https://blog.samaltman.com/trump
https://www.reddit.com/r/YAPms/comments/1i7ry5m/sam_altman_g...
Only a truly talented piece of shit can be as prolific as this.
"He is irresponsible in the way dictators are."
Chef's kiss.
Edit:
Kids, don't aspire to be like Altman. We as a community need to espouse more values than tech is gonna tech.
And don’t aspire to be like those who saw what he is but made peace with it in exchange for silver.
I could understand that from someone with an empty stomach. But too many people doing it when their pockets are already overflowing is exactly the kind of rot that degrades an entire society.
We're all just seeing the results so much better now that they can't even be bothered to pretend they ever more than this.
Aspire to be like Aaron Schwartz.
But yes.
Striving for good isn’t gonna be fun all the time, but when choosing role models I like to factor in how happy they seem. I’d like to spend some time happy.
And then later they go to the school to teach our future, working with high stress and low salary.
Same with medical school in many countries where healthcare is not privatized. Insane hours, huge responsibilities and poor pay for doctors and nurses in many countries.
Nowadays everyone wants to be an influencer or software developer.
And nurses - they work at minimal salary in Poland. Even in USA if you count hourly rates it will be quite poor salary for nurses.
(Since we are dreaming, can I add sane hours for medical doctors (like <= 8 per day)?)
edit: It appears I'm wrong. Will someone correct me on what he did?
Again, I'm not offering an opinion on it.
So, the argument goes that despite its intention, OpenAI has been one of the largest drivers of innovation in an emerging technology.
He didn't do it without authorization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
> Visitors to MIT's "open campus" were authorized to access JSTOR through its network.
For which MIT can certainly have a) locked the door and b) trespassed him, but that's a very different issue than having authorization to access JSTOR.
Kind of a cliche, but aspire to be the best version yourself every day. Learn from the successes and failures of others, but don't aspire to be anyone else because eventually you'll be very disappointed.
He was lovely. And a genius. Maybe he changed, but he was a truly nice person.
But survive. This too will pass.
The first link is from mid-2016. The second link is from January 2025.
It is entirely reasonable for someone to genuinely change his or her views of a person over the course of 8.5 years. That is a substantial length of time in a person’s life.
To me a “flip-flop” is when one changes views on something in a very short amount of time.
That's the thing though right, that we all created this mess together. Like yeah, why don't you (and the rest of us) blame him?. We're all pretty warped and it's going to take collective rehab.
Super pretentious to quote MLK, but the man had stuff to say so here it is (on Inaction):
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it"
"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people"
Yes, the first mistake was a business leader in tech taking a public political position. It was popular and accepted (if not expected) in the valley in 2016.
Doing that then (and banking the social and reputational proceeds) created the problem of dissonance now. If he'd just stayed neutral in public in 2016, he could do what he's doing now and we could assume he's just being a pragmatic business person lobbying the government to further his company's interests.
I have a lot of respect for CEOs who just focus on being a good CEO. It's a hard enough job as is. I don't care about or want to know some CEO's personal position on politics, religion or sports teams. It's all a distraction from the job at hand. Same goes for actors, athletes and singers. They aren't qualified to have an opinion any more relevant than anyone else's, except on acting, athletics, singing - or CEO-ing.
Sadly, my perspective is in the minority. Which is why I think so many public figures keep making this mistake. The media, pundits and social sphere need them to keep making this mistake.
There are no neutral positions in today's political landscape. I'm not stating my opinion here, this is according to most political positions on the spectrum. You suggested "Progressive" (but without hot button issues) as a way of signaling a neutral position. That may be true in parts of the valley tech sphere but it certainly doesn't hold in the rest of the U.S. "Progressive" is usually defined being to the left of "Liberal", so it's hardly neutral. Over half of U.S. voters cast their ballot for the Republican candidate. Almost all those people interpret anyone identifying themselves as "Liberal" as definitely partisan (and negative, of course). Most of them see "Progressive" as even worse, slipping dangerously toward "Socialist". And the same holds true for the term "Conservative" on the other side of the spectrum, of course.
No, identifying as "Progressive" wouldn't distance you from political connotations and culture warring, it's leaping into the maelstrom yelling "Yipee-Ki-Yay!" You may want to update your priors regarding how the broad populace perceives political labels. With voters divided almost exactly in half regarding politics and cultural war issues and a large percentage on both sides having "Strong" or "Very Strong" feelings, stating any position will be seen as strongly negative by tens of millions of people. If you're a CEO (or actor, athlete, singer, etc) who relies on appealing to a broad audience, when it comes to publicly discussing politics (or religion), the downsides can be large and long-lasting but the upsides are small and fleeting. As was said in the movie "WarGames", the only winning move is not playing.
In 2016: Sam alluded to Trump's rise as not dissimilar to Hitler's. He said that Trump's ideas on how to fix things are so far off the mark that they are dangerous. He even quoted the famous: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
In 2025: "I'm not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country"
This is quite obviously someone who is pandering for their own benefit.
While most of the things affected are highly political situations, i.e. Trump's ideas or Biden's fitness. We also seem to have thrown out things that we used to consider cornerstones of liberal democracy i.e. our ideas regarding free speech and censorship, where we claim that it's not happening because it is a private company.
A community only espouses good values when it punishes bad behavior. How do we do this when those misbehaving are very rich, and attempting to punish the misbehavior has negative consequences on you? There just aren't many available tools that don't require significant sacrifices.
This is the "beauty" of the free market ideology (see e.g. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ ). If all the transactions are voluntary, there is no way to punish anyone.
This is obviously untrue at face value. See: Cancel Culture, Bud Light, and Freedom Fries for examples.
Did you mean something more than what you stated here?
I worked on something back then that had to interface with payment networks. All the payment networks had software for Windows to accomplish this that you could run under NT, while under Linux you had to implement your own connector -- which usually involved interacting with hideous old COBOL systems and/or XML and other abominations. In many cases you had to use dialup lines to talk to the banks. Again, software was available for Windows NT but not Linux.
Our solution was to run stuff to talk to banks on NT systems and everything else on Linux. Yes, those NT machines had banks of modems.
In the late 90s using NT for something to talk to banks is not necessarily a terrible idea seen through the lens of the time. Linux was also far less mature back then, and we did not have today's embarrassment of riches when it comes to Linux management and clustering and orchestration software.
It looked stupid enough at the time to get him fired for it.
Especially around the era Musk is quoted for (NT4 in the late 90's) I think most people would be understandably critical, even at the time
If you're a tech leader and confuse Linux boxes for mainframes then I don't think it's hindsight that makes you look foolish. It's that you do not, in fact, understand what you're talking about or how to talk about it - which is your job as a tech leader.
One of my most contrarian positions is I still like and support Altman, despite most of the internet now hating him almost as much as they (justifiably) hate Elon. Was a fan of Sam pre-YC presidency and still am now.
(I also am a big fan of DeepSeek and its CEO.)
Tesla accelerated us forward into the electric car age. SpaceX revolutionized launches.
OpenAI added some real startup oomph to the AI arms race which was dominated by megacorps with entrenched products that they would have disrupted only slowly.
So these guys are doing useful things, however you feel about their other conduct. Personally I find the gross political flip-flops hard to stomach.
Why don't people realize that the chumps in these rackets are themselves? The news is not a TV show...
I don't support the mafia, but I sympathize with the local store that pays the mafia its racket dues to avoid being ransacked.
- Sam Altman - 2016
- Sam Altman - 2017
- Sam Altman - 2017
- Sam Altman - 2017 ( On his criticism of Trump )
- Sam Altman - 2020The reason the flip flops are so laughable to me is because they attempt to couch them in some noble, moralistic viewpoint, instead of the obvious reason "We own big companies, the government has extreme power to make or break these companies, and everyone knows kissing up to Trump is what is required to be on his good side."
Profiles in Cowardice, every last one of them.
> After years of pretending to be Democrats, Big Tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration. Beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors.
This is exactly what OpenAI is trying to do with these allegations.
There is a fine line between cowardice and common sense.
The richest man in the world has a government office down the street from the white house, which the taxpayers are funding. He's rumored to sleep there.
What do you think?
For a contrast to the Bezos, Zuckerberg and Altman types, look at Tim Cook. Sure, Apple paid the 1 million inauguration "donation", and Cook was at the inauguration, and I'm not arguing he's winning any "Profiles in Courage" awards, but he didn't come out with lots of tweets claiming how massuh Trump is so wise and awesome, Apple didn't do a 180 on their previous policies, etc.
Their failure is important at a minimum to the future of the United States if not the world.
Society will always have crazy sociopaths destroying things for their own gain, and now is Altman's turn.
I think DeepSeek’s strategy to announce a misleading low cost (just the final training run that optimizes a base model that in turn is possibly based on OpenAI) is also purposeful. After all, High Flyer, the parent company of DeepSeek, is a hedge fund - and I bet they took out big short positions on Nvidia before their recent announcements. The Chinese government, of course, benefits from a misleading number being announced broadly, causing doubt among investors who would otherwise continue to prop up American technology startups. Not to mention the big fall in American markets as a result.
I do think there’s also a big difference between scraping the Internet for training data, which might just be fair use, and training off other LLMs or obtaining their assets in some other way. The latter feels like the kind of copying and industrial espionage that used to get China ridiculed in the 2000s and 2010s. Note that DeepSeek has never detailed their training data, even at a high level. This is true even in their previous papers, where they were very vague about the pre training process, which feels suspicious.
Being a citizen of a western nation, I'm inclined to agree with the general sentiment here, but how can you definitively say this? You, or I, don't know with any certainty what interference the US government has played with domestic LLMs, or what lies they have fabricated and cultivated, that are now part of those LLMs' collective knowledge. We can see the perceived censorship with deepseek more clearly, but that isn't evidence that we're in any safer territory.
Good for them! I hope this teaches Wall Street to not freak out about an unverified announcement.
Wall Street lost billions, and I hope they learned their lesson and next time will not crash the market when unverified news comes out.
There are loads of examples on the internet of LLMs pushing (foreign) government narratives e.g. on Israel-Palestine.
Just because you might agree with the propaganda doesn't make it any less problematic.
There isn’t even a single example of that. If an LLM is taking a certain position because it has learned from articles on that topic, that’s different from it being manipulated on purpose to answer differently on that topic. You’re confusing an LLM simply reflecting the complexity out there in the world on some topics (showing up in training data), with government forced censorship and propaganda in DeepSeek.
The two aren’t the same, not even remotely close.
That's far more dystopian than a post-hoc "guardrailed" model (that you can run locally without guardrails).
Is corporate misinformation so much better? Recall about Tienanmen Square might be more honest but if LLMs had been available over the past 50 years, I would expect many popular models would have cheerfully told us company towns are a great place to live, cigarettes are healthy, industrial pollution has no impact on your health, and anthropogenic climate change isn't real.
Especially after the recent behaviour of Meta, Twitter, and Amazon in open support of Trump and Republican interests, I'll be shocked if we don't start seeing that reflected in their LLMs over the next few years.
These arguments always remind me of the arguments against Huawei because they _might_ be spying on western countries. On the other hand we had the US government working hand in hand with US corporations in proven spying operations against western allies for political and economic gain. So why should we choose an American supplier over a Chinese one?
> I think DeepSeek’s strategy to announce a misleading low cost (just the final training run that optimizes a base model that in turn is possibly based on OpenAI) is also purposeful. After all, High Flyer, the parent company of DeepSeek, is a hedge fund - and I bet they took out big short positions on Nvidia before their recent announcements. The Chinese government, of course, benefits from a misleading number being announced broadly, causing doubt among investors who would otherwise continue to prop up American technology startups. Not to mention the big fall in American markets as a result.
Why should I care about the stock value of US corporations?
> I do think there’s also a big difference between scraping the Internet for training data, which might just be fair use, and training off other LLMs or obtaining their assets in some other way.
So if training of copyrighted work scrapped of the Internet is fair use, how would the training of the LLMs not be fair use as well? You can't have it both ways.
You may not owe Altmen better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I find your behavior repulsive and fervently wish you would quit.
It's not a borderline call—I'd post exactly the same thing regardless of who or what such a comment was about.
Not even close.
This guy is actively ruining society while enriching himself in the process, but we somehow can't call a spade a spade?
Pathetic.
HN's stated mandate is intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Do you feel like your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42866108 counts as curious? or is it rather that you think something else is more important?