Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

wsj.com

259 pointshimaraya181 comments

Many points of interest here, including the answer to an earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090 Why were the YC posts about Altman stepping down as YC president & becoming chairman so confusingly edited, and Altman seems to have either never been chairman or have quickly left? Well, because his post lacked candor about him becoming YC chairman:

"To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."

Gun jumping seems to be his style.

Not that I agree with this method but it's a pretty effective way to force something.

No, it's an attempt to force, and has the same flaw as all attempts to force, which is: the other side might just call your bluff.

"Oh you think that going ahead before a decision is made and just publish a post will get us to decide in your favor because we're afraid of looking like we're backtracking? How about we don't decide in your favor and delete your post? What you gonna do now?"

> How about we don't decide in your favor and delete your post?

This response, the one YC went with, is milquetoast. It’s rational. But the true fuck you is to counter-programme and publicly call out the lie.

Also this other bit was news to me:

"Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” "

Why are these people so sycophantic, especially to such an inexperienced person?

"“I saw in a 19-year-old Sam Altman the same thing that I see now: an intensely focused and brilliant person whom I was willing to bet big on,” said Chung, now managing general partner of Xfund, a venture-capital firm."

They believe in his focus to get things done, not in his ethics. And with ChatGPT, he got things done. Which means, he connected the right people and raised money so they can work on the important things.

> said Chung, now managing general partner of Xfund, a venture-capital firm.

Emphasis mine. I mean, that's just backs up my original question. These people will say anything to garner favor, perceived or otherwise. I've seen Altman speak. At what point should I expect to see a representative example of this focus and insight?

> At what point should I expect to see a representative example of this focus and insight?

Probably never. He says nothing of substance in public.

His keynote at this year's OpenAI DevDay is an example of his focus. Have you watched it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9mJuUkhUzk

His pacing, clarity, and proficiency with the product are impressive; regardless of how one might feel about him.

But of course, as with these things, nobody needs to admit to anything and any claim can easily be rejected.

The more polarising the figure, the more polarising the assessment of anything concerning them. Disconnecting different facets of a figure is not our strong suite.

No you don’t get it, you’re not VC enough.

He has VC catnip, and he sprinkles it on his clothes, most notably between the 6 polo shirts he wears at once.

Lol. I was once at a place of real business and research that hosted some machine learning talk by a guy at Uber. When he walked in, late I might add, to an auditorium full of business casual and suits, he looked like a cartoon character with his spiky hair, jeans, colorful shirt, and all. He also spent every answer to questions making it clear he doesn't work on self-driving cars or call-a-taxis, which was strange given his employer.

He's surrounded by VCs with confirmation bias.

The dirty truth is that the ideal Silicon Valley CEO is whomever can be a perfect sockpuppet for investors and still understand technical velocity.

The more ability you have to be kind of waterproof so to speak - like a duck - because of a mixture of positioning, ruthlessness, access, intelligence, perseverance, etc the better you are. Most importantly you have to regularly show allegiance to specifically investors over all other considerations, and boom you’re perfectly crafted.

Altman has brilliantly positioned himself as that perfect fulcrum between venture and technical skills such that he is (in his own mind and to a tiny subset of incredibly powerful people in SV) indispensable to the silicon valley crowd who doesn’t really know how to navigate the intersection between venture and technical skills.

Is firing someone being sycophantic?

It is when your rich spouse asks you to do it and you do it despite attempting to pose as a leader in critical thinking in tech and potential counterbalance to your spouse. It’s an open admission that sama behaved blatantly unethically (perhaps illegally) but also pinned your financial opportunity cost so that you couldn’t play against him. Note that Loopt sold the profiles of poor people to low-income credit predators, and Sama did this to pay for his first pair of matching Mclarens (he literally bought the same car twice). Moreover pg claims he didn’t do it yet apparently flew back to CA from the UK to deal with it.

> In early October, OpenAI’s chief scientist approached some fellow board members to recommend Altman be fired, citing roughly 20 examples of when he believed Altman misled OpenAI executives over the years.

I also thought this was interesting, not sure if this detail had been reported before this article, but seems like there were maybe more incidents than initially thought.

There had been two incidents reported: Sutskever seeing in Slack from other OA execs that the attempt to fire Toner was not over the paper but over her EA ties, and McCauley (apparently) being told by Altman that another board member wanted to fire Toner over the paper.

This list of 20 examples is new, albeit unsurprising given that there was no reason to think that there were only 2 incidents, and I highlight it in my longer commentary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-fac...

After reading more articles about Sam it seems he is a genius in the game of power. Am I right? He is at the center of the stage and many powerful people and organizations trust on him beyond the "anecdotes". He will gain more power while he is an amplifier of capital and business opportunities. For an investor point of view he is a business ace and you just need to be careful about partnering with him because he will always be pursuing new opportunities, even ones that eat part of the company you invested in.

> business ace

What business has he aced?

He helps business ace, not saying that he is a successful entrepreneur. We cannot say that OpenAI is unsuccessful either. We don't know if they will be as successful in the future but he helped in moving the gears.

A combination of real drive and a tremendous amount of dumb luck. Never forget the dumb luck part though. Life isn't fair, ask Trevor Moore who wrote a song about that, oh wait, you can't, life isn't fair...

If Sam continues to have "luck" it is not survivorship bias. As I said before he is at the center of the stage.

Tell me you don't understand conditional probability without telling me you don't understand conditional probability.

CEO of Reddit, how'd that go? Project Covalence, how'd that go? Andrew Yang? Our next president, right? 2018, The year Sam Altman became the governor of California, no? And of course: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to." - that aged well.

But he's now in a position where all his failures will be forgotten and his successes amplified forevermore (unless he buys a social media company, but he seems too smart for that so far). It is clear he has reached Jeff Dean levels of ridiculous hagiography though, but I guess worshipping CEOs is a step up from worshipping invisible friends or stinky geriatric ex-presidents so there's that.

Your answer is very rude. You don't differentiate power from business success.

Why don't you?

Getting IDF gas masks is not a sign he really knows what he's doing, why not MSA or Avon Rubber?

So that's totally on brand for sama, no? He runs with the herd because he has a great nose for where the herd is heading. But it's the crazy outliers who dig into stuff like this and find the best options. I suspect he doesn't have time for that nor would he make the time. Wonder what choices Zuck made for his $100M apocalypse man cave.

The point being that a lot of people have connections, money, or whatever, but those people still don't end up with world changing successes.

So many trust fund babies know how to just sit back and enjoy life instead, that's true.

Sorry, but someone lucky every single time in their life but still be wrong.

Just by probabilities alone it's happened hundreds of times. Probably the source for original prophet claims.

Why be sorry, large sample sizes more or less guarantee the generation of outliers. But once someone attaches mythology to the event, you get another Sam Altman. Worldcoin alone should raise a lot of questions about his supposed one of a kind brilliance, but it didn't, so here we go again with another auteur too big to fail now.

Yes thanks, very succinct wording.

Let one man make one (50/50) prediction once a year from the time he is 20 until 50. One in a billion by chance, but by numbers its had to occured. Attach some mythology and tada.

You can literally just buy articles like this. The question that could be asked is the long term ROI here actually going to be worth it for Sam?

The article talks about his "luck" in "surviving." Which is about all he has, apparently. No consideration for the future of the product, the company, or the industry. The triumphant conclusion of this article is "a bunch of CEOs pulled weight and Altman got his old job back, again."

The more of these I read, the more convinced I am that his company is going nowhere, as they seem more skilled at producing "internal drama" than "new product."

> The question that could be asked is the long term ROI here actually going to be worth it for Sam?

Don't you think most entrepreneurs would call Sam if they have a chance?

I don't think being overly connected to the "silicon valley social graph" is particularly useful. I actually think it's probably going to be a negative drain on your time, or sacrificing that, a negative drain on your reputation.

At the level of corporate creation and management, your network (graph) doesn't drain you.

It amplifies you. Speeds up big moves, acquisition of resources, hiring key people, etc. These are not loner (atom), team (list), or even top-down (tree), type activities.

A network of powerful people is like a collection of other threads, each with their own resources, that you can call. Literally. And put any number of those threads and resources to work on your problems (your coroutines) concurrently.

> At the level of corporate creation and management, your network (graph) doesn't drain you. It amplifies you. Speeds up big moves, acquisition of resources, hiring key people, etc. These are not loner (atom), team (list), or even top-down (tree), type activities.

Only if it’s a network fit for use and purpose though.

Most companies (are not, won’t be, shouldn’t be, can’t be, don’t want to be) [pick one] an SV behemoth. I once worked at a small organization that had direct connections with a certain former CEO that remains one of the planet’s wealthiest people, but it didn’t really do much either way for the organization.

Put another way focused on OpenAI: I would argue that despite Microsoft’s moves in support of Altman with OpenAI, it’s not like Satya Nadella needs Sam Altman because Sam Altman has something Nadella/MS doesn’t. Quite the opposite. In situations like that, the stability of the stock price and market perception are much more compelling drivers. Microsoft is only transactionally served by him. If he was more expensive to keep than the value derived from his ability to razzle-dazzle, they’d have simply kept quiet.

Edit: typo

One would hope for most entrepreneurs to have better judgement and be less desperate.

> they seem more skilled at producing "internal drama"

My take on it is that they have an exceptionally skilled marketing department that's good at creating the impression that they've actually created an AGI, with stories trickling out to the press about ChatGPT 'getting lazy' or 'taking a break for the holidays' and other stuff that serves to humanise what is, at least for me, a product which routinely fails to accurately answer basic questions, the answers to which are contained in hundreds of blogs and forum postings.

If others are experiencing something different that's interesting. Personally I note that the 'I got this weird answer' posts are never accompanied by screenshots or any other evidence, they're just claims which all subsequent repliers appear to take as the unvarnished truth.

I congratulate their marketing team; I suspect that Mistral will ultimately present a far superior product.

You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way.

If he followed the norms, he'd be a mid-level manager at FAANG company.

This comment reminds me of when Bird's CEO described their intentional subversion of municipal legislation as "innovating on the regulatory front."

A lot can be accomplished by skirting pesky rules and regulations. It isn't something commendable.

This is a fallacy. You can't say "this other CEO did something" if you're trying to make a point about Sam. If you have a problem with Sam doing something illegal, say it.

I'm not saying Sam has never done anything illegal, but most of the outrage seems to be that he doesn't follow social/business norms (not that he doesn't follow rules/regulations/laws).

> This is a fallacy. You can't say "this other CEO did something" if you're trying to make a point about Sam. If you have a problem with Sam doing something illegal, say it.

There is nothing fallacious about my comment. Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous.

As another commenter said: he isn't unique.

> Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous

You can compare him to other CEO but you have to justify why the comparison is valid.

You didn't do that.

If you want to directly claim that Sam did something illegal you need to show or say that.

Instead, what you did, is just point to someone else who did something illegal, and then criticize that other person, while vaguely implying that the criticism applies to Sam.

But the criticism doesn't apply to Sam, because you didn't demonstrate that Sam did anything illegal.

Not OP, but adding it is called false equivalence or commonly known as comparing apples and oranges. Just because two people are CEO doesn't relate them any more than a person with mustache to Hitler.

The outrage is mostly focused on the fact that he doesn’t seem to tell the truth.

Yeah, those annoying "social/business norms".

Can you give a concrete, relevant example? As a point of comparison: Musk has a far worse (in my eyes) about lying on social media than Altman.

Yes, this is why economists recommend against too many rules and regulations.

> A lot can be accomplished by skirting pesky rules and regulations. It isn't something commendable.

Well that depends.

Is the thing that is being accomplished very good and are the regulations bad?

For example, what if there is a law that was passed for the sole purpose of protecting a well connected monopoly, so that consumers have to pay more money, only so that this one monopoly could profit.

I'd say that such a law would be bad and should be under minded.

Some rules are stupid and reek of cronyism, enshrining established players at the expense of innovation. Those deserve to be challenged.

He's not unique, instead very textbook sociopath. Lines up with the alleged abuse of his younger sister too. There's not much more to him than a wheeler and dealer, self serving abuser.

If he was brilliant and high agency, rather than a sociopath, what would be doing differently right now? The phrase "wheeler and dealer" rarely applies to people who have genuinely changed the world forever; why do you put him in that category when he clearly has had tangible results?

Hey, if you don't like Sam, that's fine. But that doesn't make him a sociopath.

I don't know a lot about Sam Altman's history, but I do know that there is a lot of misattribution in tech circles away from the doers and toward the managers. Has he had significant tangible results, or has he managed people who have had those tangible results?

This sort of misattribution seems to show up when you have individuals with sociopathic tendencies running firms that do cool things: Elon Musk is the king of this. The man has not, on his own, had any sort of good results on the world - Tesla and SpaceX seem to do a lot better when he steps away from them - but he has found ways to get himself into a position to take credit from the engineers who do. Hyperloops and Twitter are the results of Elon Musk's original work. That's not to say that the management is necessarily negative: someone needs to fund the work of the good engineers.

What do you think the leader of multiple billion dollar companies would be doing exactly? People like Musk are like conductors of an orchestra. That's not easy, especially with multiple successful companies.

The conductor of an orchestra, and the leader of a company, sets the vision and direction. Steve Jobs was exceptional at this. Two examples, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, are clearly not particularly adept at this.

SpaceX and Tesla have the equivalent of the principals of each section of the orchestra feeding their conductor his cues and making sure he gets them right. Google has someone standing on the podium and bowing, but nobody waving the baton at all.

OpenAI is more of a research organization than a product company, and so it's hard to see where someone like Altman can contribute meaningfully to the direction.

SpaceX is Elon’s original work. There was no preexisting company there.

Brilliant and high agency people don’t shill for big companies. I am not trying to be a dick but agency == honesty.

Seriously?

It feels like he just wants to do 10 things at the same time.

Whatever his issues, I think it's clear that humanity absolutely cannot afford people like him to control the emergence of AGI.

I don't like victim blaming, so I will tread carefully here. What makes you believe Annie Altman? If her accusations were sound, she should be working with a district attorney to file charges, or at least sue Sam in civil court. From some light Googling, I don't see either in progress.

My question is, what do you count as "doing"?

Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever? In the words of Urkel, "Did I do that?"

There are some leaders in the tech world who have clearly done something. John Carmack did something. Steve Wozniak did something. There are some questionable cases as well. As far as Altman goes, I put him firmly in the same camp as Musk. They haven't done jack shit. I give them no respect, recognition, or credit. They were just wealthy people spending money. I seriously question the people who look at them positively in any way whatsoever.

Someone has to be skilled enough in fundraising to be able to raise the money to get the talent to do the thing. That alone is a difficult skill to master. It’s often harder to do than to be able to create great things. Carmack and Woz are legends for a reason.

None of these people were skilled at fundraising. Their opportunities were inherited.

> Their opportunities were inherited.

I agree with your first sentence, but I am confused by your second sentence. Are you referring to this part? "Carmack and Woz are legends for a reason."

I don’t think you need to like the people you listed (I, for example, hate Musk). But you seem to have no curiosity around understanding the value non-technical people can bring to a project or company or innovation.

You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.

But even all Wozzes out there who met their Jobs are still relegated to just Wozzes, all credit being vaccumed up by their respective Jobs. Not saying that their Jobs don’t deserve any the credit, i’m just pointing out the unfair pattern of how all the credit is being vaccumed up. One clearly needs the other but it doesn’t look like a two way street at all.

It's not unfair in the case of Jobs & Woz. Wozniak represented a few years of Apple's earliest history. His contribution was similar to Paul Allen's contribution to Microsoft. Extraordinarily important in the first few years, and that was the end of that. The reality is, people broadly like Woz, and particularly among the HN crowd Steve Jobs is disliked; that's the explanation, it's purely emotional; so they want to give Woz more credit than he deserves.

There's an obsession with trying to discredit people like Jobs (and their contributions), particularly among the hacker news crowd. Fundamentally it's because most hackers don't understand leadership, marketing, sales, etc.

In this thread you'll see people claim Elon Musk is non-technical. That's bordering on belligerent. A person would have to have avoided the dozens of YouTube interviews where he demonstrates his technical understanding to an elaborate degree. Musk is as technical as Bill Gates was in his post coding days at Microsoft (which spanned the bulk of his time at Microsoft) and I've never seen anyone on HN claim Gates as being non-technical. How it works is simple: I dislike this person, therefore I shall tear them down; I'm unable to be objective about the subject, so I shall be emotional and irrational instead.

What makes you think Musk is technical? I’ve seen tons of interviews and podcasts. He’s not as stupid as he comes across on Twitter, but he absolutely is not an engineer and couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. He has an above average understanding of tech, but whenever seriously pressed —- rare because the media is absolutely terrified of pressing him and losing access —- he demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the tech behind his businesses akin to an enthusiastic fan .

He comes across as a guy who really wants to seem deep and cerebral, but his takes are pretty surface level compared to other tech CEOs. He couldn’t even give a high level explanation of Twitter’s “crazy” tech stack without having a meltdown.

>couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag

He sold a game he programed at age 12, and wrote at least the initial code for zip2 which Compaq acquired for $307 million.

Exactly. People here think knowing how to code is spinning up 5 k8s clusters and running an ELK stack from scratch, when in reality, it can be much less. Musk was an intermediate level coder from his time, which, mind you, was a time where terms like Agile, code hygiene, etc, were non-existent.

Most code critics of Musk today criticize his poor coding skills due to him unable to migrate his skills from that era to today. But as CEO, he doesn't need to do that. I'm sure he understands the code on a shallow level, which is fine for his role.

He didn’t even know what git was, a technology that is how old now? How cringe.

We are talking about a guy who didn’t understand how to run a python script that the doge guy sent him.

Who among us WASNT writing crappy little programs in BASIC back then, a language aimed at children and microcomputing amateurs? If he had written a 2.5d raycasting game at 12 in C++, i would be impressed.

Have you looked at that game and the code? Its garbage. https://blastar-1984.appspot.com/

I knew guys in the 90s in high school who were writing exploits and cracking major software. For a layperson who isn’t a dev and didn’t run in those circles, it might seem impressive for a kid, but not for any of the kids I knew. Any kid with a basic understanding of programming could copy the code from a computer magazine line by line and edit it slightly . And just because he wrote it at 12 doesn’t mean he has actual coding skills as an adult, he has even said so himself he is not a “hardcore coder”. Considering there are kids like Mike Wimmer who were taking uni level robotics courses at 12, Elon is incredibly mediocre in comparison and only a simp would believe he was some kind of prodigy.

After all, we are talking about a guy who asked his engineers to print out code to show him to prove how productive they were, and who could not explain Twitter’s craaaaazy stack without telling off an actual dev. Who the F thinks the more lines of code you write the more productive you are? How deeply embarrassing.

“ While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons. ” from his biography

That’s wildly inaccurate. Musk regularly displays a much higher level of tech skills compared to most CEOs, with the exception of a few, like maybe Jensen. You may not like musk, but musks way above someone like altman in technical skills

I’m not impressed. You know who is impressive? Wozniak, you can’t tell me those guys are even remotely in the same league. Even Jobs and Gates were/are accomplished designers and programmers, Elon is a joke compared to them.

Calling Twitter a “crazy stack” is hilariously laughable, serious junior dev energy, that at the very least he should be able to describe to another dev a) whats crazy about it b) what it looks like from top to bottom without insulting people for asking.

You should read his biography. The idea Musk isn't technical will seem absurd after that.

He’s as technical as a middle manager with an MBA at a tech company might be, but barely impressive otherwise. Compare that to someone like Zuckerberg, who I cannot stand, it’s laughable in comparison. He doesn’t have any advanced degrees and hasn’t designed anything without help from actual, world class engineers and devs. No doubt he knows PR and hires really talented people. He went to school for business, and his physics degree is total BS, also you realize that official biographies are sanctioned by the subject and are made to paint him as an adult, his business acumen, etc in the best possible light?

The issue is that if you ask the average person on the street who the leadership behind Apple was, they would name Jobs, not Woz. I'm not sure, but I think the financial compensation also carried that discrepancy.

And that's a really common case.

It is absolutely true that you need both technical and non-technical people to make a business work. There are lots of jobs to be done, hats to be worn, and they are all valuable - many are necessary.

The issue is that our society and economy massively overvalues two roles in particular: those who bring the capital and those who carry the title executive. It's not that those roles don't contribute, they do. But they currently get the vast majority of the generated wealth, credit, and recognition (which then translates into more opportunities to access more capital and thus into an exponential feedback loop).

> who the leadership behind Apple was, they would name Jobs, not Woz

Woz was critical to early Apple. He was not involved in its modern iteration. Also, plenty of important and influential people are unknown in the popular imagination.

Yeah, I should have added a line clarifying that I'm unsure about the exact case of Apple, but even so, Jobs definitely had collaborators on the modern iteration who - again - do not get appropriate credit or financial compensation.

The point is that this is a general problem that falls out of the structure of our economy and business enterprises. And it's one that's fixable with a little societal refactoring (changing the laws around business structures and how they're formed).

> Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever? In the words of Urkel, "Did I do that?"

This example doesn't work, at least, since the industrial revolution. If an average person wins the lottery they would need to solve a lot (really a lot) of issues to move a business forward and most probably go bankrupt except if he/she puts the money in low risk financial instruments.

There is no "I do that" in the complex world of business. It is a nice Disney story with a few examples. Organization does the work and that includes anonymous engineers, not only CEOs and founders. The great ignition could start at a garage (e.g. Apple) but the road is long.

You're implying that you knew how to hire and identify smart architects and provided them the right vision to build a good building.

There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic.

Money can only get you so far.

Is there an indication that Altman has a special talent for this over others?

Yes, the accomplishments of OpenAI represent that in action. It's an exceptional outcome to say the least.

If everybody could do it, they would be doing it. Altman's abilities are every bit as rare as that of a 10x software developer. The same was true of Jobs, and the same is true of Musk (regardless of whether someone likes him or not; who cares if he's likable, it's an infantile emotional derangement to obsess so much over likability).

> Yes, the accomplishments of OpenAI represent that in action. It's an exceptional outcome to say the least.

What specifically backs that up? Didn't others create the technology? Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with? By many accounts, he was just using OpenAI to further other businesses and investments.

> Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with?

Hire a top researcher? Ok, you could get lucky with a few. But keep? Good luck if you are an incompetent manager. If Sam Altman was the "know-nothing" that so many on HN claim him to be, then the top researchers would leave and go to Meta, Google Brain, etc. It makes no sense that this core research team has been so stable. Is this not evidence enough for you?

this core research team has been so stable

OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei and a bunch of others left three years ago and started Anthropic.

Ilya Sutskever reportedly told the board before the coup that he’s so unhappy with Sam he was thinking about leaving. He might be out now.

I don’t know if Sam is the right leader for OpenAI - he might be. But it’s good that he’s being watched closely right now.

That's extremely easy. There are awards and magazines and Wikipedia. Smart architects are smart because they're able to come up with the "right vision" all on their own.

We know it's possible for someone with no technical ability to look like genius just by having lots of money. I knew people who believed Musk was going to bring about an AI revolution all on his own because of his very special brain, but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101. What makes you convinced all the rich "geniuses" who haven't revealed themselves to be idiots are actually smart for real this time?

> but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101

Honest question: why? Just because your bubble denounces him and he's doing things differently than other big tech, in a way that upset developers / managers that doesn't mean he's automatically wrong.

Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great). Probably if we didn't have a board of do-nothing for years twitter could have turned into the Line of the west. Maybe it could have captured all the profits which ended up on patreon and onlyfans.

If it wasn't for his anti remote stance and general disregard for life-work balance I'd love to work for him. Finally, an organisation when things get done with few hard working people, and not hundreds of drones collecting a paycheck and slowing me down and complaining all the time.

>Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great)

I'm generally a fan of Musk, I'm glad he bought Twitter, I drive a Tesla etc. but this looks like delusion to think this.

Twitter is not doing well. Musk cut too fast and too deep, and it shows with the number of outages and problems Twitter has had. It wasn't a few months ago that they had to rate limit everyone from scolling their feed for a day, they had hours of downtime this last month alone.

This is not good for a company that makes its money by serving ads, which it also has seemed to be bad at. Running a blogging site isn't that hard, but runnign your own adnetwork is, and Twitter is doing a pretty bad job.

They are losing quite a lot of moeny according to Musk(!!!).

Do you have a source for saying the monetary outlook is good? As far as I'm aware, advertising dollars has always been the lion's share of revenue, and he's tanked that and the valuation of the site has readily dropped.

> As far as Altman goes, I put him firmly in the same camp as Musk. They haven't done jack shit.

What Musk did with SpaceX is in no way comparable to just paying an architect to build a building. Unless the entire biography from Isaacson was fabricated, he was extremely hands on in design decisions, company direction, and hiring.

If you think none of those were relevant to the success of spacex, you’re completely delusional.

Per dozens of engineers at SpaceX...the biography from Isaacson contains numerous exaggerations and outright fabrications.

Elon Musk's involvement in design decisions was limited to the typical executive level involvement in hardware design, in the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.

Indeed, with SpaceX it's usually immediately obvious when Musk was involved: does something fail spectacularly in a way it wasn't supposed to? That was Musk, getting involved in something he didn't understand and overriding the engineers and other professionals. (Contrast the first Starship launch this year, which Musk micromanaged, vs the second launch in November in which he had minimal involvement due to being distracted by X and Tesla.)

> Contrast the first Starship launch this year, which Musk micromanaged, vs the second launch in November in which he had minimal involvement due to being distracted by X and Tesla.

I tried to a Google search for a source. I cannot find anything. Do you have a good source, or insider information?

This is just made up shit though. None of what you are stating is backed by any sources.

>Per dozens of engineers at SpaceX...the biography from Isaacson contains numerous exaggerations and outright fabrications.

Which ones, specifically?

>the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.

Even if this were the only level of involvement, do you realize how important these are? Do you know how it would have worked out for the company if they focused on payload instead of reusability?

>Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever?

You should try hiring a group of really smart people and getting them to work together to create something great before you dismiss the skills of the person doing that.

My question would be, is that what Sam does? I wasn't aware that he was involved in building the founding team. I think that's certainly a skill, but I haven't yet heard that's his secret sauce.

I don't honestly know what he does, but given that he's got both investors and employees loyal to him makes me think that he does a lot more than say "Here's a pile of money, I'm going to lock you smart people in a room and take credit for whatever you come up with"

Employees faced losing their equity if the market got spooked, so not sure the petition is objective evidence of loyalty. Apparently some employees near him wanted him out.

The petition sure didn't sound like employees trying to get away from Altman:

"We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman."

>Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building.

Each one will end up pulling in their own direction, fighting with others over minor things, and nothing will ever get done.

Managing smart people, resolving conflicts, and making sure stuff gets done is a rare and underappreciated skill.

The guy's who fund these things deserve some credit for that at least. Take the Medici's for example, bankers who:

>claimed to have funded the invention of the piano and opera, financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore, and were patrons of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Francesco Redi, among many others in the arts and sciences.

Sure they didn't do the paintings but a lot of that stuff probably wouldn't have happened without them.

Which makes me think... how much of the talent in middle management in FAANG could be actually useful in the world when applied somewhere else!

right now, I get a lot more use out of my iPhone, GMail, and Netflix than I do ChatGPT. Could change soon, but something to note.

The reddit fatfire sub is full of middle managers at FAANG who are pulling a few hundred k to a mil in W2 income for the foreseeable future. Their eyes are set on riding off into the sunset at the earliest opportunity. They would probably have more fun working harder if the results benefited them directly but I'm sure many aren't serious risk takers. For those who are, I think they are already off doing their own thing.

It's less about not following the norms and more about not following the norms and doing so at a startup. Big companies know how to cut the tall poppies, it's a core corporate competency even.

>If he followed the norms, he'd be a mid-level manager at FAANG company.

If we followed the norms, he's be in prison. If you think fraud and self-dealing are justified if it moves a lot of value to shareholders, write to your senator. Until then the laws should be enforced against the rich as well as the poor.

Of course, I can't much bring myself to care in this case, because all that's at stake is a chatbot.

What laws are you accusing him of breaking?

> You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way.

Why are you surprised by folks reaction? What did he successfully build before OpenAI? Nothing as far as I can tell? His main skill seems to be networking, not building product. Also, doing it fast, does not require lying, as seems his habit.

Sam just got lucky, look who was in the board that ousted him! A bunch of no-names with no experience managing companies with a valuation over 10k except the quora exec. OpenAI was a backwater before ChatGPT and it absolutely exploded. When that happens some people are in over their heads (as the board clearly was). Sam wasn’t to his credit, but regardless non-technical people in this company could be replaced with any run-of-the-mill startup CEO and still have their current valuation. Sam was saved to save investor perception of stability. He’s Ringo.

I've seen variants of this in finance, where the strategy is called "outrunning your mistakes."

There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation.

Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming their successors for messing up a good thing. Also very good at cultivating a certain subset of journalists who will keep burnishing the legend, never stepping outside the bubble.

Loosely related: does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? Because it seems as if Sam & Co. are quite determined to ignore it, deny it or minimize it, while continuing to push for breakneck growth of products with a very troubling design flaw.

Yeah, have worked for/been burned by a few of these types. It can be really demoralizing and sets a bad example for how to be successful. Over time I've decided that how I accomplish things matters just as much, if not more than, what I accomplish, and outrunning your mistakes is a terrible "how."

This is extremely common in big tech careers.

does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem?

I think this is akin to asking if anyone in the software engineering community has the patience and humility to try to solve the software bugs problem.

So more expressive type systems? Rust has made entire classes of bugs impossible, and you can do even better in Idris or some other dependent type theory. People don't do it because it's expensive and they're not trained it.

No it never eliminated all bugs, but if we're conflating the two problems you don't need to eliminate all hallucinations either, you just need to make them very unlikely, or a consequence of your bad specifications.

Nope, those are very different. Fundamentally the reason that LLMs hallucinate is because they are predicting the next most likely word. It would be expensive to find a way to remove outputs where P truth is low, but it's not completely implausible like removing software bugs.

I suspect removing outputs where P(truth) is low is about as hard (and arguably a superset of) detecting code for which P(bug) is high.

As an aside, I think these are both roughly equivalent to detecting code for which P(halts) is high!

Really interesting how Sam gets compared to Steve Jobs quite often. Sam in some ways embodies the reality distortion field that Steve operated under, and has huge influence on those all that are part of that path.

The difference is that Sam Altman doesn’t seem to be an ideas man like Steve Jobs was.

Both have been characterized as being manipulative liars though.

I think that's a fair statement. Manipulative leader bends reality to achieve results, perpetuating a culture where we have self fulfilling prophecies.

100+ upvotes in an hour and this story is falling off the front page already?

It set off the flamewar detector. We eventually turned that off.

It was also downweighted as a follow-up [1] because there had been a similar profile article / megathread the day before:

"King of the Cannibals": How Sam Altman Took over Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38744021 - Dec 2023 (162 comments)

In the absence of significant new information [2] people mostly just repeat what has already been said, and the more reptition there is in a thread, the dumber and nastier it gets.

(Edit: I double checked that by skimming through the comments in this thread and I think it was the right call—they're generic, i.e. could just as easily have appeared in any similar thread, and range from ok-but-repetitive to outright-bad.)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I appreciate the response, thanks.

> There were complaints about Altman pursuing side projects, at one point diverting engineers to work on a gay dating app, which they felt came at the expense of the company’s main work.

Who among us ...

Are you saying this behavior is common and acceptable? Your remark strikes me as rhetorical in support of his actions but I’m not sure if I’m reading it right.

The more we learn about this person the more we understand how dubious he is. I am not entirely sure what the end game is for those protecting and promoting him. He’s clearly not steve jobs. Behaves and talks more like a cheap imitation.

Is the idea that Steve Jobs never strong armed anyone?

The idea is that steve jobs built something. And those promoting altman try to somehow make him look like steve. But altman built nothing, has no plan whatsoever, and is an impostor. I think even he knows it, which explains his attempts at making something stick - be it dodgy crypto, corrupt business deals, an ai that fails to live to its hype, and so on.

I’m with you. I think the point here is that he _is_ like Steve Jobs, and everything that goes with that comparison.

No, but he sure stinky feeted quite a few.

His values are completely aligned with the ruling class.

Billionaires need on the ground types like him to actually do stuff.

It’s hard to find people who are young and ambitious and effective, and yet fundamentally and ruthlessly aligned with corporate hegemony.

And I suspect he must be spectacularly good at flattery.

Remember to use code words next time, this is getting flagged.

> [elite’s HR issues]

We share this thought.

My pet theory regarding the recruitment efforts of this class: two broad fronts, one to drive the herd and the other to pick candidates.

The first front permeates our head space in form of content in the full spectrum of the bandwidth of this class: entertainment, news, organizations. Here the message is insistently that “Only suckers play straight”, “crime pays”, “winners and losers”. This is a consistent message.

The second front is more selective and here I am speculating (unlike the former which one gets to experience first hand, whether one likes it or not.) Here I suspect a more ‘direct’ sales pitch is used, and likely references the former.

Imagine you are a bright young thing from ‘not money’ raised in that “cultural” environment just mentioned. Now you open your favorite “journal of record”. You read barely disguised lies, note how these lies lead designated demographics by the NOSE with them not even aware of this fact, and finally your mentor has a conversation with you:

“Do you really think that the general population, these same people we were discussing being led by the nose with lies, are actually capable of self-governance and should have a say in “important” matters?”

Steve Jobs was a massive piece of shit; not a good figure to worship.

Steve Jobs was a human being. No human should be worshipped.

Like all human beings, he wasn't a one-dimensional character from a crappy sitcom. He had negative and positive traits. Whatever one feels about him personally, it is absolutely a mistake to dismiss him. What he achieved -- multiple times -- puts him in extremely rarified air in the business world.

if apple had gone bankrupt he'd have started his own company. his best accomplishment was with UI and actually giving a fuck about the end user. thats not brilliant or genius. Actually having empathy for the user was such a novel concept in computing that it drove him to the top, even though he lacked empathy for anyone around him. His other notable accomplishments were negotiating with the record companies to license iTunes music. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for those conversations. Without a critical mass of licensing, iPod would have never happened. his glory for iPhone is nonsense, it would have happened within a year or 2 anyway as electronics matured.

It’s revealing that Chesky just needed to know Altman hadn’t done anything illegal, and that was enough to start his campaign to defend him. “Not illegal” is a low bar. Those 20 instances of lying/being deceitful could have been consequential. It’s also amazing how much much support from investors can insulate an unscrupulous CEO.

> “The senior leadership team was unanimous in asking for Sam’s return as CEO and for the board’s resignation, actions backed by an open letter signed by over 95% of our employees. The strong support from his team underscores that he is an effective CEO,” said an OpenAI spokeswoman.

This is where I stopped reading.

At the risk of sounding defensive of Sam Altman. If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support? He's just one man, say that what this article alleges is true, how many tricks does he have up his sleeve to fool the entirety of Silicon Valley?

I mean, we can beat around the bush all day but he managed to get his old/new?? job back at OpenAI. This means to me that his ouster was either unwarranted or the board was acting blindly and should have stepped aside just on account of being clearly incapable of making sound decisions.

This article does not ask the right questions. Doesn't answer any questions either like the many articles written before it riddled with speculation about Sam's much belabored firing.

> why does he have such broad support?

He makes people money. Plenty of terrible people commanded great loyalty. All the loyalty tells you is he’s a good leader. Not where he’s leading us.

(Not saying anything about Sam. Just pointing out that loyalty is orthogonal.)

He should be making investors money. That's his #1 job.

Aside from that, who cares about loyalty to the CEO of a tech company. He's a replaceable employee and OpenAI should be able to continue without him.

What were his actual crimes. It's not clear from the previous board nor anyone who's spoken about the matter what those were.

> What were his actual crimes

Boards don’t judge crimes. And unlike courts, they have no disclosure obligation. Particularly for a private company.

> they have no disclosure obligation.

If true, that board deserved to be dissolved privately without being given the courtesy of raising any voices against Sam or OpenAI's future.

OpenAI is a nonprofit. Making investors money is explicitly off the table, despite how much Sam Altman wants that to change.

OpenAI opted to become a for-profit company to take money from investors back in 2019.

https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

OpenAI did not become for-profit. OpenAI opened a limited-profit arm. The board of directors who fired Sam Altman is the board of the nonprofit.

> limited-profit arm.

This is another one of those recent buzzwords that mean nothing. Like oil conglomerates making "green energy" donations and calling themselves low carbon emitters.

The point is that this was a subsidiary under the control of the non-profit. It was mostly there for tax reasons.

My point is that the non-profit on OpenAI's operating model is just a tag. And the reasons for why this is the case is clear to anyone with 5 minutes of time to research about the company's self described "capped-profit" investment structure.

> That's his #1 job.

That was not is #1 job as per the charter, that why all this controversy started.

That charter became bogus once OpenAI started taking in billions worth of investor money.

> If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support?

75 million people voted for Trump.

95% of employees voted with their wallets. Their millions of dollars in “stock options” were at risk of being worthless and the tender offer of cashing out was halted. Of course they wanted him back. And of course they would have joined Microsoft too — but almost none of them would have joined had they gotten a standard Microsoft offer, they would only join if they got a matching or near matching offer.

Sounds like he is their golden goose (for both the company and the employees).

> "If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support?"

Stock options and a carefully built cult of personality, my friend

Many years ago I once tried to share a History channel documentary on the JFK assassination with a friend. They watched up until the first part, the documentary dramaticized the assassination and talked about how the shot seemed impossible based off the shape of the car.

See I had already watched this documentary in full, and knew that this was just a cliffhanger for the second part that explained the car was modified, making the seemingly impossible shot very possible. Yet, my friend said "See? That's enough evidence." and walked away.

I asked, "don't you want to hear the rest?" the response: "nope."

Your comment reminds me of this experience

So did you tell your friend who killed JFK?

how much do you know about the signature collection process? I can easily see how a large number of these could've been out of fear of retaliation and some out of greed. Many autocrats claim high support numbers on every election, doesn't mean they are beloved.

Sounds like you are you saying the employee signatures were manufactured and we shouldn't trust anything OpenAI says. If so, maybe you should provide the evidence for these claims.

I have to wonder, why is this criticism showing up now? Who would benefit from taking him down a peg at this current point in time, and how?

It's called journalism. This is going to be happening for a while as journalists get more and more of the inside scoop. The new board also has a full slate ahead for it, including the investigation, recruiting a full board, and dealing with the non-profit and corporate structure which has a few holes showing. Plus there is all the stuff the company is actually doing with new products and the "Preparedness Framework" they are working on.

Up until recently, the press about OpenAI has been mostly "look at the shiny lights" and now it's going to get the Elon Musk treatment.

I benefit. You benefit. Everyone benefits when we learn more. Who fears these disclosures at the current point in time and why? What's your reason for questioning them? What do you have to lose?

It takes time to report these things, you can't just bang it out overnight. In addition, breaking a preference falsification cascade can take a lot of hits: a lot of people didn't want to talk about Altman, but with every article in WSJ/NYT/WaPo revealing some more, that reluctance fades a little bit. That is how you go from a few months ago, there being nothing but a whisper here or there that Altman had been fired from YC as one of the crown jewel secrets of YC known to a handful of people, to now Paul Graham casually confirming it to the WSJ.

As for what the benefit is, the ongoing report is one benefit. If the law firm (named here for the first time, I believe) didn't know about, say, Sutskever's list of 20 incidents, well, they do now.

My read - wildly successful business person, bad human being. So long as SV values what you do over how you got there (with criminal conduct being the obvious red line in how), Sam A and Steve Jobs types will continue to rise generation after generation.

Altman is a classic sociopath, tread carefully.

As Paul Graham says, Sam is a Pied Piper who plays his flute and will take the Geeks to the town lake and dump them when he is done

Source?

Altman is the perfect 3-letter inside man, that photo with Nadella towards the end of the article is the perfect representation of that (MS having won the race of "which IT company will the System choose to represent its tech interests?", ahead of Amazon and Alphabet).

Sam is great, some eggs might've been cracked along the way, but overall, very positive influence on the world.

You could shine a light into most people's lives and find in most cases broken egg shells here & there. Fixating on them at the expense of the bigger picture is a mistake.

Regarding the openai board, the problem imo is that too much weight was given to a nebulous & subjective mission, allowing those sitting to make up ridiculous positions and find them tenable (ie the company going kaput being in line with the mission, like srsly??)

Regarding your last point,

OpenAI going kaput might indeed be the best for humanity as a whole, only time will tell.

Could there be a more dangerous version of reality where we allow the government and a chosen monopoly to collude in controlling AI for the rest of society? Because that is precicely what he was/is attempting to do.

I may not personally like it, but it's the pragmatist thing to do if you're leading openai. The gov will eventually get involved, better to get in front of it.

However, there won't be a monopoly or anything of the sort that will form, our society's institutions wouldn't be able to properly enforce it and it's too easy for weights to leak, too much alpha for people to not fight back against it. Not worried.

The ai safety crowd's problem is that they're focused on a hypothetical entity that will take over humanity, imagining all sorts of scenarios in lalaland which are ridiculous (some of their "thought leaders" even advocating for strikes on datacenters to save humanity???), where the real risk is criminals/terros being empowered by the ai's cognitive ability. For that, we'll need the gov involved one way or another.

I appreciate your attitude around the infesability of monopolizing software, and agree with you on that and on how hysterical people are acting about AI.

I cant picture a case where charges need to be brought under a novel framework that couldnt be captured by existing laws. If you deploy a computer virus, thats a crime, if you hack someones bank account, thats a crime, if you slander someone, thats a crime.

Im personally not convinced that any of the public efforts made around AI safety have been honest. If these people were serious then like you say, they wouldnt be chasing evil scifi ai overlords. I can think of some wonderful use cases to counter things like AI generated fakes; I am actually uncomfortably suprised that every social media company hasnt added a banner below every picture that says whether scans indicate a picture was deepfaked, twitter could scan a picture when you post it and show what a variety of algorithms think. That would have a real shot at improving information asymmetry at the social level.

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