.” One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
- OhioMan2943 6mo ago[flagged]
- hnbad 6mo agoThe cited snippet is in TFA. Did you read it? Did you read the Hindustan Times article either? Because that one doesn't actually include any relvant statement, it just contains the picture GP was pointing out - and the entire point of referencing that picture was to emphasize that they had had contact, which is already implied by them being in the same YC batch, which I don't think you are challenging. Please don't post comments like this one. "90% of Indian outlets are basically unfactual" is a hyperbolic claim - regardless of the truth content of "Indian outlets" that claim is bogus unless you have factual evidence to back up the specific number which I doubt because "basically unfactual" is not well-defined). But even worse, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand because the factual accuracy of the Hindustan Times is at best tangential because nothing in GP's comment hinged on its accuracy unless you're saying the description of that photo as being one depicting both of them as members of the same YC cohort is "unfactual" or you're accusing them of having manipulated the image itself. But even then it would be irrelevant because you seem to take issue with the description of Altman as a sociopath (i.e. the quote), not the fact they were batch mates, and this quote is explicitly cited as being from TFA this comment thread is about, not the Hindustan Times piece. Comments like that just waste time, cause unrelated hostile arguments and could have been avoided by simply reading either of the articles involved.
- selimthegrim 6mo agoQuite frankly, if he went and scrubbed (or had scrubbed) a Facebook thread I got in an argument with him on in 2018 (about the last time someone did an article about him) I can only imagine how obsessive he is about controlling his past and info about it.
- BrenBarn 6mo agoOf course not. No one can be trusted to control our future.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- avaer 6mo agoWho would you trust more: Sam Altman, or a council of 1000 representative AI models?
- imagetic 6mo ago[flagged]
- jablongo 6mo agoFor me, the attempted productization of Sora was conclusive proof that 1) OAI was overcapitalized and desperate for revenue 2) safety didn't matter to them much 3) improving the world didn't matter much either. At one point you mentioned an interaction with OpenAI staff where you were looking to interview AI Safety researchers. You were rebuffed b/c "existential safety isn't a thing". Does this mean that you could find no evidence of a AI Safety team at OAI after Jan Leike left? If you look at job postings it does seem like they have significant safety staff...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hirako2000 6mo agoInterestingly we are still experiencing the technological momentum inspired and created by what OpenAI used to be. AI for humanity. Given the initiative started circa 2017, much of the goods remain. It's a hijack of creative geniuses who got together, which is now turning into cow milking tech.
- andrekandre 6mo ago> cow milking tech i mean, in the end, cow-milking is the name of the game isnt it?
- hirako2000 6mo agoYes if it played that game at the start. That's the name of a different game. OpenAI played the charity, coupled with a powerful altruistic card. It didn't say: we believe a more effective for-profit business shall start as a non-profit in this field, because it would yield innovation which we can then skim money off down the road. That would have been transparent. Not saying it was the intention at the start. But they flipped the game at some point. Let's play Chess, it's a better game. Oh I decided we are now playing Checkers, sorry, I won.
- 6mo ago
- andrewstuart 6mo agoMeh. I’m no particular fan of Altman but there’s nothing in this article particularly surprising or terrible. The whole AI safety thing has always seemed extreme to me and has turned out to be a storm in a teacup. All those prominent people who used to tell us how AI will end humanity seem to have stopped talking about it. I get the sense that Altman is not particularly like-able person but Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both seem to have scored a 10/10 on their “is this guy a jerk” rating, it’s common for tech CEOs. So, the article and headline are dramatic but not much really there. I think all the AI safety obsessed people turn out to have been the ones off course.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- vlovich123 6mo ago> Chesky stayed in contact with the tech journalist Kara Swisher, relaying criticism of the board. Ronan interesting writing as always. I’m curious if the role of the media as a pawn of the rich and powerful to sway perception and build narratives concerns you, especially given your personal experiences with this and the reporting you’ve done. Are there reforms you think reporters and/or news organizations should adopt to make sure access doesn’t become direct or indirect manipulation and how do you fight against that in your own reporting?
- ahahahahah 6mo agoYep, and see https://disconnect.blog/kara-swishers-story-about-sam-altman-is-falling-apart/ https://disconnect.blog/kara-swishers-story-about-sam-altman... > When Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI on November 17, 2023, Kara Swisher started tweeting up a storm of “scoopage,” as she referred to her calls with high-ranking tech figures. Over the days Altman was on the outside, Swisher helped to craft a narrative that a board stacked with his internal rivals had pulled off a coup without a legitimate reason. The face of the AI boom had been betrayed and deserved to retake his position at the helm. > She’s chosen a few CEOs to more regularly criticize now that they don’t give her the access she craves, but there are many more whose narratives she will happily help turn into the official record whenever it will help them. Altman is in that group, and six months after his removal and return as CEO of OpenAI, it’s become very apparent that Swisher was echoing the Altman line and defending his interests.
- nerdyadventurer 6mo agoWhy would anyone trust him at all? their tech is used to bomb children, all of these rich folks are immoral only about their selfish gain.
- jedberg 6mo ago> their tech is used to bomb children If you're talking about the school in Iran, that wasn't OpenAI. That was a Palantir system that pre-dates OAI by a few years, and was due to a bad entry in a spreadsheet, that showed the building as military housing. Which it was a few years ago. 180 people lost their lives because of bad data in spreadsheet, but not AI.
- Hikikomori 6mo agoPalantir was using anthropic and its use is being replaced by openai.
- jedberg 6mo agoYes but not for the system that decided to bomb a school. That was a Palanter in house system.
- Hikikomori 6mo agoAfaik the palantir system utilized ai.
- jedberg 6mo agoYes, their own in house AI. That system doesn't use Anthropic or OpenAI.
- steinvakt2 6mo agoMany years ago. Not "a few years ago". Also you could make the sentence that 180 people lost their lives because of an evil war, of which USA and Israel are the aggressors. And we definitely don't talk enough about that part.
- brap 6mo agoHe’s a grown ass man tweeting in all lowercase, that’s all I needed to know. I could more or less infer the rest from that.
- rupi 6mo agoRonan Farrow, the write of this article, made a comment in this thread that is buried in all the comments, "As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page." I saw that before I read the article and it made me read the article in a very different way than I normally do. As I was reading, I found myself thinking, "Why is it worded that way? What else is the writer trying to say, or not say?" It made reading this a lot more interactive than I normally associate with passive reading. Great job, Ronan!
- ipsum2 6mo agoI don't get why writers do this. It makes sense for fiction, but why a factual, non-fiction article?
- travisjungroth 6mo agoIt keeps it shorter.
- rupi 6mo agoYou said factual. But what is factual for you and I may not be for someone else. There are a lot of recollections in the article where sama remembers one version or doesn't remember at all and the other party remembers something else. Combine that with the nature of the article and the legal issues considering egos and sums involved. To top all of that New Yorker is known for fact checking that is exhaustive to the point of paranoia. I am just speculating but if @ronanfarrow is still checking the discussion here, it would be amazing to hear the actual reasons.
- palmotea 6mo ago> There are a lot of recollections in the article where sama remembers one version or doesn't remember at all and the other party remembers something else. Or he's being dishonest about what he remembers.
- cedws 6mo agoSounds like a snake pit. None of them can be trusted. If we have to rely on companies to self appoint a benevolent ‘AI dictator’ we’re fucked. The only high profile person in AI I’d consider perhaps worthy of trust is Demis Hassabis.
- latentframe 6mo agoIt’s less about trusting one person but more about the structure indeed AI is concentrating capital and compute and talent into a few hands so we’ve seen this before with railroads, oil, semiconductors. It brings innovation and also pricing power and political influence.
- trakkstar 6mo agoGirls and boys, this is a prime example of a rhetoric question.
- eximius 6mo agoFuck no! Of course he can't be trusted. We know that. Nobody questions that. We know that about most of the "elites" running the show. We're just in this shitty pit of despair where people are desperate. It's difficult to campaign for good when you're struggling and capital can jerk people around. People pursue good for the sake of good at cost to themselves when times are very good or times are very, very bad. Right now times are only merely very bad.
- shevy-java 6mo agoI don't trust him. He already made statements that convinced me I don't want to touch anything he controls. In a way it is similar to Meta and co. For some reason the US corporations behave very suspiciously once past a certain threshold size. With Win11 from Microsoft I always wonder whether there is a not so hidden subagenda in place.
- CyborgUndefined 6mo agough, i don't understand why only altman scares you? what about google, china, and other players? for me, the answer >>> we need to create our own systems. decentralized agent networks and etc. if you don't want to depend on one person or one company controlling your AI, build your own infrastructure. the concentration of power in one/two persons is the problem.
- aryehof 6mo agoI might expect such a subjective, gossipy exposé of a public official, but this of a private individual in a non-public sector commercial company?
- AbuAssar 6mo agono
- hirako2000 6mo agotautology
- isolay 6mo agoA contradiction in terms is not called a tautology.
- sph 6mo agoExcellent article, truly well-researched. As someone close to a pathological liar [1], the idea that one could be at the forefront of the creation of an artificial superintelligence confirms all the existential risks of such a piece of technology and how naïve, if not ignorant, the average starry-eyed tech worker and investor is about this whole endeavour. It's easy to believe there is a lot of idealism and wish for a better world, but underneath the greedy drive for money and power is excellently summarized in Greg Brockman's own thoughts: “So what do I really want? [...] Financially what will take me to $1B.” Literally, the only hope for humanity is that large language models prove to be a dead-end in ASI research. --- 1: “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” — I guess now I know of two people with these traits.
- snakeboy 6mo agoI usually use free archived versions to read mainstream journalism pieces. Seeing this convinced me to subscribe. I've always loved The New Yorker, and am happy to support serious longform journalism (and I know that Ronan is one of the best). However, it's a shame that the only way to subscribe to the print version is to pay $260 upfront for the yearly subscription. Meanwhile the digital version is $1/week ($52 upfront) for one year, or even just $10 for one month.
- ronanfarrow 6mo agoThis means a lot to me. We're living in a time when we badly need independent journalism, with a very limited number of institutions devoting resources to this kind of work. Subscribing to support journalism you care about is a real public service, in my view. Noted on the critiques of the subscription options. I'll try to relay.
- biztos 6mo agoAre you outside the USA? I just checked and I see: "This introductory offer is charged as $78 for the first year. Automatically renews at $195/year."
- netcan 6mo agoMy tendency is to believe that the individuals do not what matter as much, when it comes to the biggest risks. I'm not sure if this is a bias or a theory... but I lean to some sort of "medium is the message" determinism. >"He acknowledged that the alignment problem remained unsolved, but he redefined it—rather than being a deadly threat, it was an inconvenience, like the algorithms that tempt us to waste time scrolling on Instagram." Before "don't be evil" was a cliche, I think it was a real guiding principle at Google and they built a world class business that way. Facebook's rival ad platform didn't have search queries to target ads at. Aggressive utilization of user data was the only way they could build an Adwords-scale business. As they pushed this norm, Google followed. Doomscroll addiction gets a lot of attention because engineers and journalists have children and parents. There are other risks though. Political stability, for example. By early 2010s, smartphones were reaching places that had almost no modern media previously. Often powered by FB-exclusive data plans. The Arab spring happened, then ISIS. FB-centric propaganda seemingly played a major role in a major conflict/atrocity in Burma. Coups in Africa powered by social media based propaganda. Worrying political implications in the west. Unhinged uncle syndrome. Etc. Social media risks/implications were more than just "inconvenience." At no point did we really see tech companies go into mitigation mode. Even CYA was relatively limited. There was no moment of truth. It was business as usual. So... I think OpenAI's initial charter was naive. Science fiction almost. It was never going to withstand commercial reality, politics, competition and suchlike. I think these are greater than the individuals involved. That doesn't mean we should ignore, excuse or otherwise tolerate lack of integrity. But, I don't think it is a way of reducing risk. Whether the risk is skynet, economic turmoil, politics, psych epidemics or whatever... I don't think the personal integrity of executives is a major factor.
- Rover222 6mo agoI don’t know, but any time I see an interview of Altman and I look at those eyes, I get creeped out.
- jerrygoyal 6mo agocould someone please give a tldr? this was way too long
- askl 6mo agoThe answer to the question in the title is "no".
- valianteffort 6mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 6mo agoWe've banned this account. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668579 and marked off-topic.
- bkummel 6mo agoWithout having read the article, reacting on the headline: no single person should be allowed to control our future. Democracy is a thing in large parts of the world, and we should try very hard to keep that functioning and even improve it.
- PUSH_AX 6mo agoPeople are voting with their wallets
- xboxnolifes 6mo agoThats not democracy.
- jstummbillig 6mo agoIt's also not not democracy. It has little to do with a form of government.
- jplusequalt 6mo ago>People are voting with their wallets A handful of people's wallets are much deeper than vast swaths of the population. None of this AI shit would be happening without their funding.
- afh1 6mo agoThe only part of the world where _democracy_ is a thing is Switzerland. Rest of the western world is utterly ruled by politicians, governments with ever more control over _their_ population's private life and money, and some who shout out "democracy", deluded they have any control over anything through voting lol.
- ernsheong 6mo agoI bet Satya Nadella is regretting defending Altman now.
- firemelt 6mo agosatya defending altman is more like satya want to save his own ass
- firemelt 6mo agoobviously not
- rambambram 6mo agoAny idea how stupid this title sounds!? It's past exaggeration.
- mvkel 6mo ago> Many technology companies issue vague proclamations about improving the world, then go about maximizing revenue. But the founding premise of OpenAI was that it would have to be different. Isn't this really what everything is about? A pure research non-profit transitioned to a revenue generating enterprise because it had to, and a lot of people don't like that. Does that make it evil? It's romantic to think that the magic of science and research can stand on its own, but even Ilya has admitted more recently that SSI needs to ship something consumer facing. Anthropic, the lab that put all of its social capital in the safetyism basket, is having the exact same realization, with Claude Code being a mess of technically reckless vibe coded slop that nevertheless is the cash cow for the company. Maybe it's time for everyone to realize that for an innovation this big to come to bear, it either needs to be state funded, or privately funded, the latter requiring revenue and a plausible vision of generating ROI.
- keepamovin 6mo agoYC invests in people, not ideas. They have vetted him. They are always right about people. It's probably nothing.
- bambax 6mo ago> Altman does not recall the exchange. Altman SAYS he does not recall the exchange. Not the same thing.
- RagnarD 6mo agoNo.
- locust101 6mo agoIt’s hard to know what’s the new information here. Altman’s history has been reported on exhaustively. Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments, non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners, saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But as long as they have the money, we have to dance to their tune. We really really need a way for our society to be more equitable and hold these people responsible.
- willis936 6mo ago>PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes HR would like you to tell the difference between the two photos.
- olalonde 6mo agoI still don't understand how the transformation from non-profit to for-profit was possible legally.
- batshit_beaver 6mo agoAnything is possible with a big enough bank account.
- tim333 6mo agoThe non-profit still exists and has the for profit as a subsiduary.
- olalonde 6mo agoIt owns only like 25% of the for-profit and was essentially stripped off of all its assets (IP, trademarks, employees, etc.).
- isolay 6mo agoAs for the titular question, Betteridge's law of headlines applies. The answer is: No, we can't trust Sam Altman.
- wolvoleo 6mo agohttps://archive.is/Cd0Yl https://archive.is/Cd0Yl
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo agoAnother Mirror on archive.org for archival purpose: https://web.archive.org/web/20260407180452/https://serjaimelannister.github.io/htmlpipe/?https://ppng.io/Cd0Yl https://web.archive.org/web/20260407180452/https://serjaimel...
- basyt 6mo agohe doesn't control his own future... chatgpt implodes in 18 months max depending upon how the strait of hormuz play goes...
- laylower 6mo agoReading this makes me even happier to pay for Anthropic. Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out. " “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied. (Altman said that this was not quite his recollection, and that he had accused the Amodeis only of “political behavior.”) In 2020, Amodei, Daniela, and other colleagues left to found Anthropic, which is now one of OpenAI’s chief rivals."
- throwaway132448 6mo agoIf you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.
- AdamN 6mo agoI can go with the thesis that individuals need community control (boards, regulations, laws) in order to be accountable but is there some specific evidence that Amodei is the same? It seems like a "both sides" argument.
- throwaway132448 6mo agoI don’t need to convince you, we’ve been through enough cults of personality, time will tell. But I’ve been right enough times to back myself. Maybe it’s because I grew up around a lot of people like them? They can’t hide that they would say whatever they think you want to hear. Actually it’s funny: Their lack of empathy/emotional intelligence would also make them susceptible to thinking that talking to an LLM is like talking to a person, so maybe they really did think AGI was around the corner!
- cmiles8 6mo agoIt seems unlikely OpenAI can survive long term with Sam at the helm. Challenge is folks already realized that once and yet here we are.
- mikkupikku 6mo agoYou come at the king, you best not miss. Unfortunately, having survived a coup, his odds of surviving the next have improved. Now he knows how they go, what to look for and how he might handle them. I wouldn't bet on him being kicked out, at least while OpenAI is still on top. If OpenAI stumbles and Anthropic or another starts to prevail, only then would I bet on Sam getting pushed out.
- nextlevelwizard 6mo ago"If I don't destroy humanity someone far worse will do it" -Sam Altman
- Cthulhu_ 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
- charlescearl 6mo agoThe very idea of “trusting” monopoly capitalism.
- kazinator 6mo agoI place my trust in Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
- hansmayer 6mo agoBeyond the question of should we trust Sam Altman to control our future - why on Earth should we want any single individual to control our future at all?
- derwiki 6mo agoWe don’t, but there keep being Saurons who want the one ring maybe more than everyone combined wants them to not have it.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- calf 6mo agoThe last quote, to a layperson, may sound completely sinister, but therein lies a deep and open computer science question: AIs really do seem to get their special capabilities from having a degree of freedom to output wrong and false answers. This observation goes all the way back to some of Alan Turing's musings on how an AI might one day be possible. And then there were early theorems related to this e.g. PAC learning. I'd love to know about what's happened since on this aspect, such as the role of noise and randomness, and maybe even hallucinations are a feature-not-bug in a fundamental sense, etc.
- mt18 6mo agoAltman's character is almost irrelevant next to how frictionless it is for a handful of people to set defaults for millions.
- arafeq 6mo ago[dead]
- strgrd 6mo agoI remember reading these direct quotes from SA in 2016 from the New Yorker and thinking, yeah, this guy is just miserable: > “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources. I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” > "If you believe that all human lives are equally valuable, and you also believe that 99.5 per cent of lives will take place in the future, we should spend all our time thinking about the future. But I do care much more about my family and friends.” > "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.” > "...we’re going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of job displacement, so basic income really makes sense. Plus, the stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create the next Apple.”
- goolz 6mo agoFunny you bring this up because I always think back to a story, in the New York Times if I recall correctly but perhaps the Journal or SFC, talking about how him and his friends got upset when asked to leave a high end french restaurant due to him wearing sneakers. They pulled a "Do you know who he is?" well before he was even tied to OAI. Always left a bad taste in my mouth and stuck with me a decade on. Tangentially, without being too specific, I have someone incredibly close to me that has recently had interactions with the upper echelons of OAI's exec team and... the stories are not kind. I imagine when your company is being run by a morally bankrupt tech bro you are short on integrity. After 10+ years of hearing anecdotes about sama I am starting to wonder if maybe the word on the street is true and he really is just as selfish and blind as people make him out to be. At this point, the optics surrounding OAI vs. Anthropic are just plain bad. They should have gotten rid of him before when they had the chance.
- 4ggr0 6mo ago> while Y.C. took a six- or seven-per-cent cut shamefully have to admit that my monkey-brain smirked because of an accidental 67-meme in a serious article.
- EcommerceFlow 6mo agoYet when he was fired, 99% of OpenAi employees backed him and were ready to resign. That actual event/evidence is more telling than any hit piece article.
- goolz 6mo agoI imagine most of them were motivated by money. OpenAI was supposed to be Open. As I understand it, it was not created for shareholder profits and instead was made to benefit everyone? Hence the Open name. Then someone like Sam comes along who can make you incredibly rich by casually ignoring the initial mission. Would you go against this incredibly powerful billionaire who by many accounts is not encumbered by ethical quandaries? In doing so you risk your financial freedom, and for what? OAI is already a husk of its intended purpose. Mine as well get paid to be a sellout.
- EcommerceFlow 6mo agoLike I said, as it currently stands the evidence is 5,000 with Sam and like 5-15 against him (from the article). We can theorize on motivations all day, but since the hitpiece didn't bother contacting any 'pro Sam' employees, it's a moot point.
- clbrmbr 6mo ago> OpenAI was on the verge of closing a large investment from Thrive, a venture-capital firm founded by Josh Kushner, Jared Kushner’s brother, whom Altman had known for years. The deal would value OpenAI at eighty-six billion dollars and allow many employees to cash out millions in equity. Probably a factor in the pro Sam camp. Hard to stand up against a big payday.
- palmotea 6mo ago> Yet when he was fired, 99% of OpenAi employees backed him and were ready to resign. That actual event/evidence is more telling than any hit piece article. It's not telling. The article documents a massive pressure campaign to get that result. There are a lot of reasons why OpenAi employees could have publicly backed him, an example is fear, and there are many others that aren't an endorsement of Altman's character.
- noisy_boy 6mo agoWould you trust a guy who controls a magical orb that answers everyone's questions for free and satisfactorily enough that people basically pay money to talk more to it, to use it responsibly? I won't.
- ertucetin 6mo agoPeople call him Scam Altman for a reason.
- complianceowl 6mo ago[dead]
- owlcompliance 6mo agoControl + Altman + Delete
- wei03288 6mo ago[dead]
- Manchitsanan 6mo ago[dead]
- flippyhead 6mo agoNo
- zombiwoof 6mo ago[dead]
- yamamura_thinks 6mo agoThis Sam Altman video is addictive. I could watch it over and over.
- NickC25 6mo agoI think the answer is a resounding "no". Anyone who deliberately seeks power should not be given it.
- benliong78 6mo agothat animation of Altman with a thousand faces is oddly unsettling. Good job, new yorker.
- Lev1a 6mo agoSimple: NOOOOOOO! How is this even a question?
- oyebenny 6mo agoInteresting!
- curiouscat2026 6mo agoReally solid piece of journalism. I understand some stuff ends up on the cutting room floor in the editing process as length is eventually a factor. What was the one thing you most regret having to cut out of the final piece?
- curiouscat2026 6mo agoI assume stuff gets cut for length in the editing process. What was the thing you wish had remained that was edited out?
- ath3nd 6mo ago[dead]
- Aeroi 6mo agoSuchir Balaji deserves to have his death investigated further.
- ssz7820 6mo ago[dead]
- sp3ktrum 6mo agoNegative Ghost Rider, the pattern is full. Sorry Sam, ain't happening!!
- kazinator 6mo agoAltman cannot control anything because he doesn't have any secret sauce. Everything he has has been replicated by others. He doesn't have anything comparable to, say, the operating system platform dominance of Microsoft Windows, or service platform dominance of YouTube. The entire value proposition of OpenAI is that billions of people don't know that anything other exists than ChatGPT, which is rather tenuous and volatile.
- henry2023 6mo agoGoDaddy's annual revenue for 2025 was approximately $4.95 billion.
- triage8004 6mo agoHis sister doesn't think so
- dmvjs 6mo agothe list of people to trust is []
- tfrrggh 6mo agoI trust sam more than elon
- presz 6mo agoDidn't he molest his sister?
- theoverwatch 6mo agoThank you for this amazing reporting. Investigative journalism remains alive.
- a456463 6mo agoEverybody on HN be handing over their thinking and right to indenpendent compute for some AI speed, quick money gains and fearmongering to big tech. Even after the uncountable shady things about big tech, people just fall for that convenience left and right. Paying $200/mo to outsource my thinking skill to some rent seeking cartel that steals and is territorial is wild
- ap11071 6mo agoWas there anything that you found surprising when doing this reporting, and was there a difference in reporting on tech vs. other industries? P.S. Really enjoyed Catch and Kill.
- aimemobe 6mo ago[flagged]