Hacker News Reader

Comment by wavelander | Hacker News Reader

Altman's tweet (https://x.com/sama/status/1790518031640347056?s=46) makes it seem as if he wanted to stay, and Ilya disagreed and "chose" to depart. Very interesting framing.

View on HN

PR statement. After nearly being ousted, I'm sure Sam is relieved to have a thorn removed from his side.

It could be a PR statement, it could also be genuine. From outside looking in there's no way to know, so I will just pretend this tweet doesn't exist.

It's PR for sure. A genuine announcement would have addressed the elephant in the room.

Sorry, which elephant?

That this was an employee who conspired against him in a failed palace coup

At the time, Sam was more powerful than Ilya for sure. But framing their relationship as employee/employer when they were both in the board seems not correct.

I think calling it a "palace coup" gives it an inappropriate framing of what happened.

I definitely think that how the board handled the situation was very inept, and I think the naivety over the blowback they would receive was one of the most surprising things for me. But after reading more about the details of what happened, and particularly writings and interviews given by the former board members, I don't think any of them did this out of any particular lust for power, or even as some sort of payback for a grudge. It seemed like all of them had real, valid concerns over Sam's leadership. Did those concerns warrant Sam's firing? From what I've read, I'm of the opinion they didn't, but obviously as just some rando on the Internet, what do I know. But I do think that there were substantive issues in question, and calling it a "palace coup" diminishes these valid concerns in my mind.

I'm not moralizing. There are palace coups that are justified.

Sam's employer is who, the US taxpayer?

Someone has already tried doing that, and it's pretty close:

https://twitter.com/eli_schein/status/1790520139164614820

Altman is the biggest con artist in tech.

Surely he would have never gotten his current role if that is the case. There's way too much money and visibility involved.

Exactly. He’s only founded and led a company that’s built some of the most easily adoptable and exciting innovations in human-computer interactions in the last decade. Total fraud!

and which company would that be?

Loopt

And WorldCoin.

What’s the con? Aren’t they constantly delivering frontier models?

I would say specifically the sort of chuunibyou cringe endemic to"AI safety" of claiming that their models are an existential threat.

Agree with the sentiment.

But Sam as 'conman' might just be the impression because he is more on the promotion/marketing side.

I've been under the impression that Ilya is the brains. So this seems bad for long term growth.

Con artist is a bad description. The guy is legit dangerous. He's not after swindling you out of your money, that wouldn't be worth it.

This was easily the most PR tweet of our generation.

The fact Ilya himself tweeted about it too was also easily the most PR tweet of our generation.

Yeah, like when Cheney shot Harry Whittington and it was Whittington that apologized.

Since it's all in proper casing I'm going to assume he wrote it with chatgpt.

Good observation lol.

He used “easily one of the greatest minds of our generation” for two different people in the same message. 100% ai generated

it said one was "easily one of the greatest", and it said the second was "also easily one of the greatest"... it's puffery but it's not an awkward or mindless formulation.

doesn't read like chatgpt to me, but i certainly wouldn't call it good quality writing

AI or GPT usually doesn't repeat like that. Although it usually is easy to tell if something is GPT.

They probably avoid making it look like their writing is written with chatgpt.

I thought so, but they must've changed a lot then. In any case it's not like the type of message they wrote is something special, and it's just usual polite PR.

He also literally mentioned Ilya's personal project; something that ChatGPT would do (it repeats parts of the prompt).

Or GPT-5 went rogue, took out the senior staff, and is running the game now, Westworld style.

Ironically built by Ilya

Real life Miles Dyson

Nah. It’s same platitudes that’s always said when a someone high profile is fired.

> Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation ...

> Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation ...

Phew, I was worried he'd be irreplaceable or something. Hopefully they've already standardized the comp package.

Easily the most plat of all platitudes of our generation

Personally I don’t trust much of anything sam says, so I’d take any framing with a large grain of salt

> a large grain of salt

You mean a lump of salt? I've always wondered what the right word is to describe this amount of salt /!jk

I've been offered a "lump" of sugar before, and it was not a single sugar crystal. When I hear "large grain of salt" I imagine something like this https://crystalverse.com/sodium-chloride-crystals/, quite different than a lump.

Those huge salt cubes are so fascinating! New side project added to the list...

That is absolutely brillant and will make a fantastic week-long father-daughter science project. Thanks.

Now back to figuring out something new for a 6-year old to program using Scratch...

I'm 37 and it's also going to make a great me-me project.

A pinch of salt

I usually use "a few bags of salt" to imply that I don't trust the source.

perhaps a "mountain of salt" in this case?

a highway road side storage yard of salt

Boulder?

A handful of salt

It’s too nice. Nobody is this nice. It’s like Truman Show nice.

While he does say, he is leaving for some personal and meaningful project, let’s see what it ends up being.

That "personal and meaningful" can just mean anything.

More like hustle culture’s “spend more time with the family”

Spend more time with my side projects.

He’s got a good PR team.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com