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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

Altman and OpenAI deserve their success. They’ve been key to the LLM revolution and the push toward AGI. Without their vision to make a product out of an LLM that hundreds of millions of people now use and have greatly enriched their lives, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Meta wouldn’t have invested so heavily in AI. While we’ve heard about the questionable ethics of people like Jobs, Musk, and Altman, their work speaks for itself. If they’re advancing humanity, do their personal flaws really matter?

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> advancing humanity Perhaps but I'd say it's more of a mixed bag. Cell phones and social media have done harm and good at very large scales. As Dan Carlin once said, it feels like we're babies crawling toward hand guns. We don't seem like we're as wise as we are technically proficient.

Oppenheimer "advanced humanity" by giving us nuclear power. Cool. I love cheap energy. Unfortunately, there were some uh... "unfortunate side-effects" which continue to plague us.

Do you really want people who have a lot of power to have serious flaws? Looking back into history it doesn't end up good usually.

> If they’re advancing humanity, do their personal flaws really matter?

What's being discussed in this thread is not the personal failings of silicon valley darlings, but whether one of them just defrauded a few thousand people and embezzled a significant amount of capital. Citing his character flaws goes along with it though.

Are you seriously arguing that people should be exempt from law for "advancing humanity"? Because I don't see any advancements whatsoever from all of the people mentioned. Altman and Musk would get a hardon for sure though, from being mentioned together with Jobs.

They matter MORE. Are you like, completely unfamiliar with Spiderman and the whole great power great responsibility line??

> If they’re advancing humanity, do their personal flaws really matter?

Well, yeah, they're positioning themselves as some of the most powerful and influential individuals on earth. I'd say any personality flaws are pretty important.

Elon Musk isn't "advancing humanity".

I'm sure there were people that claimed Nikola Tesla or Henry Ford weren't "advancing humanity" at the time.

There will always be people who disagree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to downplay their success for selfish reasons.

Please don't besmirch Tesla's good name by comparing him to Musk.

> There will always be people who disagree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to downplay their success for selfish reasons.

And conversely, there will always be people who agree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to overstate the reasons behind their success for selfish reasons.

I'm very far from a musk fan, and if you want to make the case that musk isn't responsible for Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink I think that's a legitimate argument to be made. But I don't think there's much argument to be made that those 3 companies are not advancing humanity.

Tesla and SpaceX would not exist OR prosper, without Musk.

If you want to understand why, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Musk (which is based on accounts by his friends, enemies and employees). He's a hard-arsed manager, he is technically involved at all levels of the company, he is relentless, and he takes risks and iterates like no other CEO.

Considering Musk isn't the founder of Tesla, that's obviously not true. He is the founder of SpaceX so that's probably true that it wouldn't exist without him.

Walter Isaacson doesn't have the best reputation for covering his subjects objectively to be fair. If your source for what Elon has or hasn't done is Isaacson, you aren't standing on very solid ground.

The bigger picture point though is that you can easily argue that the employees at those companies, and not a single man, are responsible for the success of those companies. We give far too much credit to CEOs.

> Considering Musk isn't the founder of Tesla, that's obviously not true

Tesla began as a very early-stage startup in mid-2003 but produced nothing prior to Musk.

It was Musk that made the investment (in 2004) that Tesla needed to begin work on their first car (the Roadster). Elon Musk was co-founder, product architect and chairman of Tesla at the time of the Roadster's development. To be clear - he was the product architect of Tesla's first product, from the beginning.

Musk received the Global Green 2006 product design award for the design of the Tesla Roadster, presented by Mikhail Gorbachev, and he received the 2007 Index Design award for the design of the Tesla Roadster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(first_generati...

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