Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
"No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation."
Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back."
Seems incredibly respectful and supportive, I'm not buying that there's a lot of bad blood there.
a) purely factual
b) not supportive
Uh, what on earth would count as explicitly supportive language?
Probably not true? It seems like Russia could use another Yeltsin (or Gorbachev) more than Putin for its current situation.
He did say best in the world, not best that can be imagined; so unless you are saying there is another Yeltsin or Gorbachev available...
OTOH, Putin is himself an active reason why alternatives aren't readily available.
It feels like this situation is exactly what they want (and likely an historical inflection point, where we pit east vs west again). Dropping the cold war was needed because they had no resources (surprise, socialism doesn't work!).
I'm waiting for Taiwan next and then I'd say we are completely *** (especially looking at our reliance on the east for manufacturing / energy and how useless our governments are).
Their response is to become dependent on China instead.
What would count?
“I think Roy Sullivan is the man to be struck an eighth time. He’s the best at it. I hope he succeeds.”
When the fact is subjective to begin with?
I would even say “Roy Sullivan is the best in the world at being struck by lightning” is not a fact at all but an opinion.
And by giving an opinion you are passing judgement.
How can you claim saying something such as "Washington was the best president" is in some way a fact? Can you find it in reference books? Is it defined from the laws of nature? Does anyone even believe my quote?
Who cares that he got hit three times? Okay, he was hit the most times. That is a fact. I saw a video of a guy getting hit and he did it with grace and elegance - I think hes the best at getting hit. How is "something is best" ever a fact?
In other words, he's basically saying Sam is the best in the world at being a ruthless mofo in these situations and obliterating those who oppose him. "Admiring language", perhaps, but I wouldn't really call that "supportive language".
Exactly, it's not all that subtle, so I find it hard to even come up with an alternative interpretation.
More to the point, some people are natural leaders, they can process many stressful complex situations in parallel without breaking a sweat. I know I can't, not long term, all the kudos to them.
At least some of them are also amoral a-holes, highly functioning sociopaths (these get more common the more power and money floats around till they become the norm).
Acknowledging it does not mean supporting the person. It is just a factual statement.
Even Adolf Hitler was good at certain things like manipulating masses of people. Saying this absolutely does not mean I support Hitler. It is just a factual statement.
Not saying pg is doing this, of course.
This is clearly entirely subjective. To prove otherwise, feel free to show me the list ranking how people in the world would deal with this kind of situation and explain why Sam Altman ends up on top of that list.
Years ago I was at an event talking to a colleague who was absolutely bashing someone (with good reason) and then another colleague walked up. Same person came up and my first colleague changed tone to "yeah, so-and-so is an interesting character."
Because I knew that the other colleague also hated the person, I called him on it. I wonder, though, how often that dynamic plays out where nobody will voice a negative opinion publicly - so people slide by without being called on behavior that shouldn't get ignored.
Exactly right. People are complicated and liking or disliking them is adjacent to whether or not they are 'good' at their job.
I've known people who sucked at their job, but doing the same job in a different environment were stars. That experience led me to disassociate what people do as part of their job from the person themselves. And I can respect someone for doing a good job, even when I find their personal attitude or motivations distasteful.
Complicated.
It's counterproductive to take business conflicts personally. PG removed Sam Altman silently without harming his future. There is no reason to be enemies after the issue is solved. There may be deals to be made again.
100% agree with this, but it is productive to understand what was behind a business conflict. Personal like or dislike can change which alternative of a choice of equal alternatives, someone might make. As Tony Soprano would say, "It's just business."
When police departments do that to overly aggressive cops, it’s generally considered a bad thing.
Oh wait...
But of course, if one just wants to say snide things on the internet, yeah they're simply the same in every major respect, why bother thinking that hard about it.
Yes. There aren't a lot of rogue cops in a position to put billion dollar holes in the economy. Few of them are in positions to influence medical decisions for millions of patients. While a rogue cop might be able to influence parole board decisions for thousands of criminals, it'd be terribly difficult to impact millions.
Yes, in theory, the police have a unique monopoly on the use of violence in society, which leads to unique challenges and scenarios. However, the potential problems that stem from removing someone from a responsibility without impacting their future have nothing to do with said monopoly, as demonstrated empirically with teachers, religious leaders, doctors, politicians, and yes, business leaders. In specific cases, it might be the right thing to do, but if you think about it, the potential problems from systemic application of this practice can lead to terrible outcomes that are proportional to the amount of responsibility, not the nature of it.
...but why bother thinking that hard about it?
Or is this where we pretend that leading YC is even vaguely similar to being a rogue cop, in terms of potential impact on people’s lives?
If a cop shoots someone and kills them, it destroys that life and possibly the family of those around him, the legal system kicks in -- that cop gets ousted or thrown into prison.
how many lives have been destroyed by the mere existence of reddit and twitch, and by extension the human trafficking they help to support? how about victims of sexual exploitation that are enabled by platform payment services? how about the person drug below the Cruise self-driving car for 20+ feet? how about drug interactions caused by e-doctor prescriptions that have little over-sight or supervisory element?
how about the simplest and most common thing ever -- how many lives are fucked up when an acquihire or business movement of some sort liquidates 80% of the staff?
I think the fantasy of the reins-holder being pardoned for the sins of their business is a concept that needs to be re-evaluated; these elements do serve to do damage as well as social good.
a rogue cop constitutes a rogue element in society that is dealt with in fairly swift fashion, a rogue corporation pays the fines and continues until a senator or similarly powerful person speaks up and points a finger ; that opens the floodgates for abuse.
I’m sorry, are you familiar with the ACAB movement at all?
Do externalities not exist, or is the platform (and somehow, whomever leads YC) solely and completely to blame for the users? Why is Reddit to blame, rather than BBSes or Mosaic, without which a platform like Reddit wouldn’t have existed? Do you blame, say, Tim Berners-Lee for the fact that sex trafficking is enabled by the Internet, or only ephemeral “CEOs” and/or “billionaires”?
> how many lives are fucked up when an acquihire or business movement of some sort liquidates 80% of the staff?
Do you think getting laid off, typically with severance, is the same as getting shot or imprisoned? Do you think you are perpetually and permanently entitled to the specific job you currently have?
> I think the fantasy of the reins-holder being pardoned for the sins of their business is a concept that needs to be re-evaluated; these elements do serve to do damage as well as social good.
I think pretending losing or making money is the same as losing years of your life to prison is a weird progressive fantasy, that comes from people vastly to entitled to understand the consequences of the latter.
> a rogue cop constitutes a rogue element in society that is dealt with in fairly swift fashion
This is demonstrable nonsense, more so given that “rogue cop” presupposes cops who do egregious things, rather than simply cops who, for instance, over-police crimes or neighborhoods.
It isn't about blame. It's about impact.
> Do you think getting laid off, typically with severance, is the same as getting shot or imprisoned? Do you think you are perpetually and permanently entitled to the specific job you currently have?
In fact, layoffs and poor labor options do, in fact, lead to increased mortality rates: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779....
So, while I'd rather be laid off than shot or imprisoned, the scale of impact of captains of industry on the economic circumstance of millions could have a body count far higher than any rogue cop.
It might be hard to imagine this, but it is possible that leading a company deploying billions of dollars might actually have a significantly larger potential impact on people's lives than a rogue cop.
I also think pretending you weren’t making a comparison is absurd - why post about the evils of big companies in this context if that were the case?
Saying “rich people are all bad and have hurt way more people” is specious. Implying that I can’t imagine it, when you are apparently incapable of being specific, is juvenile.
> Implying that I can’t imagine it, when you are apparently incapable of being specific, is juvenile.
I agree. I wasn't saying that, anymore than someone was saying "all cops are bad and have hurt way more people". I'm certainly not saying YCombinator or any of its companies have done something spectacularly bad. Besides that, the whole point in "bad cop who is let go without any harm to their future" metaphor would be about the subsequent work of any "bad employee" at YCombinator. I would point out though that this lack of transparency is why, is why neither you might not know of any misdeeds --and that's the problem.
OpenAI has access to massive amounts of capital & data, and has a pretty significant reach already, and it's just the beginning. Would it really be so absurd that Sam Altman couldn't have a far larger influence on the world, positive or negative, than a cop? If it is absurd, then we're either investing way too much in OpenAI or way too little in cops.
I agree. I wasn't saying that, anymore than someone was saying "all cops are bad and have hurt way more people". I'm certainly not saying YCombinator or any of its companies have done something specifically bad. Besides that, the whole point in "bad cop who is let go without any harm to their future" metaphor, as applied to YCombinator, would be about the subsequent work of any "bad employee" at YCombinator. I would point out though that this lack of transparency is why neither you nor I might not know of any misdeeds --and that's the problem.
OpenAI has access to massive amounts of capital & data, and has a pretty significant reach already, and it's just the beginning. Would it really be so absurd that Sam Altman couldn't have a far larger influence on the world, positive or negative, than a cop? If it is absurd, then we're either investing way too much in OpenAI or way too little in cops.
It’s not a useful litmus test.
Believing that a person is not a good match for a certain business position is worlds apart from a public servant intentionally abusing his legally sanctioned monopoly on violence.
The first kind of person may be well a good match for another position, in another company; the latter is just a criminal in uniform.
The more you reveal about yourself, the fewer people you will appeal to because very few people share your exact values. People tend to like people who share some obvious common values and they assume that the values that are unspoken are also a match. In reality, it's rarely so.
As people learn more about the world and themselves, they begin to realize that some values that they didn't consider before are very important and they may be shocked to find that certain people they used to like do not share those values which they took for granted.
All conflicts are Personal. It is only when you weigh your response and its consequences to short-term and long-term goals that you start spouting niceties like "It's not Personal; it's just Business". It is a question of balancing emotions vs. rational strategy/tactics; sometimes it suits the circumstances and sometimes it doesn't.
Kautilya/Sun-Tzu/Clausewitz are relevant here.
Maybe that unspecified thing is just corporate knife fighting and this time PG is happy he’s not on the other end of it.
And seeing as he’s going back into the company, it looks like he is better at dealing than most predicted.
- H.L. Mencken
Sam with his slick black hair, looking like Tom Hiddleston's Loki... "my ambition knows no bounds, I will build AGI and then you will understand my TRUE power."
It’s like they’re trying to make a TV drama out of nothing.
In the case of YC, removing him was better for PG and YC.
In this case, having Sam on top of OpenAI gets them better returns on their investment.
I didn't see anything in the article that there was bad blood, just that Paul fired Sam. Those are not the same thing.
Wow, not the kind of compliment I’d want to receive.
This situation is rotten with conspiracy, backstabbing, money-grabs, rumor, innuendo, etc.
This(?!) is what Sam is so great at?
Used to be a guy named David Ogilvy, who ran an ad agency called Ogilvy and Mather. I think he'd have beat Sam, in part because he made more of an effort to persuade himself that in fact he and his actions were wholly ethical. However, Ogilvy managed to persuade on a scale that I don't think Altman can possibly achieve. Maybe Sam's read his book, Ogilvy on Advertising. I would also recommend the book by Mark McCormack, which is exceptionally good on the subject.
Altman's far from unique. He just happens to be way more HN-adjacent than some of these people.
Nothing is worse than religious fanatics. While I am not implying she is so, for this kind of enterprise I would personally prefer scientific method of evidential support of Sam being this and that, rather then fanatical speaches how they like him.
Fanatics and blindfolded admirers on the opposite side, say I trust him, I like him (and certainly those fanatical definitions have no substance besides blind admirations).
I find no peculiar reason to share the latter, however the former provides observer with evidence why person A is worthy of this and that.
Hope this clarifies a bit
Sam is very transparent in his self-interest, it's the "patriots" you should beware.
If you know some scientific method to pick CEOs and it works
then patent it quickly and open it as SaaS or something cuz big companies are waiting with trucks full of cash
Btw her "believing" in him may be due to serious and measurable results, how is this religious?
Look up to the true geniuses that actually do the work and discover and invent rather than the ones who can only pretend to.
Yes, absolutely, AI will reach superhuman persuasion before it reaches AGI. Yes, that's an extraordinary threat. The reason it's a threat is that it's a weapon without self-guidance or direction: a paperclip maximizer, as it were. A gray-goo problem.
I still think Sam has access to exactly this, and panic about it is what caused his firing. Whether his use of his persuasion-weapon has played a role in what ensued is not as clear.
I get that huge swathes of OpenAI appear to have been persuaded, but I don't think this weapon applies as much to them, nor do I think it is unique and different in nature from what already exists. It's a way of short-cutting the process of persuasion and coming out with the answer right away. Everything superhuman persuasion can offer, has already been deployed by trial-and-error using tools like Google Analytics and whatever metrics Facebook offered, in recent (and not-so-recent) years.
Just because you can now push a button and get the killer argument to sway a demographic doesn't mean people haven't got to that argument more slowly in previous years, whether it's watching the results of persuasion campaigns in click-through feedback… or issuing radio broadcasts and observing the results.
Back in the day there was a man named George Wallace who spoke of the things he'd done in public service, and nobody cared, and then he began talking of something else 'and they stomped the floor'. AI persuasion is nothing more than a short-cut for getting to 'and they stomped the floor', and there's more than one way to elicit that.
Reading some recent pg tweets through this lens, though, I think it makes sense. E.g. there is this tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1726198939517378988. Both of the following can be true (and more to the point, I think the following two items are flip sides of the same coin):
1. Sam is an absolute masterful negotiator and is incredibly well-respected in the valley because his skills at assembling people and resources are unmatched.
2. Sam can be manipulative and self-serving, sometimes making decisions that are nominally about a higher goal but (not really coincidentally) are self-aggrandizing.
I see this trait in lots of effective, famous people. There have been tons of comparisons in the news recently to Steve Jobs, but for me for some reason Anna Wintour comes to mind. I don't think many people would describe Wintour as "nice" as she is known for being kind of ruthless and manipulative (she was "The Devil" after all...), but tons of people in the fashion industry are incredibly loyal to her based on her abilities to identify talent and get shit done.
"Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong."
Sam is what would come out if you created a technocrat in a lab
I imagine most of us think, "S/he was so close to success. Maybe s/he'll have learned! What could be the harm in talking them up a bit? Besides, no one wants to ruin someone else's life,"
But despite comments to the effect that the YC post indicated Sam’s departure, it doesn’t seem to say anything about it right now?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.ycom...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/y-combinator-president-sam...
This is the old URL, and they indeed mentioned Sam leaving https://web.archive.org/web/20190316222853/https://blog.ycom...
Looking at those it looks like there was an edit:
> Updated on 6/12/20
> In May 2019, Geoff Ralston took over as YC President. At that time, Sam Altman stepped away from any formal position at YC.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201028062425/https://blog.ycom...
And then shortly after the edit disappeared too:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210423025128/https://blog.ycom...
1. March 2019: "Sam is transitioning to Chairman of YC and has shifted his operational responsibilities at YC to other partners. This change will allow Sam to spend more time focusing on OpenAI while still being responsible, along with the rest of the partnership, for the long-term social and economic success of YC. Because YC is run as a partnership, there will be no significant operational change."
2. June 2020: "In May 2019, Geoff Ralston took over as YC President. At that time, Sam Altman stepped away from any formal position at YC."
3. April 2021: gone entirely
waybackmachine: https://web.archive.org/web/20190310003417/https://blog.ycom...
Basically seems like they were updating it as leadership turnover happened as Sam went from president to chair to out, and Geoff from partner to president to out.
I have to imagine that the industry does not appreciate this kind of attention from the mainstream press. Everybody is making loads of money -- does it really matter if a particular business deal went south in a particular way? Maybe it's better if we all just focus on the exciting new things that are being built and all the value we're creating for the world and ourselves.
The concept you could fire someone for business reasons and later be their very good friend and recommend them for another job - sometimes an even better one than you employed them in - doesn't fit the single-input single-output mind of a lot of engineers.
It's alright. We all have roles to play.
I am unfamiliar with this
Yukihiro Matsumoto, Satoshi Nakamoto, Linus Torvalds, Jeff Dean, Aaron Swartz, Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Guido van Rossum, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy
You only exist because every ancestor of yours, up to your single celled ancestor, succeeded in 'life'. To denounce success for its own sake, is, for lack of a better term, stupid.
Ex "this person is an amazing startup CTO but they get problematically overwhelmed when the organization gets to 100 engineers" – you would 1000% recommend that person to a 50-person startup even if they got fired from their job at a 500-person company. They might even be better at it the next time around.
Because its pointless and unpleasant, we have zero means of verifying or discomfirming the story and it won't go anywhere because its unprovable.
We don't know whether there's any means of verifying the story until people actually put some effort into verifying the story. Also, it's not unprovable. Perhaps in a mathematical sense, but that's not even required in a courtroom.
Consider all that's been written about Altman's character, using such weak signals as "this former co-worker said this about him". Meanwhile there's this disturbing piece of information that could be a strong signal that is completely ignored.
Have you spoken to anyone in your life who has been molested, or abused? It really cuts through the abstract arguments and illustrates that this dynamic is how abusers get away with it.
No it really is. Unless Sam explicitly confesses it's completely impossible to prove to a courtroom standard.
It would have happened two decades ago, with a person he had frequent private physical access to. There is no possible physical or witness evidence.
It can't go anywhere.
Also, remembered allegations of sexual assault from when someone is four are much weaker signals than recountings of behavior by an adult in a workplace setting.
Hypothetically, if a little girl were molested by her older brothers, how should she proceed in order to satisfy your sensibilities?
Distraction: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
However, personally, what I've taken away from this is that he is a much better strategic/tactical operator than many other high-flying executives and very capable of winning the respect and trust of a lot of smart people. I wouldn't expect OpenAI to be run by anybody that wasn't revered in this way; a lot of CEOs aren't saints.
[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg%20since:2019-01-01%2...
Also, I doubt pg would hold a grudge for years on end. You learn many lessons in life and some you are bound to repeat because of stubbornness or whatever.
> The most alarming thing I've read about AI in recent memory. And if Sam thinks this, it's probably true, because he's an expert in both AI and persuasion.
There certainly isn't the paternal warmth you might expect from a proud mentor.
The other thing is that if you take a look at Paul Graham's blog posts, he used to regularly thank Sam at the bottom of these -- this isn't something you do if you don't like or respect someone. However, on the other hand, perhaps they fell out at some point? I can't personally make out that signal from the little data there is.
The American convention is to look for the positive and assume that was intended. The English convention is to look for the negative and assume that was the real meaning.
E.g. “Sam is going better than you. Do better.” Could mean “Even that incompetent dipshit Sam is going to do better than you can, that’s how much of a hole you’re in.”
That anecdote prompted me to do the same (in corporate battlefields). Works great.
It looses a lot in writing, and I suck in writing Bavarian.
Samuel and Moshe end up in front of a judge because they keep fighting. The judge has had enough of it and says to Samuel to apologize for calling Moshe an asshole. He says "Moshe, I'm sorry, you're an asshole".
>My kid was really surprised to find out that Sam cofounded this company.
>Sam is going better than you. Do better.
Etc. I don’t know that you’re right, since these do sound like praise, but it’s kind of a funny game to change the tone and make them into catty insults.
And they can also resell those "shares" to other people, at whatever prices people are willing to pay for them.
The only restriction is there is a 100x cap on return. So if you paid 1 billion for your "shares", once they've returned you 100 billion as a profit percentage, or by reselling the "shares" to other people, you can't make anymore money for the profit sharing.
But if you still have "shares", you can still sell them to others at whatever price they want.
So for example, say I buy 100 shares worth 100$ each. That's worth 10k total. My cap is thus at 1 million.
Say there are 1000 shares total, that means I'm owed 10% of the profit OpenAI makes. But after making 1 million, it stops and I'm not owed anymore profit.
That said, I still have 100 "shares". They just stop returning me a percentage of the profit. But I can sell those shares to someone else at whatever price they want. So I could sell them to someone else at 200$ each. And the person that receives them is now owed profit from the percentage of share he owns up to their own cap, which for them would be based on a 200$ price, so they can make a profit return up to 100x of 200$.
I think OP is saying she is calling her investment in the for-profit arm a "donation". Which is kind of true and kind of false.
False in the sense it's not at all a donation, but having a profit cap you could see as being an unusual restriction that you could claim a normal investment wouldn't have, and so some level of generosity is involved in still choosing to invest even when there is a profit cap in place, which is there because of the non-profit nature of the parent company.
True in the sense that the for-profit arm was put into place to raise more money for the goals of the non-profit, so it is a money raising for the non-profit, but the money is raised in a for-profit way.
In that sense, she maybe can get away with calling it a "donation", even if in reality it isn't one.
Now I don't know if she actually donated to the non-profit, or she invested in the for-profit, have no clue.
But I did find it suspicious to say that you didn't "donate" because you believe in AI, but because you believed in Sam, when at the time of the non-profit, Sam wasn't CEO, and "believing in Sam" doesn't really make sense at that point. Either you believe Sam can deliver on AI innovation, which would imply your belief in Sam is indirectly because you value AI progress. Or you believe in Sam, as in, you believe he can 100x your investment and make you a bunch of money. Which if you claim you don't care about AI progress, I can only interpret you mean you believe that Sam could 100x your investment, and you didn't really care what the business venture he is using to do it is, since you think he's the key to ROI. Which would mean her "donation" are actually referring to investment in the for-profit.
But this is all conjecture on my part.
It's not in either man's interests to create drama, either.
It all makes me wonder what really happened with Musk and OpenAI. There's so much we don't and can't know about these billionaires and their internal sparring, despite the fact that we give them such huge amounts of control over our society.
That's not necessarily a bad thing in employees. I was once told that it is easier to round off the corners of a cube than to develop corners on a sphere.
I understand you are probably talking about people who uniformly act like jerks but I haven’t found them to be as common.
95% is the kind of score one sees when there's an "election" in a dictatorship. Unanimity is often suspect.
Say the next US election, you have Biden against Hitler. I would expect no less than 95% for Biden. Not everyone likes Biden, but most everyone hates Hitler.
Somehow trying to tie that to the OpenAI board — which couldn't even come up with a concrete reason for firing him to their attempted CEO replacements, who both then switched sides to supporting Sam — seems like a stretch.
Now you have me interested, who could that one person be? Charles Koch? Henry Kissinger? Because many of those I would normally have guessed are either in the article as possible collaborator (middle-easter connection) or is already an investor (like Elmo). Honestly, who is too ethically different here and yet still within the anglosphere to be considered a board member?
I think his stock as potential boardmember probably went down with his service on the Theranos board.
> The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back.
https://twitter.com/jesslivingston/status/172628436492378127...
(no other reason than to understand how all the puzzle pieces come together)
Maybe we should all hedge our bets when it comes to our AGI overlords.
After some reflection, I've found that I sympathize with Ilya Sustkever a bit more now. I'm autistic and I suspect he is neurodiverse in some way. I've definitely been misled by manipulative leaders and peers, been enthusiastic for whatever scheme they had, but regretted it after seeing the aftermath or fallout. I can absolutely see ways Sustkever could have been manipulated by others on the board.
Ilya was plenty successful before OpenAI and would've been just fine without Altman helping to "propel" his career.
It's modern Jobs / Wozniak and Hacker News, despite the name, is ultimately fan service for the archetype of the former, not the latter
Ilya, a nobody who wrote the most seminal paper of the last 10 years. The guy that Eric Schmidt and Elon broke their friendship over was just a random nobody.
Come on. It is no secret that when OpenAI formed, every single researcher joined so they could work with Ilya (and Zaremba who worked with him, but was less famous). Greg is brilliant but ML people didn't care for him and Sam 'one of those VC guys'. A lot of their best hires had already worked in Ilya/Zaremba before they joined OpenAI.
OpenAI might have moved past needing Ilya's brilliance to innovate, but if anyone gets to claim that they 'made' OpenAI, it is Ilya.
Source - https://youtu.be/7nORLckDnmg?si=1T5qyYAdPrMwsEGG&t=73
>I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.
He was fired [at] and didn't die. Now he's back, and looking for revenge.
Your position is challenged by military brass, so you imprison/execute them. Anyone charismatic enough to take you on is going to have been popular with the soldiers, so now a heavily-armed mob with tanks and artillery is pissed at you. Now you have two problems, with only two solutions-- eat some shit and hope to make peace, or die.
Putin played it safe in flipping the script-- negotiate surrender, appear to resolve the dispute peacefully, then stage an "accident" of the rabblerouser once tensions are lower. Cooler heads always prevail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazmamart
I guess a L63 DS salary at MS must be the salt mines to these guys.
"One surprise signee was Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and one of the members of the four-person board that voted to oust Altman. On Monday morning, Sutskever said he deeply regretted his participation in the board’s action. “I will do everything I can to reunite the company,” he posted on X.
Sutskever flipped his position following intense deliberations with OpenAI employees as well as an emotionally charged conversation with Brockman’s wife, Anna Brockman, at the company’s offices, during which she cried and pleaded with him to change his mind, according to people familiar with the matter."
I don't find that surprising at all. Many of those reporting are highly dependent on "access journalism." I suspect it's pretty hard to be neutral when if you piss off the wrong people they will cut you off.
https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397...
> 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 reasons)
It's either very courageous and in service to changing silicon valley, or also very manipulative and in service of benefiting his company. It feels like it could be both.
I'm left feeling like there are no angels here. (That's actually funny given how investors love to call themselves angels.)
In the end it appears Altman has looked out for himself above all else, which probably enrages his mentors and investors who don't like to lose control, including pg.
Eventually they look at you and decide you're the problem to be overcome.
Might not happen for a while, but inevitably will.
Team DeepMind Team Google Team Meta Team YC Team OpenAI Team Microsoft Team nVIDIA Team VC Team Thiel
There are probably more...
That's my feeling after watching all this play out over the last few days. I don't trust any of these people to be good stewards of anything that is supposed to benefit humanity.
And you do realize that there have been investigative journalists, federal inspections, and lawsuits regarding this? So all those people are just making it all up so that I can just believe whatever I read?
musk is sending strike breakers to sweden to make it so that unions there can't do their job to protect workers so he obviously can't give a damn about his employees' safety
doesn't change the fact that people will still log on blogs and websites everyday to defend him like he's the second coming of jesus
With no mainstream outlet pushing forth the allegations his sister is claiming on social, I imagine right now they are looking under every rock on that end.
I respect his hustle but there is something about him in watching him speak live and in person that comes off as incredibly manipulative. He knows how to speak and pause in a way that gets the audience to laugh and gives soundbites. I am long OpenAI but I don’t trust Sam.
He could follow the character arch of his friend Thiel where the media come after him but he’s too resilient.
Or Zuckerberg where the media hated him for years and then moved on.
What do you think?
It would be nice to see him be down to Earth for a change and show some compassion but what do I know.. maybe those aren’t his strongest qualities.
You can say the same thing about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is a jerk for sure but a bad personality does not predict success or failure as much as you (or we) hope to. And what people say about your character is also overly dependent on results. Only time will tell whether Sam Altman will be considered a villain or a flawed hero in media.
Greatest mistake you can make is watch someone speak live about what they're selling. If they're a good actor they'll win you over.
At least Adam Neumann is a weirdo with a personality.
- https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232... (SA's sister - also have a look at her recent posts)
- Also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman... (utterly distressing)
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1727096607752282485 (check the comment with snapshots of the letter - "strangely" that Gist was deleted)
either this annie character is making stuff up, or the whole rest of her family are some kind of comic book villains
She's done something to alienate herself from the family. Usual reason is drugs, but given that she's publicly braying about being molested I'd bet that she's told similar stories about other family members, internally, prior to this. (ed: she also made the same allegations against her other brother too. Damn I'm good.)
Look at the number of people ascribing manipulative behavior to Sammy. This sort of thing runs in families.
Or look at the verbiage of the allegation itself:
> I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore. (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.) I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you.
Nowhere in there does she actually say he did anything more than get in bed with her. She just implies it, and our minds are filling in the rest, giving her plausible deniability against making such a claim. It's fuckary.
(edit2) Even better, from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...:
> "Annie had (and still was having?) extremely intense, nearly all-day PTSD flashbacks of the sexual assault she experienced in her childhood from Sam Altman, plus other forms of assault from all members of her nuclear family (except her Dad, I think.)"
Everyone wants a piece of Little Annie Altman, it seems. Histrionic personality disorder (and PTSD!) is treated with...Zoloft, dispensing of which was also considered "abuse" in her claims.
> Our Dad’s ashes being turned into diamonds (not his wishes) and that being offered to me instead of money for rent and groceries and physical therapy says more about me?
lol. The Altmans know how to push the buttons of someone with a spending problem.
For example if they know she has a drug problem and would put herself in an early grave if she received millions of dollars (just theorizing, I don't know anything about their situation).
> Besides Elizabeth Weil's nymag article (here), there has been virtually zero (mainstream) media coverage of the extremely serious claims that Annie has consistently made many, many times against Sam Altman over the past 4 years.
[1] https://www.insider.com/you-can-spot-psychopaths-by-looking-...
> According to Chinese/Japanese medical [...] when the upper sclera is visible it is said to be an indication of mental imbalance in people such as psychotics, murderers, and anyone rageful. In either condition, it is believed that these people attract accidents and violence.
It might not be scientific but people with this look certainly do freak me out. (FWIW, I haven't seen any images of Sam with these eyes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Applewhite#/media/Fil...
Also I said after that quote that it's not scientific, but it nevertheless seems true. That's my editorial take.
The Gist was posted by HN user xena and deleted after Elon's tweet led to a deluge of transphobic comments being left on it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38371837
Sam has zero charisma. Zero looks. No technical ability. He's not a storyteller. He's not a hype man. He comes off as a mildly surly sloth when he talks.
His actual pre-OpenAI achievements from a product perspective are a joke.
But he was nevertheless "there" for YC and "there" in OpenAI, and a bunch of money was raised, and he's successfully managed to get all spotlights on him at all times, so he's highly visible.
He's like a weird geek following plays from Trumps book: just stay highly visible, associate with any possible win, and be at the center of attention.
Why does it work? Because subconsciously who WOULDNT want to operate this way in life? It takes the least amount of effort compared to many other job tracks or even CEO tracks, and it's become wildly profitable for him.
So the cult of personality idolizing America of today can't help but want their tech Jesus fantasy to work out.
Which, assuming he’s like everyone else who’s done that, was accomplished by a combination of flattery and willingness to operate on behalf of the ruling class totally untethered from any principles whatsoever.
This way only insiders recognise the most fundamental realpolitical power struggles of all ages; that the "very confusing" wars, coups or power grabs is not very complex at all but always - almost as a physical principle - stemming from the richest members of society pulling the strings to benefit themselves.
Then some note or some FOIA request will be released in 40 years about the orchestration and no one will care.
Just follow the money, or the networks of people and it's easy to see the undercurrents of class warfare, elite power via the security state or oligarch clubs siphoning money and power away from the public, but that's called conspiracy these days and is dangerous (to the ruling classes).
It's amazing how much this is actually never true. Politics is largely about sincerely-held ideologies.
That's why it's a minority position. Most people aren't low-openness conspiracy theorists.
It's like the midwit meme where the people at both ends agree.
Do you think we invaded Iraq for their oil, or that anyone profited from it? (Answer to both is no.)
Close. Politics is about interests. It’s about who gets the resources and who gets status and dignity and who doesn’t.
There are a lot of sincerely held ideologies that rise up around those questions. But if you don’t analyze politics through that lens you’re fucking delusional.
These three things are all opposing; you can't "and" them. And you shouldn't put the first one first, as people in the first world are generally too rich to care about it, and when they do care they never put any work into figuring out what would benefit them.
Thus you get votes for president based on gas prices, trust fund kids being communists, Mississippi continually voting 100% for the party that keeps them at the bottom of every state ranking, people thinking the Iraq War was for oil, people thinking the current Ukraine War is good for Russia, and so on.
nb when I said sincerely held ideologies I meant for the people in politics; voters largely have sincerely held nonsensical positions they haven't thought about much, or in other words are "cross-pressured".
This "you're just a conspiracy nut" perspective for looking at actual networks of power and sources, became common after journalism pretty much died with local media as they shifted to ownership from a few parent conglomerates all working for elite interest.
Now news is about "ideas" and "events" not key players, money and networks of power ultimately benefiting the richest that kan in turn easily sway public opinion without resistance through PR, think tanks and media ownership.
I don't know when you think this rather beautiful "sincere belief in ideology" became the primary driver of history and politics, to me that's a highly naive after a bachelors in History and a love for the pretty standard historiographical realpolitical and resource oriented lenses adjacent to works like Guns, Germs and Steel.
Generally when I see people use this they're misreading it. For instance, they'll see donations from people working at Google to a campaign and think they're donations "by Google" to a campaign, but companies can't donate to campaigns. It's also unlikely politicians sincerely care that much about a campaign donation capped at $3000.
In general if you think things are about the money you should be happy with politics, because the highest-raising politicians are Bernie Sanders and crew with $25 Actblue donations. But what actually happens is that they raise more money than Republican politicians and then still lose elections in red states. Republican voters and politicians both actually believe what they're saying.
There's never been an alternative to vote for, and every attempt gets smeared in the media owned by the two-party system representing the oligarchs.
Candidates like Bernie who's still in line with most of above policies are showcased as alternatives but the distribution of power is never challenged outside of the arena of identity political circus boosted by conglomerate media.
Obama was also good example of this, PR outsider on the surface but in reality funded by the same bankers and continued global US adventurism.
Politics is downstream from elite interests when they own the media, the parties, the candidates and intermingle with the security state to take care of the rest.
This becomes especially apparent when looking back at the media landscape pre mergers, where a plurality of opinion and research existed from well respected classical journalists challenging local and state power, in what would today be smeared as conspiracy theorising or anti-patriotism while the overton window has become microscopic unless towing the line for the unfathomably rich.
> There's never been an alternative to vote for, and every attempt gets smeared in the media owned by the two-party system representing the oligarchs.
The two parties aren't controlled by anyone except primary voters. There is hardly any mechanism in the US to stop anyone who wants from joining either party, as long as you can get votes.
This is an unusual case of other countries' politics infecting ours; in other countries the parties actually can fire people and control their candidate list. Here they can't do anything.
Also the US doesn't have oligarchs. That's a specific word with a specific meaning. Closest you can get would be defense contractor CEOs but those just aren't that important here; you probably only know one.
I had to read that twice, but it was well worth it.
It seems more likely to me, given his background (programming from 8, accepted to Stanford CS) that he has technical aptitude, but he has even more dealmaking ability.
https://www.quora.com/Is-Sam-Altman-highly-technical-Has-he-... - Patrick Collison says he had technical conversations on Lisp machine implementations and iframe security policies, which to me is a measure of some depth.
And on hype, I think the carefully staged GPT PR over the years had an element of controlled hype. I remember them talking about how they couldn't release it because of how e.g. spammers could use it - https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/14/18224704/ai-machine-learn...
(They weren't entirely wrong, there's a flood of junk text out there now. Twitter popular posts have their replies flooded by AI-generated "on topic" responses by bots. Content mills are switching to AI.)
Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"
What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
Quite frankly, every time I read one of Altman's essays I am seriously underwhelmed as far as smartness goes.
Also, some people would rather be shot than talk in front of a crowd or get up in front an audience. I used to have panic attacks during introductions in small meetings, and now I'm the one who spots the nervous professionals and helps them feel that they belong.
Anyway, that's all to say there's value in it. I don't personally enrich myself off of it, but if I could offer a correction to your dim view of the imperfect, the world isn't actually run by intimidatingly charismatic, beautiful geniuses, and I have found that helping people that have the simple capacity for success connect and communicate isn't a worthless skill.
Companies, specially start up, are growth garbage. Grow. Grow. Grow.
And CEOs today who get visibility win. Period. e.g. Musk, Sam.
relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/125/
Who would you prefer, a sensible, technical, honest CEO driving real efforts or this media circus? There might be a dime a dozen AI startups doing more science based innovation instead of this moore-law-llm. But they don't have the media attention, so their offices are probably empty.
(btw, IMHO i think all of this board non-sense is planned PR, by the company or Sam, which might have gotten out of hand)
PS: The only thing people should be talking from that article is the only fact. That he was hired by YC to vet startups, and instead invested in them from his brother fund. Yet, here we are, talking about everything but it.
Perhaps this looks like "loyalty" when viewed with the narrow mindset of Silicon Valley and so-called "tech" venture capitalism. But it also looks like disloyalty to OpenAI and its stated mission when viewed more broadly.
"A former OpenAI employee, machine learning researcher Geoffrey Irving, who now works at competitor Google DeepMind, wrote that he was disinclined to support Altman after working for him for two years. "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 reasons)," Irving posted Monday on X."
One could see similarities with the way so-called "tech" companies treat computer users.
It's no surprise people working for so-called "tech" companies are trying to hide behind labels such as "Effective Altruism". These are not altruistic people. They need a cover.
That's a concern of mine from one year ago when ChatGPT exploded: Altman holds a feeble position as a zero-equity co-founder of a non-profit. He should be enabled to become a stinking rich SV mogul of some sort, or at least have his existence tied to substantial equity. Otherwise, having power but no (huge, absurd) money, or promises thereof, from his commitment to OpenAI will only boost these side gigs or even future coups. He's an ambitious and powerful leader and entrepreneur, he should be compensated accordingly so that OpenAI goals become aligned to his own.
Somehow the new board's powerful oversight goals should be leveraged with valuable equity for Altman (and other key people, employees) or equivalent. Create a path to a for-profit, consolidate the Incs and LLCs floating around - OpenAI has a complex structure for such a young enterprise. He has a comfortable upper hand right now (employees, Ilya, a resigning board, MSFT), so this is the moment to rewrite OpenAI's charter.
Yes this is always a wise thing to do.
>Most of them say nice things to be likeable, not because they actually mean or will do what they say.
I disagree with this take. I mean I’m sure there’s snakes out there. What I see in life though, is that most people don’t say enough nice things, even things they genuinely feel. They hold back from calling their dad or wife and saying “I love you”. Or giving a compliment to someone on the street if you like their outfit that you can tell they put time into.
I think a lot of salespeople are just good at “opening the gates” a little.
Personally I’ve been on a quest to be less stoic when it comes to expressing joy, and I highly recommend, especially for typical computer science personalities.
OTOH the parent comment's take seems reasonable. Calling your dad and saying "I love you" because you want to be written into the will is sort of the level we're dealing with here.
My statement was directed at those who wear that mask all too well. Example, my landlord, who's in real estate and a very nice guy in person. However, he promised to do a few things and didn't do them. So his niceties where just that, nice words and nothing more. I'd rather deal with a less nice person who actually does what they said they will. With limits of course, no one likes a-holes.
I've learned to apply this to every human being. Talk is cheap.
Elon Musk has entered the chat...
For example the emerald story seems to be false. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-father-errol-never....
That's kind of silly, isn't it? Altman is a college dropout who has barely ever worked and somehow fell upward into CEO positions very quickly.
His level of communication in talks and interviews is terrible, so I am genuinely confused where all this mystique comes from. He sounds like a college student being asked and talking about management.
It seems that if you have any title or personal relationship attached to you, people will listen to anything you say, and even say things or just conjure up an ora for you.
Say more.
Not sure how you can say he fell into the CEO position there.
Also at the time he was at YC it was a significantly smaller and less prestigious incubator.
Yea, impressive stuff. I'm sure that gave him a lot of experience that led to being one of the few "professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft".
You act like he just mysteriously found himself in executive positions when every company he's headed for a significant duration was one he founded. If you didn't even know that then you obviously know very little about him and couldn't even be bothered to do any research at all. This is a simple wikipedia search. So why are you so bothered about someone you know nothing about ?
I read it in the middle of purchasing a new car in 2010, and had signed paperwork and a purchase agreement to buy car at $X. Next day I'm told "My manager won't let me sell for anything less than $X+Y", after I'd gone through all the trouble of filling out all that paperwork.
Fortunetly I'd just finished a chapter in the book outlining this EXACT sales technique, that relies on a person being more willing to go through with an action if they've committed something to it... like filling out half an hours worth of paperwork. Said no thanks, and found the exact same car an hour away at less than $X.
Haven't underestimated the impact of a salesperson since, and no longer delude myself trying to believe somehow I'm special and immune to such things.
Selling is making you want to buy the car, agreeing on a price and filling in the paperwork.
Trying to extract more money from you after you have agreed on a price is... extorsion? Fraud? But not just "selling".
Turns out this is an incredibly common car sales tactic, enough so that it was explicitly called out in the aforementioned book.
Rather than harumph about how unfair it is, I decided it was better to just learn how to play the game. Unwilling participant or not, fair or not, it's better to come prepared than feel like you're getting taken advantage of.
I don't question the (un)fairness of it, or the game; just the name.
Your guy sounds like Jerry Lundegaard
There are no qualifications to be a CEO, ultimately, except the board happens to want you as CEO.
It’s just a title.
But Sam the CEO has totally failed to manage the narrative throughout this episode. [A CEO needs to communicate better]
Surely he could have stated it was a disagreement in direction? Instead he left it open to rumours: rumours which mostly assumed the board had good reason to sack him (everyone presumed the board couldn't be that stupid plus he didn't defend himself). : Many of those rumours were extremely damaging to Sam. Even if he couldn't say a thing, he could have got other third parties to endorse him.
Nadella and Eric came out looking pretty good.
Wasn't Peter Thiel's Palantir meant to be something like military AI for governments to catch threats in the big data. Someone once said that data is the new oil and it's so true, just look at LLMs and OpenAI. That's why Google is held as the world's most powerful data company....not Facebook as a matter of fact.
The unfairly maligned genius ceo whose on company fired him for some bullshit reason and then had to publicly embarrass themselves by begging for him to take them back?
That makes him look pretty cool - and I didn’t even know who he was a couple weeks ago.
Same reason top football players contracted with Mino Raiola.
A scum bag (or tough/sleazy negotiator depending on how you see it) who can be a scum bag without everyone hating him is an exceedingly rare talent.
Sam seems to have it and is valued accordingly.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
It seemed to really get to the depths of his personality, both the impressive parts, and with some very subtle jabs.
A 1978 USNI Proceedings essay on NR and leadership[1], which won a bunch of prizes, had this great description of Rickover's micromanagement: "Each nuclear submarine is commanded by two people: its captain and the Director, Division of Naval Reactors [Rickover]. The captain has full responsibility for the military operations of his ship as well as for power plant safety. He also has full authority over the military operations. NR has much of the authority over the power plant; its Director has been known to place a call to a submarine’s engineering space telephone and then personally direct the commanding officer how to organize his watch bill."
That level of micromanagement wasn't great inside the US Navy, a military organization (hence the essay) and would have spectacularly bombed and flamed out in the civil power world and is also not a great idea for the commercial world at large. This is why taking Rickover as a model is something that you should do very very carefully. He did some things right, but a whole lot of things can't be brought over to your company, in a way that suggests using him as a baseline takes you further away from a good answer.
I wrote a paper decades ago comparing Rickover and Jackie Fisher- of HMS Dreadnought/HMS Invincible fame- as technological entrepreneur's introducing new technology into their respective fleets. And one lesson I took away was that both of them took a whole lot of advantage of being in a military service where they could issue orders and have them be legally obeyed in a way that commercial people just can't get away with. Employees will just leave your company if you tried a bunch of the crap that Rickover did.
[1]: A badly OCR'd version of the essay is available here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1978/july/leaders... The author, then Lt Ralph Chatham, would go on to have the first ever novel published by the US Naval Institute Press dedicated to him. "To Ralph Chatham, a sub driver who spoke the truth" is how Tom Clancy's _Hunt for Red October_ begins.
We also can't run the experiment multiple times to determine if he was really relying on luck all along. The Navy's luck ran pretty low at a couple of points (Thresher and Scorpion come to mind).
e: "In time, he became increasingly conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like your coworkers, but something about the manipulative nature of it triggers an “ick” feeling that I can’t really put into words.
I’ve also spent very little time in the Bay Area, but from afar, there does seem to be something in the DNA that makes people there more susceptible to cult like behavior.
Many aides in the new administration assigned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, discovered Monday that their computer keyboards were missing the "W" key — a critical problem given their boss' name is George W. Bush, and he is often referred to simply as "W," to distinguish him from his presidential dad.
Some people wear flags as lapel pins to show their solidarity with a cause, some wave flags in the street, some post black images on social media.
Others remove the captials and punctuation from auto correct and post in lowercase.
However, I absolutely would have been livid at the board and wanted Sama to come back if I was an employee, simply because I would have joined being aligned with the 'commercialize and make money' side, and not the other.
So I think a lot of OpenAI employees probably don't care if Sama is CEO vs someone else, as long as they get to ship and get paid. The board firing sam wasn't just a 'let's get a new CEO' it was a pivot from 'ship and make $$$'.
I'm not bein doomer, this is just what I see going forward.
I think AGI can be positive, but it depends vastly how we configure that. And this is not the path that I see is best. That's it.
I get if you're a 100% AGI optimist and see any dissent to that as out of touch, but it's a leeetl disrespectfully reductive to try to frame other people's views that way, don't ya think?
Corporations have been acting in this capacity (making massive changes to the ecosystem, human lives, etc) just fine. The corporate "organisms" have caused humans to erect massive projects to shave a few milliseconds from HFT, for example. AI-based decision support tools will just make that process more efficient.
Corporations have been acting in this capacity (making massive changes to the ecosystem, human lives, etc) just fine. The corporate "organisms" have caused humans to erect massive projects to shave a few milliseconds from HFT, for example. AI-based decision support tools will just make that process more efficient.
I like your thinking man, I want to hear more of it. Where can I read your blog? When I have time, away from saving the world of course. Hahaha! :)
I will never understand peoples obsession with HFT. It is a shockingly small industry when compared to what it does (one of the reasons pay is so good). The bias is totally unwarranted: if a retailer were to come out and discuss how engineering efforts that improved response times increased sales, we would all read and congratulate them. But when HFT do it, they are lambasted.
Given that the board provided very few details about their reasoning, the ideological divide seems like the most likely explanation because it's the most nebulous by nature. Also likely given the climate of hype/doom surrounding ChatGPT.
Of course it was flagged within a few minutes.
Ahhh now I get that, all humanity, exclude noone :D
> pointed to Altman’s aggressive fundraising efforts for a chips venture with autocratic regimes in the Middle East, which raised concerns about the use of AI to facilitate state surveillance and human rights abuses.
Also, in general, when you have a CEO that's passionate, they tend to be bossy. If you don't have that, then you're just passing the time until the VC money is gone.
BTW, Sam was wrong about GPS-powered dating at Loopt. He was not wrong about pushing teleco's to free up GPS instead of hidding behind some wall of forbidden access.
How do we know he wasn't so much "fired" as "reassigned" or "differentially delegated"?
>I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this:
> "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.
> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.
> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."
> I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944
I think the article mentions what may be this same incident, without saying how it was done:
> Rabois noted that Altman, as a Stanford dropout, persuaded a major telecommunications company to do business with his start-up Loopt — the same quality, he said, that enabled Altman to persuade Microsoft to invest in OpenAI.
From the earlier comment, it seems he persuaded the telecom essentially through fraud though maybe not legally so.
There's a deceptive "fake it 'til you make it" aspect to both, and both play towards inflating the current appearance of scale/traction/experience, but I don't find them particularly damning.
It is similar to dressing the part you want - at least when that mattered. You buy more expensive clothes than you should be able to afford so that people think you are more successful than you are, and then they are more willing to bet on you, and then you become more successful.
There is nothing that is a red flag for me in the above story.
I also had a prospective first client want to visit our offices so I quickly rented an office and asked my part-time contractors to all come into the office that day to fill it out. It worked! And then I could afford an office and hiring those part-time contractors as full-time employees. So it was sort of a self-fulfilling.
Elizabeth? Is that you?
Just another nostalgic Silicon Valley "hustler" story.
She was found not guilty of that bit. The conviction and jail time is only for defrauding the investors.
The crypto-exchange part I have read many times it was profitable. Running an exchange is a profitable endeavour as you just take a cut of all transactions. As long as you control your costs it is a money printer.
The rest of FTX was full of fraud and Alameda was a money sink via unprofitable speculation. Also likely helping laundry money as well via poor KYC.
Running an exchange is a great business though if you have the volume, doesn't matter if it is crypto or futures or stocks.
Like Loopt?
It was an affinity fraud on non-SV rich people founded on acting like a tech company.
Having an office doesn't make a company real, nor any more or less likely to execute on the project
A purchaser who insists they only see white employees in the office is bad. Anyone that forces their non-white employees out of sight to secure that purchase is just as bad, if not worse.
To play along is to accept the notion, to contribute to it's perceived validity, and to harm anyone who happens to be honest. The result is that people we'd be better off without are pushed upwards in society.
Having real employees vs sham ones does imply a lot about a business, even if it isn't a perfect signal.
If that telco would know truth they would most probably cut them out, not due to their size but due to their lies. This is not how trust is built, this is how you lose it very quickly and for good.
Maybe we need to accept that this is expected from all startup owners/ceos. Fine with me too, but its still amoral. We define our own legacy, if we ever care (and these mega egos do care a lot).
It’s so par of the course that I’m willing to bet it didn’t happen.
Please note any positive connotations for the word 'revolution' should be abandoned at this point. Revolutions are short-term 100% bad and long term coin-toss bad, or worse. VCs love those odds.
You should listen to How I Built This. Tricks like this when starting out are pretty common, be it unicorn startups or personal businesses. So common that founders are openly willing to admit to it on public radio. In almost all cases, both parties came out better. It's not as if the client is at all upset at this "fraudulent" behavior.
Personally, if I were the prospective customer, I'd be angry at being lied to, and my message to my team would probably be that we'd be foolish to depend on this startup after they've shown from the start that they're dishonest.
If I were an established company, I think I'd also have our lawyers look at situation, to make sure the institutional knowledge was captured, and to see whether there's anything else we needed to do.
(For example of something else to do: though I'd treat things as confidential by default, in some future n-ary relationship/deal, is there a situation in which I'm obligated to mention to a third company that we previously had negative vetting info on the other company.)
But in the context of current startup culture, I don't think "fake (fraud) it till make it" is that unusual. And it's been normalized.
But I still don't want to do business with dishonest startup founders -- whether it's because they're naturally lying liars, or because they're surrounded by frequent dishonesty and they're not smart enough to cut through that.
I've worked for the type of people you mention and no one followed them when they leave. 95% threatening to leave in this case is hard to ignore.
These are generic statements about cult-like leaders, Musk is a prime example. Its hard won affection, not just smooth BS, we here all know that.
That being said, people generally don't change, just situations (barring some catastrophic accidents or similar). Whatever actions given person did in the past describe them well enough in present. Again, generic but IMHO always valid so far.
How do you know?
Also maybe I'm just too risk averse but if I were concerned about money I wouldn't be putting my name on such a list. Although at some point past 50% it would feel pretty safe because what are they going to do, fire everyone?
I very much doubt it.
Maybe the simplest explanation isn't the right one for 100% of the people that followed Sam (or were ready to), but it's the right one for 90% of them, which is what matters for practical purposes.
Follow the money.
Clearly they care about working on the most interesting AI around instead of continuing to work under a CEO and board whose whole plan is to cripple AI development. Both the interim CEO Shear and likely coup leader Toner made it clear they are anti-AI and want to slow progress. Toner specifically said she’d be okay with the company collapsing as that was in line with the charter.
Occams Razor is people working on the most interesting stuff in the tech industry want to keep working on it rather than follow some radical EA doomer plan to kill it off well before we get near AGI.
This is wrong.
I know a signatory of the letter and I can assure you that they were nowhere near the top of the AI industry six months ago.
His name is Sam Altman. And why is he so formidable?
Commenting on an article that portrayed him as such?
> His name is Sam Altman.
Unsure what your point is; sama is his hn username.
And I had assumed that you meant formidable in a positive sense. To me, he seems like a manipulative grifter. We even see that in his response to being fired. Instead of discussing facts, he was trying personal power plays, manipulating the media and employees, and trying to simultaneously start a new company, get a new job at Microsoft, and weasel back in as CEO of OpenAI. That seems to track as someone only concerned with himself.
Through all of this, it has remained confusing and disturbing just why he is considered so important to any of this. He seems completely replaceable. I haven't ever read or heard anything from him that didn't seem to come from some startup 101 playbook, almost like a cosplayer.
If only growing startups were as easy as cosplay.
> And I had assumed that you meant formidable in a positive sense
Yes, I did. See also: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1727386273936199893
> prefer not referring to people colloquially
If not everyone, at least for hackernews participants with 12k+ karma, you'd think they'd know very well who runs hackernews, or used to.
In other words, they believed in his leadership, direction, and ability to serve their interests more than they believed in the board's.
I don't understand why so many people are performing mental gymnastics attempting to turn the unanimous support behind him into somehow being evidence that he's the antichrist. Why wouldn't the employees act in their own self-interest? What's wrong with them acting in their own self-interest? I would assume all employees everywhere, more or less, act in their own self-interest and I don't think that makes them or their preferred leadership evil incarnate.
(It seems obvious that hitching your wagon to Mr. Altman probably has a much better chance of making you rich, than does playing harps on a cloud at an altruistic non-profit. The question is what you actually want.)
Because if it was me working at OpenAI, I would've signed it just out of peer pressure even if I disliked him. As the CEO, Altman undoubtedly shaped senior management that would've one way or another put pressure on everyone else under them.
When I was salaried, my main concern would've been to just get my pacheck and keep things going as smoothly as possible in my day-to-day with the least amount of drama. And I feel like a lot of people are like this.
Manipulation doesn't even necessarily feel bad. Just promising something, or offering a place inside the "in-group" could do the trick for most. It's when you're up against someone whose job it is to safeguard something (like someone on the board dedicated to a mission) where you start needing to get a bit more gangster with your tactics.
FWIW, while I follow this saga, I am kinda waiting to see the full retrospective. I think we don't know everything relevant yet.
I'd rephrase that to:
- "95% of the staff were ready to follow him and join Microsoft"
Amid so much confusion and uncertainty, the prospect of joining Microsoft through an acquihire would appear quite appealing and like the safest choice. This sentiment is strengthened considering the team's approval of Sam's leadership.
I work for a startup that's on the cusp of having an exit event valued at 70 billion dollars. Drama within the board, who I have no connection with, has reduced the probability of that happening to 0. There's a chance another company will hire me and my co-workers and match our total compensation in liquid stocks we can actually sell.
It's really hard to imagine why I or anyone else would sign a letter that turns back the decision impacting the exit event or join the company that'll actually let me cash out the equity portion of my compensation. It definitely reflects my feelings for the CEO and not my own self interest.
If he does come back and you didn't sign, he'll make your life hell; if he comes back and you did sign, you will be rewarded for your loyalty.
The 95% will lose a huge chunk of money if Sam leaves, at least their fortune are all in serious jeopardy. So, money might have played a bigger role here.
Have you never had that employee or colleague who threatens to leave once a year? Curiously around pay negotiations?
Nobody joined Microsoft. Nobody left. Two people were fired. Lots of threats were made, every one magically leaked within minutes to Twitter.
Nobody followed anyone anywhere. Instead we saw $81bn vaporise, and the people who stood to gain from it panic and throw their weight around.
As for the rest of the non-researching roles, most of them were hired after Altman's expansion for commercial operation. The existence and future prospersity of their jobs rely on having someone like Altman to push for profitabilty/go-to-market vision.
There's very little risk in signing if everything falls apart, but there's a lot of risk to not signing if Sam comes back on as lead.
> I find it hard to believe
I also find it hard to believe that anyone on HN interested in this space doesn't at least have a "friend of a friend" who works at OpenAI. Based on what I've heard (which is nothing particularly quotable), it certainly gives off the vibe of being exactly that "kind of environment"
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
If you had such a chance to sit around while everyone else grew your potatoes, you would.
>> Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.
Sam gives me a manipulative vibe but the way he was booted with knives out was also pretty gross. No clue what else was going on behind the scenes.
Edit: if the people who booted him were really doing it in the name of safety paranoia, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t Machiavellian. The motive can be whatever but conspiring to boot someone like that is still a knife in the back.
However, sunlight is the best disinfectant. A bully cannot stand in isolation unless he is enabled. But if left too long they can amass too much power as the bully can manipulate enough people to vote for him (see Trump) or manufacture the vote.
In those cases it takes a far larger force to bring about change.
That feels exactly like why the board did what they did. Reading between the lines of everything that has been published, the actual sin that led to Altman's firing seems obvious:
(1) Altman went to a board member and proposed something that would decrease the board's power over him (probably kicking someone off the board)
(2) That board member tells other board members about the conversation
(3) Board asks Altman if he had that conversation. Altman denies it
(4) Board fires him for lack of candid communication with board
(5) Board doesn't explicitly say what happened publicly, because it's inside baseball. But they absolutely know it did happen, because it they were first parties to it
This feels less about safety vs commercialization (in the immediate future) and more about not having faith in a CEO caught in a lie while trying to remove oversight.
[edited]: sorry means to replied one comment replied to this comment
You must be a sociopath to think that's a good idea.
> “Sam lives on the edge of what other people will accept,” said one of the people who had worked with him closely. “Sometimes he goes too far.”
Silicon Valley has a profound problem with (a lack of) morals and ethics.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. These types must have weaknesses of their own. I’m growing the cynicism necessary to tolerate them, but I’d like to know more robust strategies to manage them and keep them in check.
I find it hard to truly hate people, but with this type I can muster some pretty flowery invective on the spot.
Someone who politics for more time (with some aptitude) will generally beat out someone who doesn't.
One of the marks in favor of being cutthroat about pre-registering KPIs and expected outcomes, and then evaluating solely based on them.
In the end, I think it comes down to organizational culture.
The companies I've seen with healthier executive ranks all had a very strong culture/tradition of "brook no bullshit" and shunned/discouraged up and coming colleagues from doing the same. As well as a focus on a central, objective mission (e.g. "Does this help us X?").
You still got bad apples, but their behavior wasn't nearly as pervasive as I've seen other places.
That's the only thing off in your comment. Those KPIs are always set by politics, always have surprisingly subjective measurements, and always have unpredictable consequences that are cleared out by politics.
An environment with all formal strictly set objective metrics is one of the easiest ones to manipulate.
What's the better alternative?
What does that mean?
The entire point of KPIs is to better solve the "subjective measures allow politicial employees to dominate less-so ones" problem, by converting it into a "defining KPIs such that gaming them produces outcomes beneficial to the company" problem.
KPIs aren't objective, but they're certainly more objective than manager opinions.
I've had a chance to work with some HR people who genuinely wanted to improve the work environment on their respective companies (I know! Please believe me, lol).
One of the bigger issues was corruption in general, of which this sort of behavior could fall under. The line of reasoning for that is that people usually resort to these behaviors in order to immorally/unlawfully attain some material benefit to them (it is very strange to find a pure blooded sociopath that just does it for the sake of it). When people artificially distort any system that is set up (for acquisitions, promotions, terminations, you name it) so that it no longer serves the company's interest but that of a group of rogue employees, well ... that's corruption. This framing is nice as it makes company exec's take a look at it from a business' gain/loss perspective instead of "meh, it's just employee's gossip".
Anyway, the proposed solution was a sort of ombudsman for companies (it's actually a tech thing, not an actual person), a private channel where people could raise these issues without fear of retaliation. There cannot be a clear cut criteria by which one could define whether a particular employee is being corrupt or not, but we've observed something like a bi-modal distribution where problematic individuals truly stand out! Quoting Warren Buffet, "there's never just one cockroach in the kitchen"; you usually observe a lot of employees with no comments on them, a few getting like one or two remarks per month (and you can just ignore those, shit happens everyday) and then you have this guy who is getting 10+ comments per week and that's who you really need to sit down with and ask what's going on.
Obviously this relies on the HR person being fair and honest, not part of the plot, and that comes with its own set of caveats; but at least, it's much easier to control that for one person than for 100s. Overall, the whole thing felt like an improvement.
But, conclusion, the app didn't go much farther than being used at a couple companies, and then we realized it would be very hard to monetize, the team disbanded and we all moved on to other things :P.
The best career decision I ever made was to prioritize working with Good People and one of my few regrets was putting up with smart jerks for so long.
you don't reach the top without screwing over a lot of people along the way
Why do people follow movie stars?
Because we’re human, and we gossip and obsess over high performers.
This whole thing feels like Altman expected some back and forth here between him and the board, but in their inexperience they vastly overreacted to what was probably “standard” corporate maneuvering. He assumed there would be steady escalation, but they went right for the endgame well before passing the many opportunities for compromise that usually show up in fights between CEOs and their board.
He’s the CEO of OpenAI, which is responsible for the most-discussed advancement in technology for the past year. So it’s not that unusual for this to be discussed on a technology-focused forum.
He’s also the centre of a massive firestorm, where extremely atypical corporate behaviour was very recently taking place. Again, highly relevant topic for a forum that deals with startups.
In short, it’s news, and specifically news of interest to people on this site. No need for cults or obsession.
The specific reason for the board shenanigans seems to be related to this tension on how AI will or won’t be handled by the management of the tech companies which create and manage them.
All of these feels very relevant to the general public.
In real life I use all available evidence for scoring outcome likelihoods. I score this guy high on sleazebag, and this article just increased this score.
You just don't have access to tax funded investigators working for months to figure out if the other person tells the truth or not.
So it's down to: Something's off? I'm not trusting you. Especially when you want something from me.
My impression was rather a overwhelmingly "wtf is going on?"
edit: I still don't know enough, to judge anyone involved
A new headline by a journo seeking their own clickbait angle comes out and the flood of “See it was really just [black/white] position and you were all wrong” is the most classic stereotypical social media take to a now past it’s prime story, when IRL it’s as nuanced and shades of grey as ever.
What I did see is lots of people wondering how he lied to the board. Almost a week later and we still don't know how he lied to the board. We can all speculate away but there has been zero evidence of wrong doing, what else are we supposed to do? I guess we can just call him a sleaze-bag like you do.
Btw, this is the most probable reason right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
Did they? You should try scrolling through the original thread and ctrl-Fing [edit: removed the single word that was getting me downvoted to oblivion, my point is that people were quick to jump to very serious/troubling conclusions to explain his firing and explicitly weren't jumping to innocent] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611
https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
> I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore.
> (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.)
> I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you.
I don't know how to use twitter - is she responding to someone, or talking to herself?
If fingerprints and faces are the same as retinas, where do you draw the line - or is there just no privacy line for you anywhere, as long as a billionaire somewhere is making lots of money?
Worldcoin on the other hand went to the third world and went through Africa offering people almost a month's wages to give up their biometrics. That, to me, should merit a deeper dive into what they are doing and why.
I've always said that in another country, like Germany, it might take time to get to know someone and, if you don't know them, you certainly shouldn't ask how they are doing. In the United States, we say hello and ask how people are, even if they are complete strangers.
This is a generalization, not something to be used for every single person, or culture, but it's a good indication of how cultures deal with trust up front. Here in the US, we'll give you "trust credit" and then roll over you like a semi truck if you screw up later.
My wife says I should just always say good or great.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
He came to visit our office (YC '12 company) a few times and spoke with our team in very small fireside like gatherings. Dude always gave me a very creepy vibe. Something aint right there.
Even the worst criminal in the world should be declared "not guilty" if they were caught for a crime they did not commit for which the prosecution did not make a convincing case. In law, there no "innocent", only "not guilty" and most people surmised that sama is not guilty in this context irrelevant of a larger backstory.
For no other topic have I seen so many flagged stories, and all of them are the ones that paint Sam in a negative light.
I sometimes also do other things than reading HN, but what stood out to me, was that I read nothing about the conflict here at all and anything related to it was flagged. Likely because it would evolve into a flamewar after 3 comments.
That being said, Hacker News is primarily for news, and it's tech-oriented. I would not expect Palestinian broadsides (whether for or against) to fare well.
Which I find ironic, because I’ll see the same people looking down on non technical people idolizing celebrities, but not recognize that it’s the same thing in a different field. The height of Elon worship was identical to Swifties imho.
One of Swift’s big appeal outside her media, is that she presents herself as a blank canvas for her fans to project themselves on. While I wish she used her platform for more positive advocation , it’s a lot better for her to be neutral than Musks’s aggressively negative use of his platform (especially in recent times).
Fascinatingly Taylor Swift has convinced her fans to rebuy re-recorded versions of all of her earlier albums. Not just one album either. So far it has been 4 of them with 6 in total. Her justification of this is purely capitalistic. This is kind of unprecedented, and the success of this for her has been quite spectacular.
See:
https://time.com/5949979/why-taylor-swift-is-rerecording-old...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/arts/music/taylor-swift-1...
https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swift-taylors-version...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372059
I don't sympathize with @sama, more so, my personal opinion of him is that he definitely shows off a lot of psychopathic traits, but that said ...
... I'm also ok with keeping those topics outside the scope of this community, which is mainly tech-related and that's what I enjoy about it. Personal affairs belong elsewhere, IMO.
I realize your perception was that all the negative ones got flagged, but this perception is most likely a function of your own preference (you're more likely to notice it when a story that you agree with gets flagged, because people are more likely to notice what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Probably Sam feels like all the positive stories are getting flagged :)
I wrote a longer explanation about how we treat story floods like this from a moderation point of view, if anyone wants to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357788.
Edit: and this applies to the OP, which actually does contain SNI. I've turned user flags off on this submission and changed the title to be the article's HTML doc title, which is more specific.
This isn't evaluating products for use with pluses and minuses.
Attacks on reputation need to be very, very well substantiated or they are libel (business libel in this case). It's also morally wrong, it leads to the worst kinds of resentful discussions, and frankly, this is not really the place for that if indeed you want justice.
In this case, the board made a decision that broke the reliance of all OpenAI stakeholders on Altman's leadership, with no evidence and little explanation. If OpenAI was transitioned properly and with due care to another CEO, it would have been business as usual.
Given how the board handled this whole situation like an amateur hour shit show, you will be hard pressed to argue their competence and qualifications in their favor.
Rather, you are doing exactly what you are claiming from others, you’re seeing two unqualified board members, who happen to be women, and defending them because they’re women even though this whole situation displayed the incompetence of the entire board, Helen and Tasha included. The only one taking a sexist position is you.
If the board handled this situation like competent adults who had ever spoken to an attorney, we wouldn’t all be having this conversation in the first place.
There’s absolutely nothing in my comment that even implies I’m defending them and their actions, and also absolutely nothing in my comment that implies any of my statement is based on their gender.
I seem to have struck a nerve with you, though. I think the commenter doth protest too much.
> There has been a lot of thinly veiled sexism
No, they didn't imply it, and they didn't claim it was the primary motivation. They just said it was a contributor. You are perceiving a stronger claim than they made.
They said what they said, trying to weasel out of it doesn't make the case.
It also has revealed that non-profit philanthropic business models are little more than marketing ploys designed to fool the gullible, and that 'corporate values' statements should be viewed in the same light as the self-serving claims of narcissitc sociopaths are. In particular OpenAI's vague claims about 'ensuring AGI benefits humanity' were so subject to interpretation as to be meaningless (e.g. some may claim that cutting the size of the current human population in half would be a great benefit to humanity, others would argue for doubling it, see the history of eugenics for more of that flavor).
For-profit entities who are upfront about the fact that their only interest is in making money for their investors, executives and stock-holding employees are at least honest about their goals. Of course, this means their activities must be subjected to independent governmental regulation (which is the outcome that the whole 'we have values' BS is intended to avoid).
What is your reasoning for stating that closed-source proprietary LLMs are a bad idea and that anyone with long-term interest in the subject (AGI?) should switch to open-source models?
Open-source tends to foster monopoly and relies on free labor (see Google, Meta). AI also relies on free labor.
> The scariest sociopaths are the ones you let in to your house, who met your family, who you broke bread with
> ...
In a comment:
> Just heard some disturbing news about someone who I once thought highly of
> not just common, it’s start-up gospel from Altman’s longtime mentor, venture capitalist Peter Thiel
— according to whom? Is it supposed to be common knowledge? Is this even a helpful parallel?
In comparison, reporting on FT on this same topic is a lot more subdued and matter-of-fact.
Not said: "...but has consistently spoken in support of Sam Altman."
This article is incredibly disingenuous. Almost to the level that I'd cancel my Washington Post subscription over if I hadn't already for similarly bad journalism.
WaPo has been an atrocious wreck lately and I’d be surprised at someone still subscribing to it while actually reading their content in anger. Hastily drumming up some palace intrigue puff piece like this has been their business model for years and I don’t see the appeal.
Then I got fired on the spot for just talking a little more angrier at the manager because they put me on a task that nobody communicated to me they wanted in 1 month, and then when I realized after the leader was compaining that they wanted the task in 1 month I was like "do you realize you placed me in a project I dont know, the devs themselves don't know some answers I'm asking for the project, i have to implement a whole driver for getting API signals etc." you get the point. The leader asked me to put me in a project he did not even code in ever, and he thought it was gonna take 1 month and took 4-5 months and when I realized that he thought that I contested. To the point that the first manager agreed with me that "yeah it's not a 1 month task." and he was one of the best programmers in the company and was just a manager now. Like the first manager on the line agreed with me but on a 1-1 meeting, so his voice was not heard to the leader.
So I contacted the second manager on the line to have a conversation with the leadership about this task and that I had these concerns, and after realizing he agrees with the leader despite him not even remotely knowing what we were doing, I was kinda pissed off not gonna lie. It was the first time I actually just kinda exploded to him which diplomatically ngl is bad move ... but i was angry because I've pissed blood for this task, coz "the leader wanted it in 1 month" and I did unfortunately work days and hours just because I felt like it out of pressure, and I thought that I DIDN'T want to be fired for this stupid task taking "longer than the leader thought should take" despite him not even having direct experience on the project or the Data Aggregator API they placed me to get data from.
But was I fired because of MY mistake? No. I was fired, on the spot, without notice, after working for 3 years and doing so many things for that company, coz I made somebody angry.
And please believe me when I say that when I told this same manager "hey this other guy (not the leader) treated me with disrespect" he just said "yeah you know how he is we all know, he is just this way". Like what the hell? So, I'm so bad you're gonna fire me on the spot for making you angry just so you can powertrip, but he's "just the way he is"?
You guys get my point. You can get fired, without it being your actual fault. Yes, you may have some responsibility, as I had to be more diplomatic but I'm a human too. I can be angry about some things too some times. But I didn't fire anybody on the spot for making them angry.
I'm not claiming Sam's case is the same. But I do claim that just because you're fired, doesn't mean you're on the wrong. It seems like a cliche point to make that "you were fired thus it was your mistake". Things are just not that simple sometimes. You may be fired just because you pissed off somebody and he couldn't keep his feelings inside and powertripped without second thinking, like the board of directors did when they fired Sam without a proper discussion with all the individuals first and making sure it's the right decision.
Step 1: Dazzle an influential person
Step 2: Persuade them to hitch their reputation to you
Step 3: Do whatever you want with minimal repercussions
Also amazing amounts of luck, or family connections.
1. Jessica Livingston did not co-found a company with three random men.
2. She and Paul Graham were dating, she was job hunting and being jerked around and he said one day "Why don't we start a company?"
3. Within a day or so, he called his two co-founders from Via Web and asked them to come on board like part time or something and they said "yes."
4. They initially hid their personal relationship as a dating couple to try to appear professional.
So they have a long history of being very private people and because I am a woman who has struggled to get any traction and blah blah blah, when I learned Sam was gay, I figured "Ah, that's probably the real reason he was appointed President of YC: Paul Graham wanted to protect his marriage while retiring from YC and was concerned about his pretty, younger wife working closely with a man other than himself. So he appointed a gay guy to take over 45 percent of his duties."*
So if that had anything to do with the hiring decision, not announcing the firing would be in line with long-standing personal policy to keep his private life private and not talk to the world about his marriage to Jessica Livingston and it wouldn't exactly be shocking if that meant it (hiring him) wasn't the wisest business move.
She eventually also retired from YC, so her being there while Paul Graham is home with the kids is no longer relevant to who runs things at YC. They are both founders and presumably major stock holders, I imagine they both still have influence there.
/"wild speculation" from an outsider who has never met any of these people but did sort of politely cyberstalk Jessica Livingston for some years trying to figure "How does a woman become a successful business founder?"
* "45 percent" because Paul said somewhere that he continued to do "office hours" with program participants and called that "10 percent" of what he did at YC before retiring. They also hired Dan Gackle to take over as moderator of Hacker News when Paul Graham stepped down.
So Paul was not replaced by Sam Altman. They hired two full-time employees that I know of and Paul continued to work part-time at the business while his wife worked full-time and presumably kept Paul up-to-date about daily goings-on over breakfast/dinner, so he likely continued to have significant influence on company decisions and day-to-day stuff invisibly via his wife.
YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor read applications and did interviews with us.
Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC. At first we tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html
Note: That's from November 2015. I originally joined in July 2009 and the company dates to something like 2007.
regarding scandal and not scandal, real life doesnt follow rigid ideas of “the power dynamics are too extreme for this relationship to exist”
that’s just tabloid drama
people can be objective mature partners that met on the job where one was an executive and the other doing something menial
whether thats what happened or not, it is disarming to say the least and many would be more comfortable with the same situation given the option
1. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston tend to keep their private life private.
2. If I'm correct, it seems unlikely Paul told anyone he hired Sam to protect his personal interests as a married man nervous about his pretty younger wife working closely with another men.
3. If I'm correct, he probably didn't even tell Jessica because that would have come off as "I don't trust you" and not "I am worried about his behavior."
It's hard to square that whole thing with the way people talk about him here. But every once in a while it hits; this is the guy who wanted to collect everyone's bloody retina pattern, all for a crypto so obviously bad in nearly every fundamental aspect.
I want to build global apps where I know every user is real and limited to one account but currently that's impossible. I don't know enough about Worldcoin to know if that's it though.
Why instead did they go to some of the least wealthy parts of Africa and ask people to give them their biometrics for sometimes as much as one month's salary? To seed their database? It doesn't really pass the smell test.
But it's a fuckin scam. It's exploitative, and sleazy as fuck. It uses crappy blockchain tech, the orbs are proprietary, and you really ought to think twice before condescending at people who try to help you out on this.
It sucks and the other uses also suck.
Worldcoin stores the biometric data for opt-in users. They say it themselves. It’s stored “encrypted” which means the original data is retrievable, and kept in Worldcoin’s custody. All Worldcoin claims is that it has safeguards against retrieving the data it does collect and store, like say Equifax or 23andme claim about your PII.
That does not follow. It's true if you're using technical terms correctly, but I've absolutely seen companies use encrypted to mean hashed.
I said for the long term project they aren't storing any biometric data. They are doing it now to better train models, but long term it's not something they will gather at all nor need to gather.
The retina scan hashes that are stored are not reversible, at all.
https://archive.org/details/yourforceshowtou02mulfiala/yourf...
It's almost invariably the case that to most of us, people who are powerful and effective appear "manipulative". In fact, they are manipulative, which is how they achieve so much. It's only a problem if they are manipulative in the service of goals that are unethical or harmful.
See also: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... - successful, powerful people ("sociopaths" in vgr's comical treatise on office politics) are people who create and shape reality. Those who are not able to create and shape reality themselves (the "clueless", according to vgr) benefit from having someone create a reality for them, while at the same time, take offence at the manipulation.
it's worse. The article say he invested in companies he was being paid to evaluate for YC, perfect reason to end an exec career. And then was NOT fired.
I think hurting your own business versus being a scumbag scammer will get you much different treatment, even from PG.
But AirBnB was defended by PG and Altman fired? You see me confused.
What I've ment, PG defended - as far as I remember[0] - all AirBnB unethical things, while the article says he fired Sam Altman.
[0] I might be wrong and need to search for the comments, if not deleted.
Did Paul Graham fire Sam Altman?
Is there factual information about this - has pg said anything?
Not saying he's good or trustworthy, but it's unfair to speak badly about him without evidence or even examples of wrongdoing.