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Comment by moomoo11 | Hacker News Reader

I actually think Sam is “better” than say Elon or Dario because he seems like a typical SF/SV tech bro. You probably know the type (not talking about some 600k TC fang worker, I mean entrepreneurs).

He says a lot of fluff, doesn’t try to be very extreme, and focuses on selling. I don’t know him personally but he comes across like an average person if that makes sense (in this environment that is).

I think I personally prefer that over Elon’s self induced mental illnesses and Dario being a doomer promoting the “end” of (insert a profession here) in 12 months every 6 months. It’s hard for me to trust a megalomaniac or a total nerd. So Sam is kinda in the middle there.

I hope OpenAI continues to dominate even if the margins of winning tighten.

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Elon is one of the most unlikable people on the planet, so I wouldn't consider him much of a bar.

It’s kind of sad. I can’t believe I used to like him back in the iron man days. Back then I thought he was cool for the various ideas and projects he was working on. I still think many of those are great but he as a person let me down.

Now I have him muted on X.

Back then he had a PR firm working for him, getting him cameos and good press. But in 2020 he fired them deciding that his own "radically awesome" personality doesn't need any filtering.

Personally I don't think Elon is the worst billionaire, he's just the one dumb enough to not have any PR (since 2020). They're all pretty reprehensible creatures.

Any number of past mega-rich were probably equally nuts and out of touch and reprehensible but they just didn't let people find out. Then Twitter enabled an unfiltered mass-media broadcast of anyone's personal insanity, and certain public figures got addicted and exposed.

There will always be enough people willing to suck up to money that they'll have all the yes-men they need to rationalize it as "it's EVERYONE ELSE who's wrong!"

The watershed moment for me was when he pretended to be a top tier gamer on Path of Exile. Anyone in the know saw right through it, and honestly makes me wonder if we just spotted this behavior because it's "our turf", but actually he and people like him just operate this way in absolutely everything they do

Yeah, Putin is probably the worst billionaire. Elon might be a close second though, or maybe it's a US politician if they actually are a billionaire.

Peter Thiel who thinks the Pope or Greta Thunberg might be the antichrist, and that freedom is incompatible with democracy

https://www.nationalmemo.com/peter-thiel-antichrist

I think you did not understand his argument. He said it is a great danger that people might unite behind an antichrist like figure.

Exactly, other billionaires having calmer personality types does not make them less nuts.

> Now I have him muted on X.

Props to him for letting people mute him on his own platform. The issue with Sam and OpenAI is they their bias on any controversional topic can't be switched off.

But you're still on Twitter and calling it X...

So? I bet you think you're clever. You're using platforms daily that are ran by insane people. Don't forget that the internet itself was a military invention.

Hah, you beat me to it, serves me right for writing longer comments. Have an upvote ;)

Not extreme? Have you seen his interviews? I guess his wording and delivery are not extreme, but if you really listen to what he's saying, it's kinda nuts.

That Dyson sphere interview should've been a wake up call for the OpenAI faithful.

I understand what GP is saying in the sense that, yes, on an objective scale, what Sam is saying is absolutely and completely nuts... but on a relative scale he's just hyping his startup. Relative to the scale he's at, it’s no worse than the average support tool startup founder claiming they will defeat Salesforce, for example.

Exactly. Thanks for getting it, it is refreshing to encounter people who get it. Good luck with everything!

You too!

He's definitely not. If Altman. Is a "typical" SF/SV tech bro then that's an indication the valley has turned full d-bag. Altman's past is gross. So, if he's the norm then I will vehemently avoid any dollars of mine going to OAI. I paid for an account for a while, but just like Musk I lose nothing over actively avoiding his Ponzi scheme of a company.

Altman is a consummate liar and manipulator with no moral scruples. I think this LLM business is ethically compromised from the start, but Dario is easily the least worst of the three.

Darío unsettles me the most, he kinda reminds me of SBF, I wouldn’t be surprised if, well they’re all bad its to stack rank them.

I don't think he's good, but afaik he isn't trying to make everyone psychologically dependent on Claude and releasing sex bots.

He and SBF are both big into effective altruism, and SBF gave Anthropic their seed funding, so yeah, that checks out.

There's nothing wrong with effective altruism -- making money to give it away -- it's SBF.

Of course there is. The whole thing is a cult, designed to pull in suckers.

Your argument is guilt by association. Association with something that isn't morally wrong, it's just a way to try to spend money on charity in an effective way? You can take a lot of ideas too far and end up with a bad result of course.

There’s 4 though, where does Demis fit in the stack rank?

TBH, I hadn't heard of him until now. Looks like he's had a crazy legit professional career. I'd put him at the top for his work at Bullfrog alone.

Demis is the reason Google is afloat with a good shot at winning the whole race. The issue currently is he isn’t willing to become the alphabet CEO. IMHO he’ll need to for the final legs.

I’d hate the job too. It would be interesting to see how Google might evolve with him at the helm, for sure.

Pfft. Dario has been making nonsense fear mongering that never comes true.

> I actually think Sam is “better” than say Elon or even Dario because he seems like a typical SF/SV tech bro.

If you nail the bar to the floor, then sure, you can pass over it.

> He says a lot of fluff, doesn’t try to be very extreme, and focuses on selling.

I don't now what your definition of extreme is but by mine he's pretty extreme.

> I think I personally prefer that over Elon’s self induced mental illnesses and Dario being a doomer promoting the “end” of (insert a profession here) in 12 months every 6 months.

All of them suffer from thinking their money makes them somehow better.

> I hope OpenAI continues to dominate even if the margins of winning tighten.

I couldn't care less. I'm on the whole impressed with AI, less than happy about all of the slop and the societal problems it brings and wished it had been a more robust world that this had been brought in to because I'm not convinced the current one needed another issue of that magnitude to deal with.

> All of them suffer from thinking their money makes them somehow better.

Let's assume they think they're better than others.

What makes you think that they think it's because of their money, as opposed to, say, because of their success at growing their products and businesses to the top of their field?

Even if it's success rather than money, you still have survivorship bias to contend with, so it's not really much of a helpful distinction.

Because they wouldn't talk about money as much or try to convert a non-profit into a for profit company.

Do they talk about money that much? 99.99% of the people I see talking about money (especially other people's money and what they should be doing with it) are non-billionaires.

That’s ok, but AI is useful in particular use cases for many people. I use it a lot and I prefer the Codex 5.2 extra high reasoning model. The AI slop and dumb shit on IG/YT is like the LCD of humans though. They’ve always been there and always will be there to be annoying af. Before AI slop we had brain rot made by humans.

I think over time it (LLM based) will become like an augmenter, not something like what they’re selling as some doomsday thing. It can help people be more efficient at their jobs by quickly learning something new or helping do some tasks.

I find it makes me a lot more productive because I can have it follow my architecture and other docs to pump out changes across 10 files that I can then review. In the old way, it would have taken me quite a while longer to just draft those 10 files (I work on a fairly complex system), and I had some crazy code gen scripts and shit I’d built over the years. So I’d say it gives me about 50% more efficiency which I think is good.

Of course, everyone’s mileage may vary. Kinda reminds me of when everyone was shitting on GUIs, or scripting languages or opinionated frameworks. Except over time those things made productivity increase and led to a lot more solutions. We can nitpick but I think the broader positive implication remains.

some people are so determined to be positive about AI that at some point it just comes across like they’re getting paid to be

There are quite a lot of posts like that. Just a bit too eager. Proselytising as if AI is a religion.

Mods tolerate it for some reason I suppose.

I don't think I did that at all, and I call out that sort of bullshit all the time and get downvoted lol (idgaf :P)

Maybe some/many even are? For "AI" companies it's not really a big expense in comparison and they depend hugely on keeping the hype going.

It's very hard to see downsides on something like GUIS, scripting languages or opinionated frameworks compared to a broad, easily weaponized tool like generative AI.

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