Sam Altman: Long con was "child's play for me"
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
(in my opinion)
Incidentally, in the comments here, `upwardbound` had an interesting plausible take on this familiar link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41657334
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
Now I am not saying everybody is exactly same, there is variation, but within the shades of grey. Same as politics - think about all the hard battles they had to fight for decades, how could a decent honest person not only survive that but also come out on top of all others? At the end, with right kind of eyes you can find pretty simple logic everywhere.
I expect grand promises, nothing delivered, and a personal enrichment agenda that harnesses a cult of idiots while ruthlessly silencing/bankrupting critics.
One thing that successful people are often good at is taking their good luck and portraying it as a genius master-stroke of planning that no-one could have foreseen.
Claiming to have actually engineered the string of leadership crises that engulfed Reddit is a bit far-fetched, and I suspect just bragging and taking credit for something that just happened.
Did they ultimately benefit from those crises? Clearly, they were opportunistic.
But actually engineering that as some kind of master-plan comes across to me as an attempt to puff up their ego.
It comes across as sociopathic regardless of how much is fact or fiction.
I've personally observed such engineered crises and the stakes were considerably smaller in these cases; if you have a sufficiently Machiavellian set of people at hand, you'll observe the kind of coups and tug of wars that you see here.
Then there's also the possibility that, if he starts to feel "not liked" by the population, that he'll go into full Elon Musk mode and use his power to become the greatest pal of Elon and Trump and use the tools to suppress what he doesn't like, as a retaliation for the lack of love. If you look at his interviews, he barely shows friendly emotions, as if he's got some empathy-problem.
It could become quite dangerous.
Not coincidentally, since many people more important than him left OpenAI, they lost the lead in LLMs development and Claude/Anthropic seems to be growing way faster.
Now you have Musk, Altman... who plainly are full batshit crazy.
once speculation has become this obvious it means it has already become dangerous.
Once? Let's first worry about "if" rather than "when".
But if it does... the thing about AGI is that it will decide for itself what it wants to do. It won't be controlled like that by Altman or anyone else.
Have they even defined what AGI is?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41657014
The fact that these two things which both benefit Sam happened simultaneously (the story dropping from the front page and the explanatory comment dropping from the top of the comments) is suggestive of collusive downvoting/flagging and once again I want to state that I have screenshots showing this playing out minute by minute and I am happy to collaborate with journalists or regulators.
It doesn't mean the information in any of these articles is true or false, just that the mere existence of the discussion offends, so it's promptly pushed under the table through a voting system that is exceptionally ripe for abuse.
HN removes the "?context=3" when submitting the link as a post, which is why I have to put it here in a comment.
Credit to dalant979 for surfacing this, which they did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652513
In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager [named Yishan Wong] with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, [Yishan Wong] would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.
Once this was done, [Yishan Wong] and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.
JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.
My understanding of what Sam meant by "I could never have predicted the part where you resigned on the spot" was that he was conveying respect for Yishan essentially out-playing Sam at the end (the two of them are friends) by distancing himself (Yishan) from the situation and any potential liability in order to leave Sam "holding the bag" of possible liability.
Oh, that Ohanian. It's a small world.
There's a reason that informed consent is required for medical procedures, even lifesaving ones.
Informed consent is the process in which a health care provider educates a patient about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given procedure or intervention. The patient must be competent to make a voluntary decision about whether to undergo the procedure or intervention. Informed consent is both an ethical and legal obligation of medical practitioners in the US and originates from the patient's right to direct what happens to their body.
I know that it's a stretch to apply medical ethics to business deals but I believe the principle of informed consent is still a moral requirement. An example of how this is the intent in many legal systems is the concept of a "meeting of the minds" being a mandatory part any legally valid contract. "Meeting of the minds" is similar to the idea of informed consent:
This was a violation of Yishan’s fiduciary duty to Condé Nast. It’s illegal.
Altman and co. benefit from reframing the history of reddit as a grand genius conspiracy.
Like what?