Hi Ronan, thanks for the article and for answering questions.
My question is, how do you know when an enormous project like this, conducted over an 18-month time span is "done"? I assume you get a lot of leeway from editors and publishers on this matter. How do you make the decision to finally pull the trigger on publishing?
Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a]
This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world.
OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]
Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude, because they think it's a better product.[c]
Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position similar?
Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response.
The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.
Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much about that.
I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors.
If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love to hear about it.
Who is “us”? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex for its math capabilities but when it comes to general frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills library.
Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems
Us = me and say /r/codex or wherever Codex users are. I've tried both, liked both, but in my projects one clearly produces better results, more maintainable code and does a better job of debugging and refactoring.
That's interesting, I actively use both and usually find it to be a toss up which one performs better at a given task. I generally find Claude to be better with complex tool calls and Codex to be better at reviewing code, but otherwise don't see a significant difference.
If you want to find an advocate for Codex that can give a pretty good answer as to why they think it's better, go ask Eric Provencher. He develops https://repoprompt.com/. He spends a lot of time thinking in this space and prefers Codex over Claude, though I haven't checked recently to see if he still has that opinion. He's pretty reachable on Discord if you poke around a bit.
For that I'm not so sure. I tried both early 2025 and was disappointed in their ability to deal with a TCA based app (iOS) and Jetpack compose stuff on Android, but I assume Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 are much better.
Not a scientist and use codex for anything complex.
I enjoy using CC more and use it for non coding tasks primarily, but for anything complex (honestly most of what I do is not that complex), I feel like I am trading future toil for a dopamine hit.
I'm in that camp -- I have the max-tier subscription to pretty much all the services, and for now Codex seems to win. Primarily because 1) long horizon development tasks are much more reliable with codex, and 2) OpenAI is far more generous with the token limits.
Gemini seems to be the worst of the three, and some open-weight models are not too bad (like Kimi k2.5). Cursor is still pretty good, and copilot just really really sucks.
My rule of thumb is that its good for anything "broad", and weaker for anything "deep". Broad tasks are tasks which require working knowledge of lots of random stuff. Its bad at deep work - like implementing a complex, novel algorithm.
LLMs aren't able to achieve 100% correctness of every line of code. But luckily, 100% correctness is not required for debugging. So its better at that sort of thing. Its also (comparatively) good at reading lots and lots of code. Better than I am - I get bogged down in details and I exhaust quickly.
An example of broad work is something like: "Compile this C# code to webassembly, then run it from this go program. Write a set of benchmarks of the result, and compare it to the C# code running natively, and this python implementation. Make a chart of the data add it to this latex code." Each of the steps is simple if you have expertise in the languages and tools. But a lot of work otherwise. But for me to do that, I'd need to figure out C# webassembly compilation and go wasm libraries. I'd need to find a good charting library. And so on.
I think its decent at debugging because debugging requires reading a lot of code. And there's lots of weird tools and approaches you can use to debug something. And its not mission critical that every approach works. Debugging plays to the strengths of LLMs.
The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated?
Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It was founded by the parents of the psychologist who coined DARVO, directly in reaction to her accusing them of abuse.
Dissociation is real (I have a dissociative disorder, and abuse I “recovered” but did not remember for much of my adolescence and early adulthood has been corroborated by third parties) and many CSA survivors have severe memory problems that often don’t come to a head until adulthood. I know you didn’t dismiss her claim, but the way the public tends to think about recovered memories is shaped primarily by that awful organization.
I have the feeling that if you write an article in that style, the subject of the story becomes the hero even if you insert a couple of negatives. In the same manner that Michael Corleone becomes the hero of The Godfather.
I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted.
On the positive side, the Kushner ad Abu Dhabi involvements (and threats from Kushner) deserve a wider audience.
My personal opinion is that "who should control AI" is the wrong question. In the current state, it is an IP laundering device and I wonder why publications fall silent on this. For example, the NYT has abandoned their crown witness Suchir Balaji who literally perished for his convictions (murder or not).
Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star behind all this that’s not centered on himself?
The piece is an interrogation of this very question, at great length and with some nuance. I think what it does most usefully is scrutinize an array of different answers to the question.
My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he is identifying something of a true north star when he frames this around "winning." There are people in the story who talk about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opposed to, say, wealth). I think he probably also believes, to some extent, the story he tells that equates winning, and his gaining power, with a superabundant utopian future for all.
However, I think critics correctly highlight a tension between his statements about centering humanity writ large and his tilt into relentless accelerationism.
Damn, just wanted to say reporters are scary... The amount of detail here is huge. You think of hackers as the ones good at doxing... Nah, its reporters.
Do you think the recent conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War, and the apparent bootlicking by OpenAI has fundamentally altered the public perception of OAI? Are they the baddies now in the general public opinion?
In depth reporting is great. This is a really tricky topic to cover over the course of 18 months. A year and a half ago OpenAI was ascendant, now it's -at best- stalling and, more likely, trending toward irrelevant.
I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.
However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in.
I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted you to know.
You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income from me.
The public library [digital edition] is absolutely the correct answer. I maintain a library card at 3 different local municipal library systems. My local city's library offers access to several Digital Library apps, including Overdrive, Hoopla, and Libby.
It took me a couple searches in Libby to locate the New Yorker and it offered up the current issue right away. The article is on page 32. It is ridiculous that anyone considers to access this from "The Public Internet" or the newyorker dot com website, rather than simply turning to your public library, which has been the go-to resource for basically everyone, for hundreds of years.
You're already paying for your library with your tax dollars. If you don't use it, you may lose it, but you will certainly lose out by subsidizing bums, vagrants, and other families who use the library to their heart's content.
The public library also features lots of streaming and CD music, videos, and video games, that you can freely check out without any cost. In fact, my local library staff told me that they've abolished overdue fees. Libby and the digital apps will automatically renew or return materials. My physical books even got auto-renewed three times before I needed to manually do it, or bring them back into the building.
Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.
This is absolutely the correct answer. I maintain a library card at 3 different local municipal library systems. My local city's library offers access to several Digital Library apps, including Overdrive, Hoopla, and Libby.
It took me a couple searches in Libby to locate the New Yorker and it offered up the current issue right away. The article is on page 32. It is ridiculous that anyone considers to access this from "The Public Internet" or the newyorker dot com website, rather than simply turning to your public library, which has been the go-to resource for basically everyone, for hundreds of years.
You're already paying for your library with your tax dollars. If you don't use it, you may lose it, but you will certainly lose out by subsidizing bums, vagrants, and other families who use the library to their heart's content.
The public library also features lots of streaming and CD music, videos, and video games, that you can freely check out without any cost. In fact, my local library staff told me that they've abolished overdue fees. Libby and the digital apps will automatically renew or return materials. My physical books even got auto-renewed three times before I needed to manually do it, or bring them back into the building.
Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course, I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" - I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers they have :-)
Sure, 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.
I'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.
> 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.
Eh. The buck doesn't stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth.
The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.
While true and we can see them literally everywhere where there is some money and/or power (even miniscule places like classic banks have easily 1/3 of the staff with clear sociopathic traits, I have to deal with them daily... or whole politics) - thats just human nature, or part of it.
Its up to rest of society to keep them in check since classic morals are highly optional and considered nuissance blocking those games. And here we the rest fail pretty miserably, while having on paper perfect tool - majority vote.
Wow, 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.
They'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.
There's a time and a place for everything, and rejecting popular media as "lowest common denominator" is the most uninspired form of cultural elitism.
Is it cynical to want your <art project> to make a profit? Or for it to make enough profit to subsidize other projects?
Is it cynical to make something accessible so more people who watch it are able to enjoy it?
I agree that it's embarrassing and feels crass when movies both try to be broadly appealing and simultaneously fail to be entertaining or well executed ... but many of the marvel movies clearly surpass that bar.
No one wants to make a bad movie that does poorly with critics and paying customers - but it does happen because making a movie is expensive and complicated and requires a lot of skilled people working together towards the same goal.
Regarding taste: do you think a michelin star chef swears off cheap food like hotdogs or fish and chips? Doubtful - because those foods have their place and the chef is able to enjoy them for what they are rather than use them as an excuse to display a superiority complex.
When 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.
We 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.
I 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.
Great 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.
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.
One 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.
This 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.
I have been in or next to a number of social circles with such missing stairs, where for various reasons people in the groups have decided to not directly acknowledge certain Facts that are known about some members, because it would involve them confronting their hypocrisy.
Someone cheating regularly on their partner, flagrant substance use problems, controlling people who ostracize anyone who doesn't agree with their sometimes insane perspectives...
People will go along with quite a lot to avoid friction, especially as they get older and picking up new social circles becomes higher cost.
It's possibly the most telling thing, when you see what people say is a hard line versus how they actually respond to it.
I 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.
Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.
> 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 intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
That'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.
"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.
It'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.
It'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.
The entire thing is a joy to read, especially in the age of LLM prose. I mean this juxtaposition is just clever
>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.
I 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.
But 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?
Founding his own company would be one alternative. Full control. No stigma on the non-profit part. Probably get the same paper money as he got now at OpenAI.
The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows that the system is flawed.
The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is very flawed.
We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their money.
Well, redistributing their money is (in some cases disingenuously) exactly how they are able to pitch investors. "Sure, value my company at $10B and my shares make me $2B, but we're alllllll gonna make money when hit AGI!!!" That kind of thing.
This 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.
He'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.
Amazing 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.
This 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&qu....)
Oh, 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.
Even 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.
One 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.
HN 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.
I 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.
This 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.
Well 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.
You might be. Or at least I feel like Gemini is actually dumber than a house of bricks - I have multiple examples, just from last week, where following its advice would have lead to damage to equipment and could have hurt someone. That's just trying to work on an electronics project and askin Gemini for advice based on pictures and schematics - it just confidently states stuff that is 100000% bullshit, and I'm so glad that I have at least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would have easily hurt myself.
It's somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me every week, but it just doesn't follow instructions and keeps repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now, like it's some kind of giant joke that all these companies are playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that don't seem that intelligent.
I also use claude at work, and for C++ programming it behaves like someone who read a C++ book once and knows all the keywords, but has never actually written anything in C++ - the code it produces is barely usable, and only in very very small portions.
Edit: I just remembered another one that made me incredibly angry. I've been reading the Neuromancer on and off, and I got back into it, but to remind myself of the plot I asked Gemini to summarise the plot only up to chapter 14, and I specifically included the instruction that it should double check it's not spoiling anything from the rest of the book. Lo and behold, it just printed out the summary of the ending and how the characters actions up to chapter 14 relate to it. And that was in the "Pro" setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real life person did that I'd stop being friends with them, but somehow I'm paying money for this. Maybe I'm the clown here.
It set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now.
I only saw this thread by chance and almost didn't look, because the title made the piece sound like a flamebait blog post. Fortunately I saw newyorker.com beside the title and looked more closely.
There 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.
> OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teams
A paper with "ideas to keep people first" was (coincidentally?) published today:
• Worker perspectives
• AI-first entrepreneurs
• Right to AI
• Accelerate grid expansion
• Accelerate scientific discovery and scale the benefits.
• Modernize the tax base
• Public Wealth Fund
• Efficiency dividends
• Adaptive safety nets that work for everyone
• Portable benefits
• Pathways into human-centered work
You 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.
But 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?
I'm not sure what big_toast meant, but we do trust the user base to comment intelligently (which sometimes works and sometimes not), and we don't devalue articles like this.
We do tend to devalue titles like this, or more likely change them to something more substantive (preferably using a representative phrase from the article body), but I'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls of protest, since YC is part of the story.
I'm sure you're sick of comments about moderation, but I will say, this makes me more sympathetic to the position you're in.
It's an interesting dilemma. Many very respected publications use provocative titles because of the attention economy. And I'm sure you have good data that provocative titles lead to drive-by comments and flame wars.
But I don't think big_toast was entirely wrong that there is a side effect of sometimes burying articles that are by their nature provocative. And how do you distinguish a flame war over a title from a flame war over content? That's not a leading question. I don't know.
Yes, I was surprised that it was downranked when I saw that too. Then I realized it had set off the flamewar detector and it was a simple matter to turn it off. I'm glad we got to this in time, because sometimes we don't, and this was an important case not to miss.
Excellent 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.
I 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.
For 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.
I 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.
I 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.
What 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.
This 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.
Disclaimer: 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...
Seeing 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.
> 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.
It 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.
>
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.
I'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.
Money 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.
Yes, 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.
Note: 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.
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)
This 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.
OpenAI 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.
I'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.
Well 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.
makes sense if you think the point of journalism is just to take everyone down a notch instead of... um... informing the public of bad actors
"the local drug-dealing pimp is so passe, we need to investigate the most upstanding members of the community just to be sure" is a frankly insane strategy
A 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?
My question is, how do you know when an enormous project like this, conducted over an 18-month time span is "done"? I assume you get a lot of leeway from editors and publishers on this matter. How do you make the decision to finally pull the trigger on publishing?
This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world.
OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]
Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude, because they think it's a better product.[c]
Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position similar?
---
[a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
[b] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-sh...
[c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.
I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors.
If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love to hear about it.
No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.
Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems
I enjoy using CC more and use it for non coding tasks primarily, but for anything complex (honestly most of what I do is not that complex), I feel like I am trading future toil for a dopamine hit.
Gemini seems to be the worst of the three, and some open-weight models are not too bad (like Kimi k2.5). Cursor is still pretty good, and copilot just really really sucks.
LLMs aren't able to achieve 100% correctness of every line of code. But luckily, 100% correctness is not required for debugging. So its better at that sort of thing. Its also (comparatively) good at reading lots and lots of code. Better than I am - I get bogged down in details and I exhaust quickly.
An example of broad work is something like: "Compile this C# code to webassembly, then run it from this go program. Write a set of benchmarks of the result, and compare it to the C# code running natively, and this python implementation. Make a chart of the data add it to this latex code." Each of the steps is simple if you have expertise in the languages and tools. But a lot of work otherwise. But for me to do that, I'd need to figure out C# webassembly compilation and go wasm libraries. I'd need to find a good charting library. And so on.
I think its decent at debugging because debugging requires reading a lot of code. And there's lots of weird tools and approaches you can use to debug something. And its not mission critical that every approach works. Debugging plays to the strengths of LLMs.
https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m
https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532
Unfortunately it probably doesn't even matter here on HN considering how brigaded down this story is predictably getting.
But yeah, it was a fantastic piece.
Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It was founded by the parents of the psychologist who coined DARVO, directly in reaction to her accusing them of abuse.
Dissociation is real (I have a dissociative disorder, and abuse I “recovered” but did not remember for much of my adolescence and early adulthood has been corroborated by third parties) and many CSA survivors have severe memory problems that often don’t come to a head until adulthood. I know you didn’t dismiss her claim, but the way the public tends to think about recovered memories is shaped primarily by that awful organization.
As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman's partners and what we found and didn't is as described.
I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted.
On the positive side, the Kushner ad Abu Dhabi involvements (and threats from Kushner) deserve a wider audience.
My personal opinion is that "who should control AI" is the wrong question. In the current state, it is an IP laundering device and I wonder why publications fall silent on this. For example, the NYT has abandoned their crown witness Suchir Balaji who literally perished for his convictions (murder or not).
Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star behind all this that’s not centered on himself?
My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he is identifying something of a true north star when he frames this around "winning." There are people in the story who talk about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opposed to, say, wealth). I think he probably also believes, to some extent, the story he tells that equates winning, and his gaining power, with a superabundant utopian future for all.
However, I think critics correctly highlight a tension between his statements about centering humanity writ large and his tilt into relentless accelerationism.
I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.
However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in.
I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted you to know.
You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income from me.
You're already paying for your library with your tax dollars. If you don't use it, you may lose it, but you will certainly lose out by subsidizing bums, vagrants, and other families who use the library to their heart's content.
The public library also features lots of streaming and CD music, videos, and video games, that you can freely check out without any cost. In fact, my local library staff told me that they've abolished overdue fees. Libby and the digital apps will automatically renew or return materials. My physical books even got auto-renewed three times before I needed to manually do it, or bring them back into the building.
It took me a couple searches in Libby to locate the New Yorker and it offered up the current issue right away. The article is on page 32. It is ridiculous that anyone considers to access this from "The Public Internet" or the newyorker dot com website, rather than simply turning to your public library, which has been the go-to resource for basically everyone, for hundreds of years.
You're already paying for your library with your tax dollars. If you don't use it, you may lose it, but you will certainly lose out by subsidizing bums, vagrants, and other families who use the library to their heart's content.
The public library also features lots of streaming and CD music, videos, and video games, that you can freely check out without any cost. In fact, my local library staff told me that they've abolished overdue fees. Libby and the digital apps will automatically renew or return materials. My physical books even got auto-renewed three times before I needed to manually do it, or bring them back into the building.
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.
The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.
Its up to rest of society to keep them in check since classic morals are highly optional and considered nuissance blocking those games. And here we the rest fail pretty miserably, while having on paper perfect tool - majority vote.
> "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.
The people shaping the future have no taste.
Is it cynical to want your <art project> to make a profit? Or for it to make enough profit to subsidize other projects?
Is it cynical to make something accessible so more people who watch it are able to enjoy it?
I agree that it's embarrassing and feels crass when movies both try to be broadly appealing and simultaneously fail to be entertaining or well executed ... but many of the marvel movies clearly surpass that bar.
No one wants to make a bad movie that does poorly with critics and paying customers - but it does happen because making a movie is expensive and complicated and requires a lot of skilled people working together towards the same goal.
Regarding taste: do you think a michelin star chef swears off cheap food like hotdogs or fish and chips? Doubtful - because those foods have their place and the chef is able to enjoy them for what they are rather than use them as an excuse to display a superiority complex.
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.
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.
Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai...
Fantastic reporting.
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.
Someone cheating regularly on their partner, flagrant substance use problems, controlling people who ostracize anyone who doesn't agree with their sometimes insane perspectives...
People will go along with quite a lot to avoid friction, especially as they get older and picking up new social circles becomes higher cost.
It's possibly the most telling thing, when you see what people say is a hard line versus how they actually respond to it.
In your investigation were you able to determine if Altman has similar proxies?
How common would you say that this is? Do these kinds of people generally have teams of people who sling mud for them?
Can you speculate on how that manifests on a site like Hackernews?
This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of power between a few organizations with untrustworthy incentives and leadership.
If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
>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.
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.
The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows that the system is flawed.
The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is very flawed.
We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their money.
All the downsides without much upside...
Sergey Brin is trying to change that lately, but Altman still has a sizable head start.
> 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.
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.
(* 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&qu....)
Or if the person lying is in a position of power?
Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.
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&que....
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VWJVBNzc2u
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.
You might be. Or at least I feel like Gemini is actually dumber than a house of bricks - I have multiple examples, just from last week, where following its advice would have lead to damage to equipment and could have hurt someone. That's just trying to work on an electronics project and askin Gemini for advice based on pictures and schematics - it just confidently states stuff that is 100000% bullshit, and I'm so glad that I have at least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would have easily hurt myself.
It's somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me every week, but it just doesn't follow instructions and keeps repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now, like it's some kind of giant joke that all these companies are playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that don't seem that intelligent.
I also use claude at work, and for C++ programming it behaves like someone who read a C++ book once and knows all the keywords, but has never actually written anything in C++ - the code it produces is barely usable, and only in very very small portions.
Edit: I just remembered another one that made me incredibly angry. I've been reading the Neuromancer on and off, and I got back into it, but to remind myself of the plot I asked Gemini to summarise the plot only up to chapter 14, and I specifically included the instruction that it should double check it's not spoiling anything from the rest of the book. Lo and behold, it just printed out the summary of the ending and how the characters actions up to chapter 14 relate to it. And that was in the "Pro" setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real life person did that I'd stop being friends with them, but somehow I'm paying money for this. Maybe I'm the clown here.
I only saw this thread by chance and almost didn't look, because the title made the piece sound like a flamebait blog post. Fortunately I saw newyorker.com beside the title and looked more closely.
Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting in your communities, and subscribe to investigative outlets when you can.
A paper with "ideas to keep people first" was (coincidentally?) published today:
https://openai.com/index/industrial-policy-for-the-intellige...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
We do tend to devalue titles like this, or more likely change them to something more substantive (preferably using a representative phrase from the article body), but I'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls of protest, since YC is part of the story.
It's an interesting dilemma. Many very respected publications use provocative titles because of the attention economy. And I'm sure you have good data that provocative titles lead to drive-by comments and flame wars.
But I don't think big_toast was entirely wrong that there is a side effect of sometimes burying articles that are by their nature provocative. And how do you distinguish a flame war over a title from a flame war over content? That's not a leading question. I don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
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.
If for no other reason, given what happened when the board fired him... no. I'd say not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.
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...
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.
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.
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.
No, he cannot.
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
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.
It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.
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.
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)
2. You cannot "control" superintelligent AI.
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.
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.
"the local drug-dealing pimp is so passe, we need to investigate the most upstanding members of the community just to be sure" is a frankly insane strategy
And when you're dealing with a potential existential threat, this is an existential problem.