Come on… The guy who said he can’t imagine caring for his child without consulting ChatGPT… The guy who said he didn’t know how to make revenue with ChatGPT, and made a “soft promise” to investors they’d somehow achieve AGI then ask it how to make money… The guy who made a cryptocurrency scam that was banned in multiple countries… The guy who everyone around him says he’s a con artist and a sociopath… That guy? Really?

Really. That guy. I'm afraid you're one side of the coin in https://paulgraham.com/fh.html. Paul himself would agree with me on that if he were to read your post.

I’ve read enough Paul Graham to know he’s not someone whose opinion I care about or respect. He’s yet another rich guy tech bro out of touch with normal people who unfortunately has an army of wannabe tech and finance bro shills clinging to his every word like he’s some sort of sage. He’s not. He isn’t smarter than anyone else, he just has a bigger platform. I don’t abide by cults of personality, they’re a major reason everything is shit right now. They’re the fuel that perpetuates online and offline toxicity. Bragging that Paul Graham would agree with you is like bragging Will Smith or Kim Kardashian agrees with you: it’s not a badge of honour even if it’s true, and doesn’t make your argument stronger or mean you’re right.

But since you value his opinion so much, perhaps you should inform yourself of what he has said about Altman, including “Sam had been lying to us all the time”.

Paul has addressed this quote many times afterwards. But you've already said you don't care about his opinion, so it's not worth showing his explanation. He still likes Sam.

Uhh literally what is one thing Sam has done or said that demonstrates he's either human-aligned or visionary?

I could write a giant response to this with dozens of quotes from him and others and various sources but you would just say it's all lies/posturing, so it would not be a good use of my time. I will say that him becoming one of the most prominent funders and promoters of UBI research/experiments 6 years before GPT-3 is probably not a coincidence, though. OpenAI releasing a paper a month ago strongly suggesting the US move towards a more socialist economic system to handle massive economic upheaval is also probably not a coincidence. He obviously founded OpenAI with the primary intent of making AI so that they could make it go well instead of poorly, and it going well means properly addressing mass unemployment, biosecurity risks, some degree of widely distributed access so that the very poorest get meaningful use of the exact same intelligence as what the very richest get to use, etc.

This is what the most midwit milquetoast person in the country would try to do if they were in Sam's shoes and, like Sam, once they had a couple billion dollars dangled in front of them they'd abandon all regard for safety or distribution of wealth or whatever-else-they-thought-they-ought-to-care-about.

I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ. We can make up "what if"s all day but it's meaningless to even discuss them if you don't have a shred of evidence to support the claim.

Exactly. The second coming of Christ would be a very good case.

Why people want to believe Altman is good is about the same reason people want to believe in the second coming.

I’m really struggling to see how Christian apocalyptic ideas are even remotely relevant.

We used to be capable of so much.

So much of the AI Hype is religion encoded. It's relevant because the AI companies are invoking the ideas. If you go around telling people that AI is going to cure cancer, bring about global prosperity, and give you an uploaded immortality then you cannot be surprised when some people start thinking of it similarly to the second coming.

I'm consistently amused by the fact that there's still this weird faction of populists on even tech-oriented sites like HN and /r/programming and lobste.rs and Mastodon who have this almost antivax-level stance on AI. I'm not precisely sure what explains it, because many of them actually are smart people and good programmers.

AI very likely will cure many cancers and very possibly (assuming combined with good politicians) will bring about global prosperity. A high percentage of AI company employees and executives and open source developers and researchers sincerely believe it will and so they say they believe it will. They have good reason to believe it, and they will likely be proven correct. If 400 (or 40, or 4) years pass and it's still mostly just creating spreadsheets, I will concede, though.

> I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ.

Makes sense. Cue Don LaFontaine: In a world, where one man sacrificed himself for all of humanity… And they learned nothing of his lessons… In a country where people lie in his name as an excuse to hate their fellow man… Where they mock him by wearing his moment of death as jewellery¹… He’s back and adopted a new identity to slowly fuck them all and make the world burn… Johnny W Pussyfoot is Jesus in: The Second Coming.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJSZcxXe7IQ

If he's our representative in the era of superintelligence, we are all screwed.

If you give me a hundred dollars, I promise I'll come back tomorrow and hand you thirty trillion dollars.