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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Taking it a step further, building that infrastructure may contribute somewhat directly to limiting the other resources actual wars are being fought over.

This man needs to get out of his own head.

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I think it’s misunderstanding the guy’s whole deal to expect truth or reality to be major factors in his writing. “Sell, sell, sell!” is the goal above all else. Sell whatever he’s invested in today. Sell himself. Sell!

You’re honestly convinced that he’s faking this level of futurism? I’m happy to see people call him wrong, maybe even defend him on a few point, but calling him dishonest on this central point seems irrational. Ditto for someone I personally have absolutely 0 respect for: Elon Musk. They are both honestly convinced that AI is incredibly important in the short-medium term, IMO - they just want to own the fix and be the hero.

He might find the hype cycle itself entertaining and engaging, but I doubt he’s taking it seriously. I think he’d be worse at his job if he did.

Is Sam Altman generally considered good at his job? OpenAI hasn't really come up with any groundbreaking breakthroughs (transformers came from Google and diffusion came from academia) and they definitely do not make a profit or have any concrete plan to become profitable. He's really good at raising gargantuan amounts of money, but that's not enough to be considered a good founder.

> Is Sam Altman generally considered good at his job?

No credit for popularizing the current generation of AI, kicking off $hundreds of billions in CapEx spends, and for more concrete achievements, leading the fastest company to hit 100m users / $1b ARR?

You call some numbers in an ACHS a concrete achievement? I was thinking more like a dam or a school or something...

The question was if he's good at his job. How does building "like a dam or a school or something" have anything to do with that?

> He's really good at raising gargantuan amounts of money

As far as what he does for others, that seems to be his entire job from what I can tell. Just going by what he visibly does.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Sam’s ambitions are way beyond “salary”.

It's a quote from Upton Sinclair from an era where you generally had to have a profitable business and employees before you had investors.

There were many ventures in the past that got investors without a current profitable going concern. Oil & mining speculation, chartering boat crews to go on exploration expeditions and more.

Indeed, public investment was born from large projects where any profit would be many years off.

I know theres this whole joke about being pre-revenue on the Silicon Valley TV show, but getting investors in order to be able to build a business which becomes profitable after goes back a long time. Like a really long time.

Replace salary with the thing he wants

Maybe he wants to make the world a better place?

Maybe :)

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