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Comment by Satam | Hacker News Reader

From: https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141...

Geoffrey Irving @geoffreyirving: Third, my prior is strongly against Sam after working for him for two years at OpenAI:

1. He was always nice to me. 2. He lied to me on various occasions 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reaso

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This certainly doesn’t make Sam Altman look good either: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the... and on the other hand Altman is liked by reporters: https://twitter.com/teddyschleifer/status/172664422600670052....

This is important because it comes from someone who has first-hand knowledge and can talk freely (caveats notwithstanding).

It matches my gut feeling; Sam Altman has always seemed deceptive and manipulative to me. This is based on a general impression and as such, isn't worth much or anything at all -- but I would be surprised if something doesn't eventually come up that shows a real dark side of him.

> if something doesn't eventually come up that shows a real dark side of him.

Harvesting (scans of) eyeballs of poor people makes him look extremely bad to me, but it seems like many people are happy to pretend that the ongoing worldcoin crypto eyeball scam never happened.

Yeah, that is absolutely horrible. But not the same kind of deception. It's horrible because it consists of preying on the vulnerable. But it's not exactly fraud.

Both can be true though: Altman can be a jerk and the board can be out of line with the firing and subsequent handling of the fall-out. Plenty of blame to go around here.

Seeing a few of these types of accounts. Something tells me more is going to come out about the why. I still think it’s a mistake to assume rational people would act completely irrationally

Assuming people to act rationally can really bite you hard. Life experience has taught that people are mostly irrational beings with occasional rational episodes.

I get that but to assume a board of very smart, competent people would just up and fire a highly respected CEO for no reason when it seemed like they were destined to be enormously successful and right after a well received keynote seems strange to me when it’s the least likely scenario if you just consider the facts that we all know to be true.

It's a mistake to claim to confidently know anything at this point. But if the board has some secret reason that makes them look good, I really struggle to understand why they wouldn't have leaked it to the media yet. It's too late for the truth to come out if half your company has already left, and the best people are going to be lining up offers, like, today.

That is very confusing to be sure but the explanations I’ve heard to this point that people are speculating on make absolutely zero sense. The board would fire him to protect a board member’s competing product? Why? Multiple people given the same project? What?

I’m not going to speculate why they would withhold any commentary this long because I have no idea but nothing about this adds up and calls for an alternate explanation. Remember that a lot of people have wagered their own reputations on Altman and so have a great interest in him coming out on top.

Eh, at this point are there any successful people that don't have these 'qualities'? We raise our children with stories about great men and fair leaders, when reality is nothing of the sort.

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