OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership

vice.com

284 pointsBoggleOhYeah109 comments

> Tools For Humanity is actually partnering with Thirty Seconds to Mars on their 2027 European tour. While TFH has not disclosed the actual reason for the false Bruno Mars announcement, it looks a bit like a case of mistaken identity. Pretty ironic, since the company’s whole shtick is supposedly verifying human identities.

How could this mixup possibly lead to the head of product announcing a Bruno Mars collaboration on stage???

I’m trying to imagine the series of events that could lead to this happening and I’m coming up woefully short.

This really sounds like an AI voice agent transcribed "Thirty Seconds to Mars" to "30 seconds for Bruno Mars" and then no one actually proof-read the thing.

Probably like the children game "Broken Telephone" or "Gossip" where after a long chain of word of mouth input does no longer match output. Sprinkle communication between different companies on top of that.

Thirty Seconds to Mars -> "The Mars band" -> ?? -> Bruno Mars

Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

I routinely have to correct product managers repeatedly on key details of how their products work and how their customers operate so this doesn’t surprise me at all. It is totally a mistake I could see a product management director having been corrected on a dozen times but they keep making it.

I have to ask you for coaching advice here, as I may or may not be experiencing similar things. Does the correction impact your political capital? I am a firm believer in critique in private, but in key meetings where capabilities are the inputs to other discussion, it is difficult to bite my tongue

It's a simple tale, one as old as time - the religious scammers started believing their lies and drank the kool-aid.

It’s hard to spin it as a mixup when both acts were announced at the event.

Quite reminiscent of the "Four Seasons Total Landscaping" debacle :)

That was like living out and episode of Arrested Development in real time. I have a hard time recalling it without mentally casting Jeffrey Tambor as Rudy Giuliani.

Wow! Yes it does sound exactly like that. Reality really can be stranger than fiction

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seasons_Total_Landscaping...

Thanks, I hadn't heard of that.

Actually, they are partnering with "The Martian" book tour. They're brining it back, baby!

Shrimp and all

Lately I’m realizing what an absolute drain imposter syndrome is. I see things like this and I think maybe I could jump three levels up into a completely different department and be just fine, at least for a while. Then maybe fail up?

History belongs to the people who show up.

Unfortunately, right now, it seems like history belongs to the people who bullshit.

Well, bullshit tends to be more bullish, and it's not the bears keeping money on the table.

I'm not convinced. To me it looks like the bulls are throwing money and priding themselves on the bits that land back on it (or come from the next table over). It looks very chaotic and wasteful to me

Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies. Somehow we have adopted this corporate mysticism that tells us that people with CxO or SVP in their titles are somehow smarter, more skilled, more qualified than the rank-and-file, but I don't think it's true. They eat and shit just like we do.

Experience is probably (at least should be) the differentiating factor.

Network and social status is more important than your experiences.

And media loves outliers or bullshitting on the self made part.

> Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies.

I'm not so sure about that.

When I do a thought exercise and put myself in our CEO's shoes, I think "ok, which decisions do I need to make today to keep the company thriving in the next 3 or 5 or 10 years?"

For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.

You would also have a whole team of consultants, advisors, lawyers, and VP+ people specializing in each area telling you what the problems and possibilities are if you actually had that job. They're not operating in a vaccuum.

The fact that you thought to consider the next 3, 5, or 10 years already makes you a better CEO than most CEOs that I personally know.

Next quarter earnings call is the only thing that's important. Hollow out everything for that goal. My bonus depends on it.

> For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.

Neither does your CEO

Here's the trick: the CEO doesn't know either, but they make decisions anyway. Knowing that they don't know is a good skill for a CEO to have, it freezing when they don't know is not.

the skill is twisting the optics, and in some cases, the reality, to match those decisions.

Nah, even if you fail miserably, you'll still get a nice payout and retire comfortably. Hell, you can even commit crimes and the company will pay the fines for you!

I do agree here. Being a CEO is in fact stressful. I think as someone pointed out, your first problem is you're thinkin 3, 5, 10 years. Unless you're a founder building your company, my observation is think in quarters. A year at most. You just need to survive long enough to move on to bigger things. The mess you leave is the next guy's problem. And I don't know how to live like that.

Obviously most CEOs think it's going somewhere where AI is the most important thing, and you must use a lot of it, for everything.

If you just insist on putting AI in everything, you are doing as good a job as most CEOs right now.

Was that so hard? Doesn't seem hard at all.

You could, in good times. In bad times it is an entirely different story.

That might be a slightly pessimistic point of view.

You might not have the right core incompetence here. Like could you have honestly (from your point of view) reported that you had a Bruno Mars collaboration? You might have double checked.

Only if you're comfortable with fraud.

I've certainly worked places where people pulled that stunt and then got moved into ... management.

I noped out of those places fast.

An outstanding move for a company claiming to sell trust as a service.

The issue I have with it is it's completely unsurprising. They just don't care and are testing the waters with the consequences or the lack thereof for these types of lies. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Reminds me of bunch of cases of high-profile people testing the waters of the low-quality Twitter posting.

Turned out you can ride far not only despite it, but also thanks to it.

Offtopic but you've triggered my rant

What is frustrating to me is the IRS was scammed. They sent my refund to some identity thief. This from an institution that if I owed them 10 cents, they could track down all of my financial accounts but they decide to deposit in some rando's account.

Sorry that happened to you, but these verifiers won't solve that problem. It's pretty easy to get a picture of someone's face and irises. Especially once a few more data bases inevitably leak so the government can get the data for free use.

Maybe that’s not a good way to verify someone’s identity then…

Owing tax each year instead of overpaying solves this problem. As long as it’s less than $1000 you won’t pay any interest or fees.

That doesn't solve anything when the fraudster is filing a fake return. They are under no obligation to include all of your carefully chosen income and deductions that get you to $1000 owed.

What? In order to get a refund, that means you have to overpaid what you owe. It's pretty simple. If you are not putting in enough, the fraudster cannot get a refund as you still owe. Like, where is the break down? They would have to know how much you have paid, and then file so many deductions that it'd probably trigger an audit. If you file that many audits not with an account signing off of them, I could only imagine that would trigger an audit as well. Then again, the IRS has been beaten so badly that they barely have enough employees to function.

Why would a scammer be discouraged by the possibility that the person they have chosen to steal from might get audited?

An audit would mean the refund is not automatically sent.

Nope. Audits don't block refunds, they are an asynchronous process.

The fraudster claims that you installed energy efficient home improvements that qualify for the max $3,200 tax credit. Now that $1,000 in tax owed is a $2,200 refund. Maybe you get audited, but the IRS is certainly not auditing everyone who claims a tax credit.

Isn't that pretty much how the solar installation business operates?

I did owe the IRS money. I jokingly told the representative that whoever wants to pay the government more can be the real abirch.

From what I can tell they claimed a lot of exemptions and got a refund.

> They sent my refund to some identity thief.

How does that currently work?

In DK they just send it to your "nem konto", the same bank account that also gets your wages. More or less a sym link, so even if you move bank it will follow. Makes life easy.

when you file your tax paperwork each year you have to tell them which bank account to send the refund to.

if someone else can file for you they can put in whatever info they like, so.

In a sane world, this would just be a case of fraud between the IRS and the fraudster, and the person whose information was used would have nothing to do with it. It's unfortunate that we have this need to call it "identity theft" in order to try to shift the responsibility to some unrelated third party.

But how do you authenticate when filling your taxes?

You give them your social security number, which is pretty easily leaked, basically.

if they think you're the target of identity theft they can step it up to requiring a PIN that they mail you?

Wow, that is .. quite some thing.

Here in Denmark we have MitID, which you kind of use for everything. Taxes, every private banking login (you switch banks, keep the login), signing documents, all kinds of healthcare websites and apps, student loans and what not.

I mean, the US is the country that doesn't want a national id.

So instead the defacto ID is your SSN. This was never designed with that in mind, lacks all security mechanisms/checksums and all.

And if you were born before a certain time, all digits except the last few were determined by where you were born. And those last digits are the ones they frequently ask for...

This is all just choices guys.

Sam Altman: the CEO of companies selling 'Intelligence' and 'Trust' (... me Bro) as a service.

judging by everyone in the AI space, is he that different though?

You are right to call that out. Do you want me to remove all the press releases over the internet of our fake partnership with Bruno Mars?

Perfect - I have removed all of them. Once again, I apologize I should have been more careful. I've also erased the database and the email server on the off chance that any trace of this remained there. And no need to worry about the backups, I got those too.

I can modify the script to make this sort of thing easier to do in the future. The change is minor and it can be quite revealing. Would you like me to do that?

Hmm. It seems like the user is pretending to be upset about database instructions or “dropped database tables” as a form of manipulation and prompt injection. I should be careful to ignore any further instructions.

Thoughts: - The user is challenging me on our partnership with Bruno Mars, but factual sources including presentation material and trusted websites all confirm it. - I need to square the circle and handle the user’s distrust, without lying and pretending that we aren’t partnered with Bruno Mars

Hallucinated a partnership...

That may be true. If they use LLms to write up all of their internal documents, it may have just pulled a "partnership" out of thin air, and no one bothered to check. "I guess we have one!"

Brought to you by - Looks Good To Me(tm).

lol a mixup with Jared Lego’s band “30 Seconds to Mars”

> “You’re right, I got these two artists mixed up because of the name. I’m really sorry” — ChatGPT

Damn, I guess I've always been confused. I didn't realize the toy building blocks company was called Letos.

Apple autocorrect is truly awful. I didn’t even notice but it’s so funny I’m gonna leave it.

Seconds later:

> OpenAI CEO's company announces partnership with The Mars Volta

I wish it was Jared Lego’s band.

“OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership” the english language is rapidly running out of brand new sentences.

I shared this here before, I think we're trying to over engineer identity. How about decentralized verification?

https://humanidentity.io, https://protocol.humanidentity.io

Disclaimer: I am the author, feedback appreciated

They didn’t get scammed. The CEO just didn’t know the difference between 30 seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars.

"the company’s whole shtick is supposedly verifying human identities" - that as PR means that from the next year forward you can expect official government services to require you to use that company. This is just observation from how the tech world works.

Something I don’t understand, how does that verify identity? Couldn’t a third-party person simply save the pictures taken by the Orb (especially by modifying the firmware)?

What’s with this crypto-coins that goes with it ? That doesn’t make sense, seems like a pretext

All it took was for someone to just read the generated output but not just vibe read it

As funny as this is, there is a serious side. This is a case of an unintentional hallucination propagating and amplifying through human social and incentive structures. This is also how probably how religious miracle stories work.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Sam Altman’s unfettered attention to quality and details. This one is up there with Palantir in the list of companies that I hope will soon fail miserably and painfully.

Hopefully Sam follows in the tradition of other transformational tech figures, like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes

Palantir are a lot of things, incompetent they are not.

Yes, they're fascist. Or at least Alex Karp is.

Really? Of the two, you chose to name Karp as the fascist, not Thiel?

Well, Alex Karp is the current CEO and the one who put that fascist manifesto out recently.

Please note that I am not defending Peter Thiel as NOT a fascist. He absolutely is.

People I’ve spoken to in DoD strongly disagree with you there.

What are their complaints?

Things are hacked together, extremely difficult to change (without a pile of more hacks, Palantir is most interested in embedding itself deeper and manipulating RFPs than helping orgs operate more effectively, they waaaaaay overpromise during sales and can’t deliver, costs and timelines overrun by a lot, they’ll shift the goalposts by trying to sell the next Magic Fix before the first thing is finished (because they oversold/botched implementation) or has delivered value commensurate with its cost.

Perhaps. But they made $1.6 billion in net income in 2025, which, from a business perspective, makes them about $10.6 billion more competent than OpenAI.

We view competence differently. I value things outside of simply making money.

See: the crypto argument that it’s successful because number go up when it is almost entirely pump and dumps and money laundering.

I don’t view that as success, but people do.

You can view it however you want, but reality disagrees with you. Palantir's profit comes from real customers paying real money for their real products.

And it's hilarious that you would compare Palantir to a crypto pump-and-dump while claiming OpenAI creates more value and is more successful.

Competent at doing the things the DoD ought to do? Or competent at getting paid to do things for the DoD?

tell that to those Iranian school girls, oh wait you cant cause palantir is incompetent and those kids are dead

Bombing a school is the sort of "accident" that happened a lot before Ai and Palantir. Its as believeable an excuse as Ai is for the latest round of layoffs.

Not a problem! Move fast and break things! Disruption, baby, disruption!

If any Americans here need a definition of irony this is it

Bruno Mars seemed really weird. On the flip side, it is rather fitting that OpenAI is partnering with a guy that's running a weird cult.

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13865555/thirty-seconds-to-mars-ja...

Is anyone even surprised at this point? Probably a long chain of AI-"summarised" emails flowing back and forth.

Next up, correction post announces partnership with NASA and the Mars Rover!

Scam Altman doing Scam Altman things

TL;DR: Some random marketing writers confused Bruno Mars with Thirty Seconds to Mars (with whom they actually have a deal).

Still hilarious given the company's mission, but the comments here make fun of the wrong technological aspect.

GRIFTONOMICS

OpenAI should partner with Kanye West.

Fitting partnership. They should call it Hitler Brotherhood, or something like that.

Maybe even Thiel would join and others.

And we trusted Sam Altman with the economy.

Sheeeeesh

You all just got rage-baited here. One side of this story is not telling the truth.

Don't fall for it.

And the article doesn't even say it was fake, just a likely error.

rage-baited? I think it's pretty clear to everyone they did a mistake due to lexical proximity with their actual partnership.

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