Some VCs are over the Sam Altman hype | Hacker News Reader

Some VCs are over the Sam Altman hype

businessinsider.com

42 points1vuio0pswjnm725 comments

I always found it a bit weird how Altman leveraged Loopt (which AFAICT did not make his investors money and was basically a failure) into giving advice to aspiring founders, which he leveraged into, um, whatever he's doing now.

Apparently a smart guy, but it's always hard to distinguish "smart at selling himself" from "smart at building good things."

Sam is incredibly smart and has always given great advice.

And even though Loopt failed, it failed in the right way. This is America: failure is not a negative.

What he has done with OpenAI is only the second time true disruption has happened in the last decade after SpaceX.

He's clearly smart.

I am not sure I get the "failed in the right way", though. From one point of view, I think it's a great story here that, given how much of a role is played by luck and external factors, someone who might have proven himself to have great instincts and intelligence can get ahead even if, due to external factors, his particular startup failed.

But from another point of view, Sam is just an example of "those who can, do; those who can't...", only in this case it's "become hugely successful VCs and CEOs."

Which is weird! But maybe the wrong interpretation. I don't know.

Correction: what the authors of that Google Brain paper on attention did was the time disruption happened. Without them Sam produced a me-too checkin startup. It's so weird that the current frame of thinking is that CEOs are the ones who innovate.

I never said innovate. I specifically used the word disruption. As I said in another post if people only knew how hard it is to get all the pieces in place to create disruption, these founders would have more respect.

You’re being way too charitable. Anthropoic and Google are very close almost equivalent? Spacex is 5-10 yrs ahead of its competition

He's super smart, just too ambitiously political for many's, including mine, taste.

The Valley is now acknowledging a history of shady dealings that flew a number of acquisitions into mountains right after their founders flew away on golden wings, Loopt, Socialcam, and Twitch have entered the chat.

Everyone who has ever slept with a YC founder has known this for more than 10 years, and there are still going to be holdouts?

It’s over folks. It was fun while it lasted. Not.

wat? sam is known for leading yc if anything

He went from being basically a failed founder of a YC company to running YC. Then rumors are that he was fired from YC and then somehow went into AI stuff from there.

He's one of those guys like Kevin Rose who seems to be able to fail upward again and again. Like every venture is a failure but the person responsible ends up being given even more responsibility and even more money. They're very common in silicon valley for some reason.

Probably some sort of self dealing among some insider group.

There's a guy like that who's been president once and is trying again. So the grandparent post is right: this is the American way.

Yeah, as the other reply here said, that's what I was referring to with "giving advice."

As in, his rep seems (from my distant POV) to be about his acumen as a mentor, not investor. Maybe that's bullshit! Maybe he's just great at picking the right horses! And that's totally a talent on its own, and one deserving of a lot of respect.

But it seems like his star was really made on the perception that he knows how to give good advice, which as I said above has a bit of a weird "those who can, do..." vibe to it.

I assume that's the "into giving advice to aspiring founders" bit.

> He's one of the more intellectually dishonest guys in tech," said another VC, who has interacted with Altman and invested alongside him. "I've had plenty of meetings with him where he says things where I'm like, 'That just cannot possibly be true,' but he can kinda get away with it."

I like the photo choice for that article. On that picture, he looks like he really doesn't want any of this and is increasingly horrified over what he is getting into - but the little Roko's Basilisk in the back of his head is forcing him to go on and on and he can't do anything about that.

So it's fun to imagine that he actually believes the things he is saying and is not intellectually dishonest - but simply insane.

But yeah, the more reasonable explanation is indeed that it's all just an act and he knows exactly what he is doing.

The easiest way for Sam to facilitate goodwill would be to remove the customer noncompete which claims use of output to develop “models that compete with OpenAI” is “illegal, harmful, or abusive activity.”

It’s like claiming your words cannot be used against you because competition is evil. Ironically, the prohibition is more evil than that which it prohibits, especially in the context of free market capitalism. It also seemingly violates California law on noncompetition and contractual restraint of trade and even false advertising, since they advertise “you own the Output” yet prohibit its fair use (while arguing “fair use” in mimicking copyright work)

A simple “not for resale” would suffice.

Not like Microsoft respects the rule anyway.

"Not like Microsoft respects..." : birds of a feather. google is no different, ask Schlüter and Müller. or ask the winklevoss twins about the facebook. goodwill is a secondhand store.

It is interesting that he and his proposed replacements (at a time) at open AI were all non technical

Any hype should go thru the hype cycle.. the phase of peak of inflated expectations is over.

I would expect the hype cycle to start again with GPT-5.

Proof that VC's are lesser people than most mortals? Some of us never even bought the hype.

VC's might be smarter than they show -> they have great interest in creating bubbles and hyping companies they invested in. They can always hope for greater fool further down the line. Best to sell company / IPO and just hype the next bubble

I think it's proof that VCs as a group are just people, neither smarter nor dumber than any other group of people.

VCs talking about other VCs to pretend VCs are important people

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