Indeed. I’ve heard first hand accounts that would make it impossible for me to trust him. He’s very good at the game. But I’d not want to touch him with a barge pole.

Any stories or events you can talk about? It sounds interesting

The New Yorker piece is pretty terrifying and manages to be so while bending over backwards to present both sides of not maybe even suck up to SV a bit. Certainly no one forced Altman to say on the record that Ice Nine in the water glass was what he had planned for anyone who crossed him, and no one forced pg to say, likewise on the record that “Sam’s real talent is becoming powerful” or something to that effect.

It pretty much goes downhill from there.

> The New Yorker piece is pretty terrifying and manages to be so while bending over backwards to present both sides of not maybe even suck up to SV a bit. Certainly no one forced Altman to say on the record that Ice Nine in the water glass was what he had planned for anyone who crossed him, and no one forced pg to say, likewise on the record that “Sam’s real talent is becoming powerful” or something to that effect.

Article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

Holy shit I thought he was just good at networking, but it sounds like we have a psychopath in charge of the AI revolution. Fantastic.

The government is behind it all. Here are a bunch of graduate related talks that don't talk about CS, AI, but instead math and social control: https://videos.ahp-numerique.fr/w/p/2UzpXdhJbGRSJtStzVWon9?p...

For anyone else like me who hasn't read Kurt Vonnegut, but does know about different ice states (e.g. Ice IX):

"Ice Nine" is a fictional assassination device that makes you turn into ice after consuming ice (?) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine

"Ice IX" (ice nine) is Ice III at a low enough temperature and high enough pressure to be proton-ordered https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice#Known_phases

So here, Sam Altman is stating a death threat.

It's more than just a death threat, the person killed in such a manner would surely generate a human-sized pile of Ice 9, which would pose a much greater threat to humanity than any AGI.

If we're seriously entertaining this off-handed remark as a measure of Altman's true character, it means not only would be willing willing to murder an adversary, but he'd be willing to risk all humanity to do it.

What I take away from this remark is that Altman is a nerd, and I look forward to seeing a shaky cell-phone video of him reciting one of the calypsos of Bokonon while dressed as a cultist at a SciFi convention.

> the person killed in such a manner would surely generate a human-sized pile of Ice 9, which would pose a much greater threat to humanity than any AGI.

Oh okay, I didn't really grok that implication from my brief scan of the wiki page. Didn't realize it was a cascading all-water-into-Ice-Nine thing.

just to clarify, in the book it's basically just 'a form of ice that stays ice even when warm'. it was described as an abandoned projected by the military to harden mud for infantry men to cross. just like regular ice crystals, the ice9 crystal pattern 'spreads' across water, but without the need for it to be chilled, eg the body temp water freezes etc, it becomes a 'midas touch' problem to anyone dealing with it.

“Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful” was the quote, which has a distinctly different ring to it. Not that this diminishes from the overall creep factor.

> Any stories or events you can talk about? It sounds interesting reply

Paul Graham fired Sam Altman from YC on the spot for "loss of trust". Full details unknown.

The story of the "YC mafia" takeover of Conde Nast era reddit as summarized by ex-ceo Yishan who resigned after tiring of Altman's constant Machiavelli machinations is also hilarious and foreshadowing of future events[0]. I'm sure by the time Altman resigned from the Reddit board OpenAI had long incorporated the entire corpus into ChatGPT already.

At the moment all the engineers at OpenAI, including gdb, who currently have their credibility in tact are nerd-washing Altman's tarnished reputation by staying there. I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere but Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ, RIP) book called the "Psychopath Code"[1] is rather on point in this context. He notes that psychopaths are attracted to project groups that have assets and no defenses, i.e. non-profits:

If a group has assets and no defenses, it is inevitable [a psychopath] will invade the group. There is no "if" here. Indeed, you may see several psychopaths striving for advantage...[the psychopath] may be a founder, yet that is rare. If he is a founder, someone else did the hard work. Look for burned-out skeletons in the closet...He may come with grand stories, yet only by his own word. He claims authority from his connections to important people. He spends his time in the group manipulating people against each other. Or, he is absent on important business...His dominance is not earned, yet it is tangible...He breaks the social conventions of the group. Social humans feel fear and anxiety when they do this. This is a dominance mask.

A group of nerds that want to get shit done and work on important problems, who are primed to be optimistic and take what people say to their face at face value, and don't want to waste time with "people problems" are susceptible to these types of characters taking over.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

[1]https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/psychopathcode/content/chapter4...

Social engineering has been a thing well before computers and the internet...

the name OpenAI itself reminds me every day of this.

I knew their vision of open source AI wouldn't last but it surprised me how fast it was.

It was impractical from the start; they had to pivot before a they were able to get an LLM proper out (before ~anyone had heard of them)

That vision, if it was ever there, died before ChatGPT was released. It was just a hiring scheme to attract researchers.

pg calls sama ‘naughty’. I call him ‘dangerous’.

I'm still finding it difficult to understand how their move away from the non-profit mission was legal. Initially, you assert that you are a mission-driven non-profit, a claim that attracts talent, capital, press, partners, and users. Then, you make a complete turnaround and transform into a for-profit enterprise. Why this isn't considered fraud is beyond me.

My understanding is that there were two corporate entities, one of which was always for-profit.

It’s “Open” as in “open Pandora’s box”, not “open source”. Always has been.

Awfully familiar to the other South-African emerald mine inheritor tech mogul.

I'm starting to think the relatives of South African emerald mine owners might not be the best people to trust...

Lmao no point in worrying about AI spreading FUD when people do it all by themselves.

You know what AI is actually gonna be useful for? AR source attachments to everything that comes out of our monkey mouths, or a huge floating [no source] over someone's head.

Realtime factual accuracy checking pls I need it.

If it comes packaged with the constant barrage of ridicule and abuse from others for daring to be slightly wrong about something, nobody may as well talk at all.

Who designs the training set for your putative "fact checker" AI?

You are not responsible for the sins of your father regardless of how seriously fucked in the head he is.

No but there is the old nature versus nurture debate. If you're raised in a home with a parent who has zero qualms about exploiting human suffering for profit, that's probably going to have an impact, right?

What are you implying here? The answer to the nature vs. nurture debate is "both", see "epigenetics" for more.

When considering the influence of a parent with morally reprehensible behavior, it's important to recognize that the environment a child grows up in can indeed have a profound impact on their development. Children raised in households where unethical behaviors are normalized may adopt some of these behaviors themselves, either through direct imitation or as a response to the emotional and psychological environment. However, it is equally possible for individuals to reject these influences.

Furthermore, while acknowledging the potential impact of a negative upbringing, it is critical to avoid deterministic assumptions about individuals. People are not simply products of their environment; they possess agency and the capacity for change, and we need to realize that not all individuals perceive and respond to environmental stimuli in the same way. Personal experiences, cognitive processes, and emotional responses can lead to different interpretations and reactions to similar environmental conditions. Therefore, while the influence of a parent's actions cannot be dismissed, it is neither fair nor accurate to presume that an individual will inevitably follow in their footsteps.

As for epigenetics: it highlights how environmental factors can influence gene expression, adding a layer of complexity to how we understand the interaction between genes and environment. While the environment can modify gene expression, individuals may exhibit different levels of susceptibility or resistance to these changes based on genetic variability.

> However, it is equally possible for individuals to reject these influences.

The crux of your thesis is a legal point of view, not a scientific one. It's a relic from when Natural Philosophy was new and hip, and fundamentally obviated by leaded gasoline. Discussing free will in a biological context is meaningless because the concept is defined by social coercion. It's the opposite of slavery.

From a game theory perspective, it can make sense to punish future generations to prevent someone from YOLO'ing at the end of their life. But that only works if they actually care about their children, so perhaps it should be, "you are less responsible for the sins of your father the more seriously fucked in the head he is."

This is a great sentiment in theory. But it assumes that the child is actually interested in rejecting those sins - and accepting the economic consequences of equality (e.g. them not being filthy stinking rich).

In practice most rich people spoil the shit out of their kids and they wind up being even more fucked in the head than their parents.

Please. Elon's track record to take tesla from concept car stage to current mass production levels and building SpaceX from scratch is hardly comparable to Altman's track record.

Indeed, at least Elon and his teams actually accomplished something worthwhile compared to Altman.

But he is a manager, not an engineer although he sells himself off as such. He keeps smart capable folks around, abuses most of them pretty horribly, and when he intervenes with products its hit and miss. For example latest Tesla Model 3 changes must have been pretty major fuckup and there is no way he didn't ack it all.

Plus all self-driving lies and more lies well within fraud territory at this point. Not even going into his sociopathic personality, massive childish ego and apparent 'daddy issues' which in men manifest exactly like him. He is not in day-to-day SpaceX control and it shows.

"A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”

As is repeatedly spamming the same pasta

You’re confusing mommy and daddy issues. Mommy issues is what makes fash control freaks.

SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. Their initial designs were based on NASA designs. Stop perpetuating the “genius engineer” myth around Elon Musk.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch You must first invent the universe”

…no one “started from scratch", the sum of all knowledge is built on prior foundations.

I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals.

We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.

The people downvoting have never read the Isaacson book obviously.

More like ppl on this site know and respect Jobs for his talent as a revolutionary product manager-style CEO that brought us IPhone and subsequent mobile Era of computing.

Mobile era of computing would have happened just as much if Jobs had never lived.

To be fair, who else could have gone toe-to-toe with the telecom incumbents? Jobs almost didn't succeed at that.

Jobs was a bully through and through.

Someone far more deserving of the title, Dennis Ritchie, died a week after Jobs' stupidity caught up with him. So much attention to Jobs who didn't really deserve it, and so little to Dennis Ritchie who made such a profound impact on the tech world and society in general.

I think Ritchie's influence while significant is overblown and not entirely positive. I am not a fan of Steve Jobs, who had many reprehensible traits, but I find it ridiculous to dismiss his genius. Frankly, I find Jobs's ability to manipulate people more impressive than Ritchie's ability to manipulate machines.

> not entirely positive

I don't know if he was responsible, but null-terminated strings has got to be one of the worst mistakes in computer history.

That said, how is the significance of C and Unix "overblown"?

I agree Jobs was brilliant at manipulating people, I don't agree that that should be celebrated.

The main reason C and Unix became widespread IMHO is not because they were better than the alternatives, but rather because AT&T distributed them with source code at no cost, and their motivation for doing that was not altruistic, but rather the need to obey a judicial decree or an agreement made at the end of an anti-trust court case under which IBM and AT&T were ordered not to enter each other's markets. I.e., AT&T was prohibited from selling computer hardware and software, so when they accidentally found themselves to be owners of some software that some universities and research labs wanted to use, they gave it away.

C and Unix weren't and aren't bad, but they are overestimated in comments on this site a lot. They weren't masterpieces. The Mac was a masterpiece IMHO. Credit for the Mac goes to Xerox PARC and to Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, but also to Jobs for recognizing the value of the work and leading the first implementation of it available to a large fraction of the population.

Altman is riding a new tech wave, and his team has a couple of years' head start. Musk's reusable rockets were conceptualized a long time ago (Tintin's Destination Moon dates back to 1953) and could have become a reality several decades ago.

You seriously trying to take his credit away for reusable rocket with "nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow.

"A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”

No, in fact I'm praising Musk for his project management abilities and his ability to take risks.

>"nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." - Oscar Wilde

What's wrong with weakness? Does it make you feel contempt?

By that logic nothing has started from scratch.

SpaceX is still the only company with reusable rockets. NASA only dreams about it and cant even make a regular rocket launch on time

And don't forget StarLink that revolutionized satellite communications.

Are you saying that Altman has family that did business in South African emerald mines? I can't find info about this

No. Some dude that launches rockets did, though.

Surely people trying to build rockets are trying to do _the opposite_ of "bringing people down"?

The rockets are reusable, the people are expendable.

They are referring to Elon Musk.

Saying the other suggested there were 2.

I disagree. If you watch some long form interviews with Elon, you’ll see that he cares a lot about the truth. Sam doesn’t give me that impression.

> you’ll see that he cares a lot about the truth.

Didnt he call the cave diver, a pedo and the guy who attacked Pelosi's husband they were in a gay relationship.

He doesn't seem have much of a filter because of his aspergers, but I think he genuinely believed those things. And they are more on the level of calling people names on the playground anyway. In the grand scheme of things, those are pretty shallow "lies".

Oh so it’s ok to lie and call people a pedophile (which is far beyond playground name-calling; from a famous person a statement like that actually carries a lot of weight) if you genuinely believe it and have Asperger’s?

Those might explain his behavior, but it does not excuse it.

Musk fans will contort into pretzels. He genuinely believed it. Just an insult. Just trading shots because the guy called his idea stupid.

It’s the RDF.

I have multiple relatives on the spectrum. None of them baselessly accuse strangers of being pedophiles.

It's not Musk's lack of filter that makes him unhinged and dangerous. It's that he's deeply stupid, insecure, racist, enamored of conspiracy theories, and powerful.

I figure its the chronic drug abuse and constant affirmation he receives from his internet fanboys and enabler yes-men on his board who are financially dependent on him. he doesn't ever receive push-back from anyone so he get more and more divorced form reality.

He's 52. And running multiple companies. Aspergers is not a justification for his shitty behavior (and blaming this behavior on Aspergers harms perception of people with Aspergers)

> If you watch some long form interviews with Elon, you’ll see that he cares a lot about the truth.

You mean the guy who's infamous for lying? The guy who claimed his car was fully self driving more than a decade before it is? The guy who tweeted "funding secured" and facing multiple fraud charges?

Tbh, he wasn’t convicted as far as I know.

But yes, he’s overly optimistic with timelines. He says so himself.

The first time someone is "overly optimistic with a timeline", you should forgive them.

The tenth time, you should have the good sense to realize that they're full of shit and either a habitual liar or utterly incompetent.

Realists are incapable of pushing frontiers.

If you are doing something that has been done before, hire a realist. Your project will ship on time and within budget. If you are doing something that hasn't been done before, you need an optimist. Partly because the realists run for the hills -- they know the odds and the odds are bad -- but also because their hedging behavior will turn your small chance of success into zero chance of success. On these projects, optimism doesn't guarantee success, but pessimism/realism does guarantee failure.

So no, I am not scandalized to find that the world's biggest innovator (I hate his politics, but this is simply the truth) is systematically biased towards optimism. It's not surprising, it is inevitable.

Wright Brothers took a risk and build first planes but didn't have to lie that their planes already left the ground before they did. They didn't claim "it would fly a year from now", they just build it over and over until it flew.

They were optimistic and yet they found a way to be optimistic without claiming anything untruthful.

Clément Ader, on the other hand, claimed that his innovation flew, and was ridiculed when he couldn't proof it.

One look at their works and it's clear who influenced modern planes, and who didn't.

The Wright Brothers are infamous for failing to industrialize their invention -- something that notoriously requires investors and hype. Perhaps they wouldn't have squandered their lead if they had been a bit more public with their hopes and dreams.

There is a difference between saying "we believe we will achieve X in the next year" and "we will achieve X in the next year." Each framing has its advantages and disadvantages, but it's hard to accuse the person who makes the former statement of lying.

>Man who’s the second richest, led companies that made electric cars and reusable rockets

>> Random HN commentator : utterly incompetent

I want what you’re smoking

He may be the second richest but he still doesn’t seem competent enough to provide remotely reasonable estimates.

That, or he’s just a straight up liar who knows the things he says are never going to happen.

Which would you rather it be?

Yes, he is largely incompetent but with a great nose for picking up good companies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40066514

I'm no fan of Sam Altman, but between the two, Elon lies much more often. He's lied about FSD for years, lied about not selling his Tesla stock, lied about "robotaxies" for years, lied about the roadster for years, lied about "funding secured" for Tesla, lied about his twitter free speech ethos, spreads random lies about people he doesn't like, and so much more. The guy is a compulsive liar.

You could also come up with many examples where he worked hard against repeating lies from others since he often reasons from first principles.

But yes you’re right. The difference is probably whether one "beliefs" Elon is beneficial for the world or not.

> The difference is probably whether one "beliefs" Elon is beneficial for the world or not.

I don't think he matters that much, good or bad. Yes, I know he's a billionaire, but in practical terms he hasn't done much, especially compared to the other tech moguls like jobs, bezos, gates, zuck, larry/sergy etc. All those others oversaw companies that completely revolutionized life for everyone on the planet. By comparison, Tesla makes really fun luxury cars that most people can't afford, and all his other companies are vaporware besides spacex which has almost no practical impact on people's lives. You could argue starlink has some impact, but for the vast majority of the population that can afford starlink, terrestrial broadband fills their need.

It didn't take long to drag Elon into this thread. The bitterness and cynicism is unreal.

You are literally repeating false smears about Elon Mask. No emerald mine has ever been owned by anyone in Elon's family, and Elon certainly didn't inherit any of it. I find it very ironic that you are doing this while accusing someone of being a manipulative crook.

Many easily fooled rubes believe that veneer, so I guess it's working for him.

The startup world (as the artistic world, the sports world, etc) values healthy transgression of the rules

But the line between healthy and unlawful transgression can be a thin line

The startup world values transgression of the rules.

I'm surprised at such a mean comment and lots of follow-ups with agreement. I don't know Sam personally, I've only heard him here and there online from before OpenAI days and all I got was a good impression. He seems smart and pretty humble. Apart from all openai drama which I don't know enough to have an opinion, past-openai he also seems to be talking with sense.

Since so many people took time to put him down there here can anybody provide some explanation to me? Preferably not just about how closed openai is, but specifically about Sam. He is in a pretty powerful position and maybe I'm missing some info.

People who have worked with him have publicly called him a manipulative liar:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1804u5y/former_open...

There seems quite a lot of bitterness and jealousy on this forum. Any time someone builds a world leading company young there will be lots of comments about how they are a fraud, idiot, crook etc.

Idk, everyone loves Carmack

Carmack did his thing 40 years ago; before social media was as prevalent. I'm sure if the community was as large and talkative then as they were today; you'd find many detractors.

What about Palmer Luckey ? I don't think he received a lot of criticism before he founded Anduril Industries.

I don't have a strong opine on him; quick wikipedia skim tells me certain crowds probably hate him as a military contractor. Some people hate anyone/thing associated with that space.

True. And does anyone talk bad about the two Google founders? They are pretty much invisible multi-billionaires now. That is a major accomplishment!

I shared stage with Sam at one point for an hour and was not impressed. Obviously I was wrong as Sam has accomplished so much in the meantime, but my initial impression wasn't much. How he did it is for him to know and for others to ...

What do you mean by not impressed?

Probably did not see him as a future billionaire.

Well, more than 90% of OpenAI employees backed him up when the board fired him. Maybe he's not the clown you claim he is.

Or they didn’t want the company, their job, and all of their equity to evaporate

Well, if he's a clown then his departure should cause the opposite, no? And you're right, more than 90% of them said we don't want the non-profit BS and openness. We want a unicorn tech company that can make us rich. Good for them.

Disclaimer: I'm Sam's best friend from kindergarten. Just joking, never met the guy and have no interest in openai beyond being a happy customer (who will switch in a heartbeat to the competitors' if they give me a good reason to)

> Well, if he's a clown then his departure should cause the opposite, no?

Nope, not even close to necessarily true.

> more than 90% of them said we don't want the non-profit BS and openness. We want a unicorn tech company that can make us rich. Good for them.

Sure, good for them! Dissolve the company and its charter, give the money back to the investors who invested under that charter, and go raise money for a commercial venture.

People are self-motivated more often than not.

I fear your characterization diminishes the real risk: he's incredibly well resourced, well-connected and intelligent while being utterly divorced from the reality of the majority he threatens. People like him and Peter Thiel are not simple crooks or idiots - they truly believe in their convictions. This is far scarier.

how does one divorce the belief that technology can be a force for good from the reality that the gatekeepers are so committed to being the most evil they can be