Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.
I couldn't agree more, on both counts. It's such a thrill seeing a link to a research paper or exceptionally well written essay, and have the author answering questions in the comments. I can't even estimate how much general science, history, and literary education I've received this way, almost by accident. No doubt I am a much more well rounded person as a result.
I rarely read TFA. I'm here for the discussion, and if the discussion is extraordinarily interesting, I'll read the article for clarification. To me, HN is the "guild" that teaches fundamentals, and keeps me abreast of the state of the industry (and many, many unrelated topics that are equally interesting!). Normally this level of access to illuminating dialog would be restricted to universities, but I can get it here for free, in my underwear. I've spent a good part of my life geographically isolated from centers of learning and industry, and being able to remain in the loop is priceless. I doubt my personal and professional growth over the last 10 years would be a fraction of what it is if I hadn't had this resource. Yes, I am a fanboy.
Specifically I have become a better writer. The HN crowd is a tough but fair audience when it comes to upvotes on comments.
Before HN there was PG's blog.
Before pg's blog, there was /.,
before /. there was Carmack's .plan file ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575501
The strength of YC is the relatively large value they provide in exchange for your equity. Their "price" is still excellent and continues to clear the market. This becomes rapidly obvious if you attempt to raise early stage funding and start comparing options.
Aside from the actual cash and the famous network, YC and its partners have earned a reputation for sticking with their investments through tough times instead of writing them off. This seems relatively rare amongst early stage investors, especially outside the US. In my relatively few years of experience in business, I've learnt to value people in the "cooperate cooperate" quadrant of the Prisoner's Dilemma very highly, and it's not a reputation you can "buy" quickly.
HN is a place to have civilised discussions thanks to both a seed of core tech personalities for historical reasons drawing a network of quality, and thorough and active moderation. I think "self-perpetuating machine" is harsh and not quite representative of most of the value derived by those of us who are not part of the YC ecosystem and unlikely ever to be (and yes, I haven't read the original article).
PS: nice site! Light, fast and with just one tracker (but "old geeks" would crunch web logs, surely?)
And, thanks for the feedback OldGeekJobs. It's been making rounds on HN over the last two weeks.
This is a great way to put it. People who act in good faith are the only people I'd want to do business with, and YC has (rightfully IMO) earned a reputation for being a partner you can trust.
Edit: Getting downvoted, but these resources are really great, so I'm not sure what's going on. I just added links in case people are unfamiliar.
But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes.
Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you.
A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles.
This comes out in small ways:
1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad-school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator.
2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech’s culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as “a buck,” he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco’s Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity."
3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, “A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ "
Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.
The negative passages are an integral part of the story, which is about a wealthy and powerful guy living in a closed-off bubble of wealthy and powerful guys with limited or no outside supervision, and a capacity for self-reflection bounded within an extraordinarily limited scope. It may not be the story you want to be told, but it's a perfectly legitimate take on the situation.
> “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
Hahaha, that's so awesome.
Imagine this coming from an ultra rightwing prepper nutball. Do you still love that quote?
I am not predicting impending doom, but when it hits the fan, better to have a plan than not.
Keep in mind the official government recommendation is that everyone should be a prepper.
The SV ethos, in a nutshell.
I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.
His argument that our world is most likely a simulation does seem logical given our current knowledge. However, breaking out of the simulation is completely another matter, more in line with Hollywood thinking than with anything that scientists can be engaged to do, at least currently.
EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines
For example, if light did not have a speed limit, and interacted with the entire universe instantly, this would be very hard to simulate. You would save resources by giving light a speed limit.
We also expect that they might abstract out the nitty gritty details of how things work at the atomic level. If you don't really care that much about how very small particles interact with each other, you might have these numerous calculations evaluated lazily, when they are "observed" by the higher level entities.
Things get really interesting when you start thinking about what kind of bugs a god programmer might be likely to make when designing their simulation.
Are there any weird natural processes, that would be much more elegant if our equations modeling them were changed very slightly, almost as if the equation was a mistake in the first place? Another attack avenue is to combine two natural processes in unexpected ways, to try and find "edge cases".
On a different note, does simulation hypothesis strike anyone else as the idea God just explained in pseudo scientific/computing terms?
The simulation argument is one that can be supported or argued against using evidence.
For example, if scientists find some new nature process that would be very difficult to simulate, (infinite speed of light is one such example) then that is strong evidence that we aren't in a simultion.
Of course, even if we keep observing things about the universe that would make it easier to simulate, that doesn't mean we actually are. It could just all be a coincidence. Or maybe it doesn't make any sense for a universe to be difficult to simulate.
The basic idea is to ask the question "Assume someone lives in a simulation. What would that person be likely/unlikely to observe?". and "Assume someone does NOT live in a simulation. What would they be likely/unlikely to observe?" And see how much this stuff matches up with reality.
That's actually a pretty cool idea for a movie. Scientists hacking the universe to achieve alchemy and time travel. Maybe it could be a sequel to the Matrix. It's strange how they only ever made that one Matrix movie.
Interesting to consider: if we ever discovered ourselves to be living in a simulation and attempted to do something about it, would the simulator simply reset the simulation (a la The Matrix trilogy)? Or would the simulator be intrigued by our self-awareness and allow the simulation to continue?
But anyhow, that's enough of a digression for one day.
And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath.
You can find smart, rational, deep thinkers who adhere to any and all of the world's major and minor religions, as well as atheism.
You don't even need to take a position on religion to conclude that no-one really knows what's going on.
"Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist."
Only to one's immediate family might the work-life balance and low chance of success raise eybrows.
One of Altman’s co-founders at Loopt, Nick Sivo, was also his boyfriend; the two dated for nine years, but after the company sold they broke up. “I thought I was going to marry him—very in love with him,” Altman said
to me, sounds like a romance novel, not objective reporting. From a group that espouses the virtues of a 30 second elevator pitch, I find the down voting odd. There's an incredible amount of verbosity here that essentially adds nothing to the article. At 46 pages, that's roughly half the size of the entire GoLang specification.
Long articles are fine so long as the length is required to convey the information presented. Based on the first few paragraphs, this one appears to actively waste time with pretentiousness. Not my cup of tea.
I'm also curious about the 46 pages, I'd put it at about 15 in the print form of the magazine. Enjoyed the read and comment thread quite a bit.
It really is quite good and I have gone out of my way over these past 8 years or so to show them whatever patronage I can. To that end, I subscribe to the digital version on my kindle as well as buy the print version (which I prefer, aesthetically).
Since we're talking about it, I think any discussion of how good the New Yorker is has to touch on how good the London Review of Books is. It's a truly remarkable publication. Very, very left leaning but I appreciate it nonetheless. I highly recommend an LRB subscription to anyone that appreciates good, original, thoughtful reporting and commentary. As a bonus, you get a very different perspective on many world events than you get from US media.
I thought this was an interesting statistic. "80% of the fastest growing private companies did not need to raise capital to become one of the fastest growing companies."
"Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth."
That said, although VC funding might be a small percentage of investment overall, it has a leveraged impact on the economy as a whole [0]:
"According to a study conducted at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, 43% of U.S. public companies founded since 1979 were funded by venture capital. These companies now comprise 38% of all employees, 57% of the total U.S. market capitalization, and account for 82% of all R&D spend — a proxy for further innovation growth — in the United States."
Someone care to explain that because I don't see economic growth as a dependency to democracy.
The US and the West experienced a huge gain in resource that is quickly being squandered in a contest of "either we use it or we lose it". Since there was more to go around there is less need to enact stricter forms of government.
The application for the Inc 500 requires revenue disclosure. There are plenty of companies that decline to submit applications for the Inc 500, for reasons ranging from a hesitation to disclose revenue to a media company, to a hesitation to spend resources on PR that could be better spent on growth.
In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.
Lecture on said book http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bfriedman/files/moral_conse...
Foreign Affairs review http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bfriedman/files/the_ethical...
IMHO An economically strong middle class is needed to maintain social order. This mitigates the public from hunting and and killing the rich and keeps the public from displacing their social frustrations on to each other and creating riots. Generally its a better existence for everyone.
Obviously those are both failure modes. We want the quality of stretchiness, to use a technical term :) because the requirements of what the elastic band has to put up with are changing over time.
It goes like this:
Suppose there exist 2 parties to a conflict of interest. I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time.
Then it is possible for 1 party to play ball with the other party, but IFF there is a different, separate conflict of interest where the trade can be reversed.
So I win A, but only if I allow you to win B. 'the next time'
This logic only can work if we allow each other to be winners.
Suppose our economic incentive was to 'defect' in game theory parlance, and defect always. Why would this be so?
Perhaps because we're in a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game. Perhaps I must win or I will die, in which case my non-cooperation with you is non-negotiable.
"I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time."
sama, and Thiel, believe technology solves this by turning a potential rival good into non-rival goods. Or put more simply; if everybody can have stuff they are happy.
There can be exceptions to this logic, like a mother choosing her child's survival over her own in a pregnancy gone wrong. But in a world without growth, without those potential negotiations 'violence' becomes selected for.
The important realization is not the trivial 'more stuff makes people happy'. It does, but the real reason why growth is a big deal is that in the long run it selects for outcomes which don't lead to deadlock leading to violence.
Where I part company with Sam, is the belief that democracy is worth saving. It is worth saving representation, each entity's self interest in a system must be recognized yes, but not democracy. Ironically equal voting must lead to unequal outcomes. Right from the initial premise it does not hold up against physical reality. Like genetics, circumstance, and all of history. There are other systems in G-space that have the potential to be much better at governing. That includes systems in which people would feel much more represented than they do in our current system. Equality of votes is like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I mean even the NSDAP had policies on the environment and health most people agree with in the present. What does that say about our ability to select?
tldr; The relationship is close to axiomatic in game theory and democracy when looked at in the cold light of day is a pretty dim worldview to start with.
This is obviously an enormous topic area. It is also a dangerous and highly contentious subject matter filled with many taboos, due to its nature and importance.
That said political scholars, like economists, have come to many consensus realizations. This is kind of amazing since Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are clones from a political science perspective, there exists a great diversity of thought.
This means that there is not as much of a gap between somebody like Francis Fukuyama and Moldbug as is popularly imagined. If you have a sincere interest in outcomes you find unexpected allies.
Here is a good start:
Volume 1: The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama Volume 2: Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama
Seeing Like a State by James Scott
Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman
The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joesph Tainter
The majority of the time these authors are interested in outcomes, not in winning for whatever their home team is.
Outside of academia Silicon Valley itself is having a serious discussion on this topic from our perspective:
Balaji Srinivasan : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
Peter Thiel : http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4
Patri Friedman : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
Larry Page : https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/15/larry-page-wants-earth-to-...
Last but not least, the notorious Moldbug: Best explained by Scott Alexander : http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-...
If somebody is aware of an interesting line of thought around these issues I'll be happy to hear it.
One thing is perfectly clear and that is with the advent of the Internet we see the world differently and that this will lead to different forms of governance for the first time in several hundred years.
I also half seriously recommend you listen to audiobooks by Lovecraft to get into the appropriate mood for studying or reading about government.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
I don't agree with his statement but it feels familiar after reading the books I recommended to you. This stuff has scale and is scary, the last person to seriously tinker with the subject on this level was Karl Marx.
That is why Patri's ideas may eventually win the day, but I leave you to it.
Altman worked so incessantly that summer that he got scurvy.
I don't need to be rich that badly.
This is a highly dissonant statement, so it's not surprising it's coming from a VC.
Innovation is exploring the crazy and coming back with something that can be shoehorned into reality without upsetting reality's tea cart too much. The problem with VCs is that their jobs consist of spending time investing in crazy things that have far reaching drawbacks that nobody sees until everyone is using the product and the founders and investors have already exited their position.
It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!
What's stopping these things penetrating the west? For payments, mostly incumbents. For e-vehicles, mostly protectionist levels of government regulation that make small vehicles too expensive to approve as roadworthy or illegal to drive, and foreign SNS platforms have outright announced they are planning on emulating WeChat.
The expansion plans don't work because if you build a community which includes a few assholes they eventually overpower the system and being an asshole becomes the norm.
The last 3 paras of that article are worrisome.
Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.
The difference from Holmes is that Altman does not have to be particularly brilliant at something specifically, he just has to be the soul of the YC, ie life of the party.
From all accounts he is very good at that and that is of huge value to YC. Being a big ideas guy is an important and valuable position for an organization such as YC.
Holmes couldn't be such a generalist and life of party. She had to execute on a specific niche and failed very very late(I'd say about 10 years late). Holmes epitomizes the "fake it until you make it" taken to the extreme.
If Holmes had admitted defeat earlier maybe she could have been such a life of a party person at Draper's firm.
I think that circuit exists and is functioning quite well. It seems to me there's a lot of glory embedded in YC's plans.
... opined Altman in his New Yorker PR piece.
Perhaps he should have said "most people" instead of what he did say.
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifest%20destiny
> In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:
The special virtues of the American people and their institutions
The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America
An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
Sometimes it is blatant. See Congo Free State. The nominal justification was to bring civilisation and thus improve lives. Instead the people were enslaved in a state owned and controlled by private enterprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_follows_the_plow
This led to people settling in unwise places. And you know what, even though the Wikipedia page says that climatologists now regard this as mere superstition, these areas of the US are now well-populated: A critical mass did settle, so in a way it's all worked out.
Sounds like a classic case of survivor bias though? Where would Chicago be today if it wasn't for the trains? What would be the state of Phoenix Arizona if not for things like CAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project
You mentioned this but I wanted to spell it out.
Or in another sense; because it exists, then it exists only for them. It ties into their earlier religion where they warped the belief that an entity called God created the world for mankind and humans, where they only reason and believe that only they themselves to be human and man.
These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based on a sentence or two and they are often way off base.
My takeaway and you may disagree, without getting too heavy: Sam Altman is one of a very small handful of people in the history of the world who has the resources, the awareness, the intelligence and maybe the motivation to do important, mankind-changing things. Sound exciting? Actually to most people who get what that really means, that is very very scary and a bit sad.
This group of people is not limited to SV, but for comparison: Elon and Zuck are also in this handful of people with Sam. Musk has chosen his "inter-planetary species on planet Mars" and he has a plan. Zuck (and his wife LLC) seem to have chosen eradicating all diseases ASAP - his plan is starting now.
I don't think Sam has found his "Planet Mars" yet and that can be really hard on someone. He knows the odds of finding it and the odds of success even if he does find it.
I also think the YC startup thing that pg and Jessica started is of secondary importance here. Sam has the skills to run YC of course, but I'm not sure that's why pg handed it to him...
Sam might have office hours and can spit off advice like "talk to your paying customers more" or "understand the problem being fixed" which new, lost founders always seem to need to be told. This stuff is so easy for someone like Sam and most natural entrepreneurs it's almost laughable and might even get annoying after a while...
I think pg handed YC to Sam not for YC's sake. Many people could have taken over YC. I think one reason that pg did it was to give Sam something else to work on so Sam's search for meaning, for his "Planet Mars", didn't consume him to the point that it broke him and the promise he has. He did it to save Sam's life.
These are all assumptions and personal opinions. As someone familiar with earning a relatively large amount of money at a young age and then wanting to do something more important to me than just make more money, but not knowing what to do, Sam is among those I look to and I am following his career.
I wish him a lot of success and happiness.
I'm not really looking to attack Altman's character or competence, he seems to have both in spades, but the whole thing was just...creepy. And cultish.
The idea of writing this sort of piece about someone whose grand ambitions have not yet been realized is both to make the reader aware of the grandeur of the ambitions, and also to draw a line in the sand so that his accomplishments can be judged later, aided by the glimpse into his unfettered idealism.
This is not a criticism of the New Yorker (I love it). Just a phenomenon of the unique genre of personal profiles that the magazine produces. The same tone would also work if writing about an artisanal butcher in Maine, for example.
Unlike Sam, these guys can dive deep into whatever industry they choose with a very obvious clarity of thought. Watch any of their interviews for examples. Even though Steve Jobs wasn't "technical" he was able to speak about the technical aspects in detail. On the other hand, Sam seems to stand at a very high, superficial level. I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.
But it's not just that, these visionaries let their track record speak for itself. I don't seem to understand Sam's track record. A Stanford dropout whose claim to fame is selling Loopt for $43M (at a loss to investors) after raising $30M in total at a $175M valuation, and pocketing $5M for himself? Then goes on to tout YC's runaway success as due, in part, to his leadership when >60% of YC's portfolio value is due to ~15 companies from pre-2014 YC batches.
To top it off, as proof of his ambition, a silly comparison between YC's portfolio value being 14% of Alphabet's market cap is made. That's apples-to-oranges.
Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends. I wish people would stop forcing this narrative of Sam Altman as a visionary. Right now, he's more Tim Cook, less Steve Jobs. There's nothing wrong with being an operational genius. YC, the company, has a manifest destiny.
If you're American and some foreigners tell you that you all look like you're up your own assess all the time, just think of this New Yorker piece as an explanation why.
Excellent prose that crafts the same old boring story about how this very special individual has become richer and more successful than others. All around him an orbit of friendly millionaires and billionaires whose contradictive role is left out of the picture and an army of wannabes whose anxiety-laden lives are always romantically portrayed with a recurring reference to ramen-based meals -- because it's fine to have nutrition deficiencies and work 22 hours a day if you're building the next (much probably) useless tech startup that will hopefully turn you into the next Sam Altman.
This is what it is, people: a narrative. Why always trying to live by someone else's narrative? What really strikes me as incredibly counterintuitive is that every single startup story is different in its own ways, and what set successful startups apart is their willingness to follow individual paths. Yet, the way we tell these stories always gets down to pattern-matching the same old tropes everybody knows and loves.
I fondly appreciate most of the American culture, I'm enamoured with the startup scene naïveté, I think Y-combinator is a wonderful and extremely innovative player in the VC scenario. I mean, I love even this echo chamber that's called hacker news. That's how much I dig this stuff.
But again, I'm European. Doubt and skepticism are built in as standard features. So please, listen to me when I say that's better to limit agiography to the boooks about catholic saints from the Middle Age.
On topic, don't underestimate the power of faith. Humans are not rational beings by default, so powerful narratives about the hot shots of SV really do have an effect in inspiring the next generation of SV hot shots. Yeah, it might be a bubble waiting to pop, but it also might be the fastest economic and technological growth the world has ever seen.
The NYT and other papers have to deliver stories to the readership, I guess. But this has a premise that is borderline ridiculous.
YC has proven itself and justified its business model many times over. But one gets the sense that it is still cruising on the momentum of P.G. and the early team.
Not knocking Sam Altman in any way. He is ambitious and has a plan which he has publicized - but he has not yet delivered on it. It is far too early to laud his greatness by speaking of his 'manifest destiny'. He has high standards for YC applicants; we should apply those standards to him as well.
I think the best way to understand it is to compare their two respective "request for startups". Paul Graham had 6 concrete tradeable opinions about the world. Sam Altman has 21 non-specific opinions which cover more or less everything ("healthcare", "robots", "hollywood" with no specific opinions within the field), and several of them (11, 19, 14, 21) are not even startup sectors so much as talking points to show the Cathedral that he's one of them.
Additionally, Sam Altman is now in a position to achieve greatness and he probably will do so whether or not he has already. Someone in that position would not even have to be particularly exceptional (once again, whether he is or not) to do so. So whether he has or not so far is a moot point. I'm just pleased he has ambition and apparently isn't focused on the lime light. Compare that to how most billionaires use their funds (ie, big yachts etc) and you should just be pleased that anything is happening.
Anyway, my main point is that I guess that an appreciation of "genius" is a highly subjective thing. And the instant someone would mention Jobs as such is the same moment I'd intensely disagree with them. It can probably just be left at that.
Steve Jobs talked incessantly about object-oriented programming after he left Apple, and built an entire company (NeXT) and operating system (NeXTStep) using a new object-oriented programming language (Objective-C). He didn't write the code himself but he funded and led these efforts.
I do admit I am still very skeptical about his views on AI. I am not an expert on that particular subject, but as a student of biology my understanding is that we are still a very long way away from truly understanding how "intelligence" works...
What's even neater about AI is that the requirements to get involved are much lower than that of hardware and much easier to propagate. Combine that with the inherent power of machines teaching themselves and networking with each other and we may be looking at more of a power law or exponential rate of increase in capacity for accomplishments.
Very exciting times.
That's thinking very much from a CS point of view. Sure, if we're only talking about software you're quite right. But I would strongly argue that if we want to build an artificial intelligence, we first need to know what a "natural" intelligence looks like - and that includes a lot of neurobiological research that still needs doing. Now you can say what you like about software, but neuroscience doesn't come that cheap...
I don't consider myself a troll, nor do I hate Sam Altman. My goal is not to come here and slander. But I agree with you. Sam's accomplishments and track record have been very much exagerated. And he has played a roll in that exageration.
For me Sam's biggest qualities are: 1) being able to navigate sillicon valley skillfully 2) having a fantastic network 3) Portraying a self image that is super founder friendly (which he actually probably his, for at least the companies that are doing well).
That said he is not: 1) A successful founder. 2) A serial entrepreneur 3) A tech genius 4) A visionary
However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.)
OTOH, a few memorable quotes:
> Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman)
> Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders were ridden with angst. Fredrik Thomassen said that they wanted to make their war chest last forever, and Sondre Rasch mentioned that he’d frugally chosen to live in a twelve-entrepreneur collective in a nearby forest.
"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."
P.S. The mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/747/
"At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_...
I find this oddly reassuring.
This right here amounts to false equivalence. Suffice it to say that it is relatively easier to launch a start-up today, this doesn't change the fact that it is just as hard to keep one alive. The risks associated with launching a startup are all too real and I think they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Call it conformist, I call it hard and as such, not for everyone.
And your assessment of Airbnb of just "diverting dollars from the legacy provider" is wrong in my opinion, it turns an unused space into cash (creating a new market/enabling an underserved market), just like early-eBay turned unwanted stuff in your house into cash. I'm not fully sure where I stand on Uber, but they're certainly offering a much better customer experience than traditional taxis.
Reading the rest of your comment, I don't really think we disagree except that you seem to think AirBNB is driving additional revenue into the economy ("Also, I've stayed at AirBnb locations where there was no other accommodations options") - before AirBNB was there, what would you have done? You would have either stayed at a hotel that was further away than you'd like, or stayed home.
The consumer is definitely winning though.
The Freakonomics podcast had a really good economic justification for Uber specifically that goes beyond what I've described here. It's worth listening to (and I can't seem to link to it directly: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538045/freakonomics-radio -- September 7th).
I believe Sam is better at making such connections than most people I know.
Has there been a New Yorker piece on PG? I googled and didn't find anything. He's the one that put all this together and seems far more deserving of such a thing.
>“unlike Google, we grow faster as we get bigger. We could catch them in ten years.”
trying to be the biggest tech group in the world can be interesting even if he fails.
What accomplishments did you expect in 2 years?
Working towards OpenAI, YC Research, the upcoming MOOC, basic income project, the private city project seem very impressive to say the least.
After he has taken over, YC is expanding into new areas, mentioned above, whereas earlier they were focussed on getting the startup program right and expanding to accomodate larger batches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
I see a mix with no consensus.
The answer to that is: because McLarens are awesome. :-)
It's really easy to get fame and plaudits by associating yourself with a cornucopia of big ideas, it's a lot harder to actually follow through.
It does.
Sam mentioned in an interview (can't remember which one) he sees YC as a meta company, like Alphabet. So it makes sense to broaden the type of companies YC is interested in.
Note that YC itself is not directly working to solve the problems mentioned in the RFS. They are funding companies that solve them. So the laser like focus exists at the individual startup.
TL;DR It makes sense to expand focus, being a meta company.
more that he is pissed that the YC Continuity fund is starting to compete with him on deals at Greylock which the article alluded to that it's a threat to other VC's
> It’s all about founders. Facebook had Mark Zuckerberg, and MySpace had a bunch of monkeys.
The kind of ubermensch/Ayn Rand rhetoric that makes me cringe.
> Graham wrote an essay, “Mean People Fail,” in which [...] he declared that “being mean makes you stupid” and discourages good people from working for you.
Doesn't this confirm that VotePlz is mostly just a smokescreen to "get-out-the-vote" for a favored candidate?
What? This is only true if you believe that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations are exclusive to Democrats.
Non-targeted get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/missing-white-voters-cou...
The summary is that by far the largest unregistered cohort is those who are young, poor, and uneducated. And this election, the poor and uneducated group is largely in Trump's camp, while in past elections they may have split roughly evenly between Republicans and Democrats depending on other issues.
The other interesting thing is that the Trump campaign has done fairly little with voter registration drives, perhaps because of this image of it largely helping Democrats. Would be an interesting example of how hewing to common wisdom rather than data can end up hurting a candidate, if 538's analysis is true.
The tricky part about using data is that it takes time to build an effective data operation. It takes time to collect the data, it takes time to analyze it, and then you need a large ground organizational effort to actually turn that data into votes. The last day for voter registration in most swing states is Oct 11, barely a week away. Even if he's recently had a change of heart, it's likely too late to do anything effective.
[1] http://elections.ap.org/content/ap-interview-trump-says-big-...
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-big-data-gamble-146939531...
[3] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/trump-cambridge-analytica/
IOW, the ability to vote is highly contested. Pressure in the opposite direction is probably necessary if we want to consider ourselves a representative democracy.
This is not how it works now.
Even without photo ID, a voter must confirm that they are registered before they are permitted to vote. At my precinct this consists of giving my full name and address, which the poll worker confirms against a list they have of currently registered voters.
If you wanted to steal my vote, you would need to know in which precinct I'm registered, then you would have to go there and give them my full name and address. Not impossible but not "anyone can walk in and vote" either.
Requiring photo ID only makes sense to people who don't understand how the voting system works now. It's very hard to mess up more than a few votes in person. It would be impossible to steal an election that way. And numerous studies of actual elections have shown that to be true.
Meanwhile, the requirement for photo ID reliably messes up the vote for hundreds of thousands of people, mostly poor and minority. Which is the whole point, of course.
To scale such an effort up to materially affect an election would be incredibly difficult to do, and easy to spot.
> If that's really stopping people from voting, then there's something wrong with our DMVs, etc.
The DMV sucks: this is news?
This is one reason we know that in-person voter fraud is rare: because there are very few provisional ballots filed due to impersonation.
Of course I don't have to _imagine_ this scenario, because it happens every year.
Real harm, happening right now vs an imaginary harm that happens so rarely we essentially have to guess what form it would take... this is an easy one.
(re: guessing what form it would take -- if we're going to imagine a fake voting threat, we can just as easily imagine that these same people have the capability to get fake licenses. That happens _all the time_, after all, in college towns across the country. Amazingly these people seem to all use their fake licenses to get a drink, and not to go vote illegally for other people. Silly them!)
Bingo? :)
-------
A -> B -> C
B -> C
But shitty DMV's aside, even if (A) is near negligible effort (which we'd probably both say isn't true for DMV's), then the first process will always stop people from voting compared to the second, right? no matter how "easy" (A) is. Engagement funnels FTW :)
That's fairly easy, too, since there is usually a direct mapping between addresses and precincts.
But to cast a fraudulent vote it takes more than doing that, it takes finding that information and using it to vote before the legitimate voter does -- and to do it undetected requires the legitimate voter not voting after you've done it, either.
Sure. But sometimes, it seems like the "something wrong with our DMVs" isn't a separate problem, but a fairly deliberate effort to exploit the danger directly created by adding the functioning of the DMV as a dependency in the electoral process. [0]
[0] e.g., http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/alabama-dmv-closings-draw-call-fe...
Its harder to do that when they are directly making it harder for people who tend to disagree with them to vote at all.
> After conferring with the accelerator’s sixteen other partners, Altman launched an initiative to support startups even earlier in their life span, and a fund to continue investing in them as they grow.
> “Sam said, ‘Take all the “M”s and make them “B”s.’ ”
Badass. Reminded me of "Drop the 'The'".
> A 2012 study of North American accelerators found that almost half of them had failed to produce a single startup that went on to raise venture funding.
It's very much a "me-too" endeavor, almost political at the universities local to where I live, aimed at appearing to "foster innovation" and justifying huge continued government loans for their "customers".
> YC provides instant entrée to Silicon Valley—a community that, despite its meritocratic rhetoric, typically requires a “warm intro” from a colleague, who is usually a white man.
Yes the meritocratic aspect of networking is far overblown. Intros or bust in my experience, unless someone gives you a lucky break. If they do, be grateful and be damn sure to impress that person.
> All the early arrivals at the party were men; the batch’s female founders were attending a presentation on the challenges of being a female founder.
Anyone else find this kind of ironic and counterproductive?
> “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
This is funny, he almost sounds like one of those awful Trump supporters! :P
> In 2012, he and the other founders sold the company for forty-three million dollars—a negative return for their V.C.s.
This isn't as bad as it sounds. Losing a few million dollars vs. around $50M is a huge difference. In fact I'd say it's harder to salvage a failing company that exit a successful one.
> “you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced.”
Value investing, absolutely. I tend to apply this principle on a smaller scale, to individual people. For example, I've had the opportunity to hire and work with extremely intelligent and hardworking people who simply lacked some basic English skills, and had shit cover letters. But who cares if they can program a robotic system the way I need.
> “hard things are actually easier than easy things. Because people feel it’s interesting, they want to help. Another mobile app? You get an eye roll. A rocket company? Everyone wants to go to space.”
So incredibly true. I have a startup with very few resources but no problem recruiting because the field is exciting hard tech.
> “Most people do too many things. Do a few things relentlessly.”
The best advice for life success, hands down.
> “What’s it looking for?” I asked Altman. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s the unsettling thing about neural networks—you have no idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you.”
Well I find this response - which someone in the domain would tell you isn't even correct - to be unsettling. Yes, we can see what lots of neural networks are doing, and understand it [but you often need a PhD].
> “Sam’s program for the world is anchored by ideas, not people,” Peter Thiel said. “And that’s what makes it powerful—because it doesn’t immediately get derailed by questions of popularity.”
But "Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?"
> Paul Graham cheerfully acknowledged that, by instilling message discipline, “we help the bad founders look indistinguishable from the good ones.”
This would make me a little unsettled as an external investor but I understand the incentives and dynamics at play.
> So we used accounts protected, a number that showed roughly thirty-per-cent growth through the course of YC—and about forty per cent of the accounts were YC companies. It was a perfect fairy-tale story.”
Yeah this never made too much sense to me. As an investor I'd be wary of a startup using alumni connections to secure a large portion of their customers, because that eventually runs out - meaning the acquistion strategy is still essentially untested. As a founder though, I really like this strategy and would readily replicate it.
> The truth is that rapid growth over a long period is rare, that the repeated innovation required to sustain it is nearly impossible, and that certain kinds of uncontrollable growth turn out to be cancers.
I forgot exactly where I learned this, but I like the story of "multiple S curves" over a single "J" curve. Businesses innovate and attach new markets, launch new product lines, secure new customer segments, etc.
> Peter Thiel, the forty-eight-year-old libertarian who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, secretly funded the lawsuit that drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy, and has sought to extend his life span by taking human growth hormone.
Damn so is Thiel gonna get jacked? This makes me feel less bad about wanting to do a steroid cycle when I'm older.
> The fear is that YC will soon provide cradle-to-I.P.O. funding for so many top startups that it will put a lot of V.C.s out of business.
Well this is why I find them remarkably pro-founder: they are creating competition at the VC level even if the later stages.
> two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.
Who knew, even billionaires get high and watch The Matrix.
> recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote.
Encouraging youth voting will absolutely be partisan, let's not kid ourselves here. Why not just pay people to vote, or give them deals at retail stores? I'm sure these things will happen.
> As I considered this, he said that he’d sacrifice a hundred thousand. I told him that my own tally would be even larger. “It’s a bug,” he declared, unconsoled.
It's a feature.
> the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food.
Here's my controversial theory: a "great life" only exists relative to others. Once all needs are provided for and people don't need each other (and here's the real controversial idea: most women won't need most men, something that I would understandably expect Altman to miss), they won't be incentivized to create and maintain strong family units. We won't love like we used to. But maybe they see this as a "bug" too.
Maybe I'm wrong and a few centuries of tech will solve the problems of human nature created by a few million years of evolution.
> More generally, he observed, “The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk.”
A gift and a curse that I wrestle with constantly.
> “At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There’s something worth thinking about in there.”
This was a great read and it made me think a lot, it was a pleasure.
But: it's about the least interesting thing that can be said about this article. And whoever is responsible at the New Yorker will never see these comments.
I think dang has said these kind of comments are off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332#9238739
I personally don't think "The choices you've made exclude part of your audience, and may not be compatible with laws around accessibility" is bike-shedding, but I have stopped commenting on design choices.
How should the extension work? Maybe a simple blacklist of fonts so the fallback font kicks in?
There's an annoying fakeness about YC/HN that gets old after a while. Lots of founders willing to tell YC folks whatever they want to hear and YC folks happily slurping it up like it's authentic. Genuinely gamed. And worse they treat anyone who isn't a sycophant (people like @pinboard/idlewords) as crazy assholes who they actively seek to filter out of YC/HN as possible.
It would be really good for the world if HN was replaced by a neutral platform.
It's also factually incorrect, both re idlewords (whose latest piece spent most of the day at #1 on HN) and everyone else who uses this site in the intended spirit.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625852 and marked it off-topic.
Given your position, do you think that you can look at HN objectively?
Lobste.rs is also a good HN-alt. A bit more groupthink on common topics, and less groupthink on VC stuff.
edit: and thanks for lobste.rs! I've been looking for something similar to HN without all the SV gossip.
Whatever faults dang may have, he's not a capricious moderator, and he works hard to be fair.
Since I got called out my name, let me say that no one has tried to "filter me out" of HN since Paul Graham stopped moderating the site.
I spend a lot (too much) time here, I've been quite critical of PG, a fair number of YC investments that I think behaved in an un-ethical way, and have read most of what Maciej has written through HN (and the associated comment threads).
When PG was still at the helm I would not have come out in support of the balance in the moderation and some of what you wrote would have stuck but those times are gone (at one point he called me a 'concern troll' for raising a legitimate issue which I haven't forgotten about).
But Dan and Scott have been as clean as could be in running the site, the only link there is is that YC still pays their salaries but afaik they have a completely free reign to moderate as they see fit and if you're going to make claims like the ones above then you probably should back those up with specific cases where you feel the moderation wasn't even handed. I know of no such cases off hand.
> “The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. I’d love that,” he said.
I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.
> If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel
Is this true? How does it work?
Thiel is a very vocal supporter of Trump and yet he's Altman's friend, a friend so close they would want to spend the rest of their life alone together, in the event of a catastrophe.
Altman can certainly have all the friends he wants; but he shouldn't get to pretend he opposes Trump at the same time.
I actually read a bit of an insinuation to the fact they're both gay, but maybe I'm overreading into the article.
And it's not just one's opinions or even party affiliation; Thiel is working very hard and very publicly to get Trump elected.
A Trump presidency would be an extinction-level event (for example -- and this is just one small example -- he doesn't "believe" in global warming, and would dismantle the EPA).
How far can friendship go?
The only way to explain this is, Altman doesn't think Trump is that big of a threat. Which makes me question his judgement very much.
You are amusing. How similar to a meteor strike would you say Trump is, or is there another analogy that you want to make [0]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Most_widely_s...
Very similar. The main difference is that a meteor strike is bad luck (an "act of God"), whereas electing Trump would be an act of Thiel and friends.