"No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation."
Jessica Livingston retweet: "The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back."
Seems incredibly respectful and supportive, I'm not buying that there's a lot of bad blood there.
In the case of YC, removing him was better for PG and YC.
In this case, having Sam on top of OpenAI gets them better returns on their investment.
Wow, not the kind of compliment I’d want to receive.
This situation is rotten with conspiracy, backstabbing, money-grabs, rumor, innuendo, etc.
This(?!) is what Sam is so great at?
Nothing is worse than religious fanatics. While I am not implying she is so, for this kind of enterprise I would personally prefer scientific method of evidential support of Sam being this and that, rather then fanatical speaches how they like him.
I didn't see anything in the article that there was bad blood, just that Paul fired Sam. Those are not the same thing.
Yes, absolutely, AI will reach superhuman persuasion before it reaches AGI. Yes, that's an extraordinary threat. The reason it's a threat is that it's a weapon without self-guidance or direction: a paperclip maximizer, as it were. A gray-goo problem.
I still think Sam has access to exactly this, and panic about it is what caused his firing. Whether his use of his persuasion-weapon has played a role in what ensued is not as clear.
I get that huge swathes of OpenAI appear to have been persuaded, but I don't think this weapon applies as much to them, nor do I think it is unique and different in nature from what already exists. It's a way of short-cutting the process of persuasion and coming out with the answer right away. Everything superhuman persuasion can offer, has already been deployed by trial-and-error using tools like Google Analytics and whatever metrics Facebook offered, in recent (and not-so-recent) years.
Just because you can now push a button and get the killer argument to sway a demographic doesn't mean people haven't got to that argument more slowly in previous years, whether it's watching the results of persuasion campaigns in click-through feedback… or issuing radio broadcasts and observing the results.
Back in the day there was a man named George Wallace who spoke of the things he'd done in public service, and nobody cared, and then he began talking of something else 'and they stomped the floor'. AI persuasion is nothing more than a short-cut for getting to 'and they stomped the floor', and there's more than one way to elicit that.
Sam with his slick black hair, looking like Tom Hiddleston's Loki... "my ambition knows no bounds, I will build AGI and then you will understand my TRUE power."
Reading some recent pg tweets through this lens, though, I think it makes sense. E.g. there is this tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1726198939517378988. Both of the following can be true (and more to the point, I think the following two items are flip sides of the same coin):
1. Sam is an absolute masterful negotiator and is incredibly well-respected in the valley because his skills at assembling people and resources are unmatched.
2. Sam can be manipulative and self-serving, sometimes making decisions that are nominally about a higher goal but (not really coincidentally) are self-aggrandizing.
I see this trait in lots of effective, famous people. There have been tons of comparisons in the news recently to Steve Jobs, but for me for some reason Anna Wintour comes to mind. I don't think many people would describe Wintour as "nice" as she is known for being kind of ruthless and manipulative (she was "The Devil" after all...), but tons of people in the fashion industry are incredibly loyal to her based on her abilities to identify talent and get shit done.
"Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong."
Sam is what would come out if you created a technocrat in a lab
But despite comments to the effect that the YC post indicated Sam’s departure, it doesn’t seem to say anything about it right now?
I imagine most of us think, "S/he was so close to success. Maybe s/he'll have learned! What could be the harm in talking them up a bit? Besides, no one wants to ruin someone else's life,"
However, personally, what I've taken away from this is that he is a much better strategic/tactical operator than many other high-flying executives and very capable of winning the respect and trust of a lot of smart people. I wouldn't expect OpenAI to be run by anybody that wasn't revered in this way; a lot of CEOs aren't saints.
[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=from:paulg%20since:2019-01-01%2...
>My kid was really surprised to find out that Sam cofounded this company.
>Sam is going better than you. Do better.
Etc. I don’t know that you’re right, since these do sound like praise, but it’s kind of a funny game to change the tone and make them into catty insults.
It's not in either man's interests to create drama, either.
It all makes me wonder what really happened with Musk and OpenAI. There's so much we don't and can't know about these billionaires and their internal sparring, despite the fact that we give them such huge amounts of control over our society.
That's not necessarily a bad thing in employees. I was once told that it is easier to round off the corners of a cube than to develop corners on a sphere.
I understand you are probably talking about people who uniformly act like jerks but I haven’t found them to be as common.
95% is the kind of score one sees when there's an "election" in a dictatorship. Unanimity is often suspect.
Say the next US election, you have Biden against Hitler. I would expect no less than 95% for Biden. Not everyone likes Biden, but most everyone hates Hitler.
Somehow trying to tie that to the OpenAI board — which couldn't even come up with a concrete reason for firing him to their attempted CEO replacements, who both then switched sides to supporting Sam — seems like a stretch.
Now you have me interested, who could that one person be? Charles Koch? Henry Kissinger? Because many of those I would normally have guessed are either in the article as possible collaborator (middle-easter connection) or is already an investor (like Elmo). Honestly, who is too ethically different here and yet still within the anglosphere to be considered a board member?
I think his stock as potential boardmember probably went down with his service on the Theranos board.
> The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back.
https://twitter.com/jesslivingston/status/172628436492378127...
(no other reason than to understand how all the puzzle pieces come together)
After some reflection, I've found that I sympathize with Ilya Sustkever a bit more now. I'm autistic and I suspect he is neurodiverse in some way. I've definitely been misled by manipulative leaders and peers, been enthusiastic for whatever scheme they had, but regretted it after seeing the aftermath or fallout. I can absolutely see ways Sustkever could have been manipulated by others on the board.
Ilya was plenty successful before OpenAI and would've been just fine without Altman helping to "propel" his career.
Ilya, a nobody who wrote the most seminal paper of the last 10 years. The guy that Eric Schmidt and Elon broke their friendship over was just a random nobody.
Come on. It is no secret that when OpenAI formed, every single researcher joined so they could work with Ilya (and Zaremba who worked with him, but was less famous). Greg is brilliant but ML people didn't care for him and Sam 'one of those VC guys'. A lot of their best hires had already worked in Ilya/Zaremba before they joined OpenAI.
OpenAI might have moved past needing Ilya's brilliance to innovate, but if anyone gets to claim that they 'made' OpenAI, it is Ilya.
It's modern Jobs / Wozniak and Hacker News, despite the name, is ultimately fan service for the archetype of the former, not the latter
>I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.
"One surprise signee was Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and one of the members of the four-person board that voted to oust Altman. On Monday morning, Sutskever said he deeply regretted his participation in the board’s action. “I will do everything I can to reunite the company,” he posted on X.
Sutskever flipped his position following intense deliberations with OpenAI employees as well as an emotionally charged conversation with Brockman’s wife, Anna Brockman, at the company’s offices, during which she cried and pleaded with him to change his mind, according to people familiar with the matter."
https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397...
> 1. He was always nice to me.
> 2. He lied to me on various occasions
> 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons)
It's either very courageous and in service to changing silicon valley, or also very manipulative and in service of benefiting his company. It feels like it could be both.
I'm left feeling like there are no angels here. (That's actually funny given how investors love to call themselves angels.)
In the end it appears Altman has looked out for himself above all else, which probably enrages his mentors and investors who don't like to lose control, including pg.
With no mainstream outlet pushing forth the allegations his sister is claiming on social, I imagine right now they are looking under every rock on that end.
I respect his hustle but there is something about him in watching him speak live and in person that comes off as incredibly manipulative. He knows how to speak and pause in a way that gets the audience to laugh and gives soundbites. I am long OpenAI but I don’t trust Sam.
He could follow the character arch of his friend Thiel where the media come after him but he’s too resilient.
Or Zuckerberg where the media hated him for years and then moved on.
What do you think?
Greatest mistake you can make is watch someone speak live about what they're selling. If they're a good actor they'll win you over.
It would be nice to see him be down to Earth for a change and show some compassion but what do I know.. maybe those aren’t his strongest qualities.
At least Adam Neumann is a weirdo with a personality.
You can say the same thing about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is a jerk for sure but a bad personality does not predict success or failure as much as you (or we) hope to. And what people say about your character is also overly dependent on results. Only time will tell whether Sam Altman will be considered a villain or a flawed hero in media.
- https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232... (SA's sister - also have a look at her recent posts)
- Also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman... (utterly distressing)
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1727096607752282485 (check the comment with snapshots of the letter - "strangely" that Gist was deleted)
The Gist was posted by HN user xena and deleted after Elon's tweet led to a deluge of transphobic comments being left on it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38371837
> Besides Elizabeth Weil's nymag article (here), there has been virtually zero (mainstream) media coverage of the extremely serious claims that Annie has consistently made many, many times against Sam Altman over the past 4 years.
[1] https://www.insider.com/you-can-spot-psychopaths-by-looking-...
> According to Chinese/Japanese medical [...] when the upper sclera is visible it is said to be an indication of mental imbalance in people such as psychotics, murderers, and anyone rageful. In either condition, it is believed that these people attract accidents and violence.
It might not be scientific but people with this look certainly do freak me out. (FWIW, I haven't seen any images of Sam with these eyes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Applewhite#/media/Fil...
either this annie character is making stuff up, or the whole rest of her family are some kind of comic book villains
For example if they know she has a drug problem and would put herself in an early grave if she received millions of dollars (just theorizing, I don't know anything about their situation).
She's done something to alienate herself from the family. Usual reason is drugs, but given that she's publicly braying about being molested I'd bet that she's told similar stories about other family members, internally, prior to this. (ed: she also made the same allegations against her other brother too. Damn I'm good.)
Look at the number of people ascribing manipulative behavior to Sammy. This sort of thing runs in families.
Or look at the verbiage of the allegation itself:
> I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore. (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.) I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you.
Nowhere in there does she actually say he did anything more than get in bed with her. She just implies it, and our minds are filling in the rest, giving her plausible deniability against making such a claim. It's fuckary.
(edit2) Even better, from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...:
> "Annie had (and still was having?) extremely intense, nearly all-day PTSD flashbacks of the sexual assault she experienced in her childhood from Sam Altman, plus other forms of assault from all members of her nuclear family (except her Dad, I think.)"
Everyone wants a piece of Little Annie Altman, it seems. Histrionic personality disorder (and PTSD!) is treated with...Zoloft, dispensing of which was also considered "abuse" in her claims.
> Our Dad’s ashes being turned into diamonds (not his wishes) and that being offered to me instead of money for rent and groceries and physical therapy says more about me?
lol. The Altmans know how to push the buttons of someone with a spending problem.
Sam has zero charisma. Zero looks. No technical ability. He's not a storyteller. He's not a hype man. He comes off as a mildly surly sloth when he talks.
His actual pre-OpenAI achievements from a product perspective are a joke.
But he was nevertheless "there" for YC and "there" in OpenAI, and a bunch of money was raised, and he's successfully managed to get all spotlights on him at all times, so he's highly visible.
He's like a weird geek following plays from Trumps book: just stay highly visible, associate with any possible win, and be at the center of attention.
Why does it work? Because subconsciously who WOULDNT want to operate this way in life? It takes the least amount of effort compared to many other job tracks or even CEO tracks, and it's become wildly profitable for him.
So the cult of personality idolizing America of today can't help but want their tech Jesus fantasy to work out.
It seems more likely to me, given his background (programming from 8, accepted to Stanford CS) that he has technical aptitude, but he has even more dealmaking ability.
https://www.quora.com/Is-Sam-Altman-highly-technical-Has-he-... - Patrick Collison says he had technical conversations on Lisp machine implementations and iframe security policies, which to me is a measure of some depth.
And on hype, I think the carefully staged GPT PR over the years had an element of controlled hype. I remember them talking about how they couldn't release it because of how e.g. spammers could use it - https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/14/18224704/ai-machine-learn...
(They weren't entirely wrong, there's a flood of junk text out there now. Twitter popular posts have their replies flooded by AI-generated "on topic" responses by bots. Content mills are switching to AI.)
Also, some people would rather be shot than talk in front of a crowd or get up in front an audience. I used to have panic attacks during introductions in small meetings, and now I'm the one who spots the nervous professionals and helps them feel that they belong.
Anyway, that's all to say there's value in it. I don't personally enrich myself off of it, but if I could offer a correction to your dim view of the imperfect, the world isn't actually run by intimidatingly charismatic, beautiful geniuses, and I have found that helping people that have the simple capacity for success connect and communicate isn't a worthless skill.
Which, assuming he’s like everyone else who’s done that, was accomplished by a combination of flattery and willingness to operate on behalf of the ruling class totally untethered from any principles whatsoever.
I had to read that twice, but it was well worth it.
Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"
What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
Companies, specially start up, are growth garbage. Grow. Grow. Grow.
And CEOs today who get visibility win. Period. e.g. Musk, Sam.
relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/125/
Who would you prefer, a sensible, technical, honest CEO driving real efforts or this media circus? There might be a dime a dozen AI startups doing more science based innovation instead of this moore-law-llm. But they don't have the media attention, so their offices are probably empty.
(btw, IMHO i think all of this board non-sense is planned PR, by the company or Sam, which might have gotten out of hand)PS: The only thing people should be talking from that article is the only fact. That he was hired by YC to vet startups, and instead invested in them from his brother fund. Yet, here we are, talking about everything but it.
Perhaps this looks like "loyalty" when viewed with the narrow mindset of Silicon Valley and so-called "tech" venture capitalism. But it also looks like disloyalty to OpenAI and its stated mission when viewed more broadly.
"A former OpenAI employee, machine learning researcher Geoffrey Irving, who now works at competitor Google DeepMind, wrote that he was disinclined to support Altman after working for him for two years. "1. He was always nice to me. 2. He lied to me on various occasions 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons)," Irving posted Monday on X."
One could see similarities with the way so-called "tech" companies treat computer users.
It's no surprise people working for so-called "tech" companies are trying to hide behind labels such as "Effective Altruism". These are not altruistic people. They need a cover.
That's a concern of mine from one year ago when ChatGPT exploded: Altman holds a feeble position as a zero-equity co-founder of a non-profit. He should be enabled to become a stinking rich SV mogul of some sort, or at least have his existence tied to substantial equity. Otherwise, having power but no (huge, absurd) money, or promises thereof, from his commitment to OpenAI will only boost these side gigs or even future coups. He's an ambitious and powerful leader and entrepreneur, he should be compensated accordingly so that OpenAI goals become aligned to his own.
Somehow the new board's powerful oversight goals should be leveraged with valuable equity for Altman (and other key people, employees) or equivalent. Create a path to a for-profit, consolidate the Incs and LLCs floating around - OpenAI has a complex structure for such a young enterprise. He has a comfortable upper hand right now (employees, Ilya, a resigning board, MSFT), so this is the moment to rewrite OpenAI's charter.
That's kind of silly, isn't it? Altman is a college dropout who has barely ever worked and somehow fell upward into CEO positions very quickly.
His level of communication in talks and interviews is terrible, so I am genuinely confused where all this mystique comes from. He sounds like a college student being asked and talking about management.
It seems that if you have any title or personal relationship attached to you, people will listen to anything you say, and even say things or just conjure up an ora for you.
I've learned to apply this to every human being. Talk is cheap.
Yes this is always a wise thing to do.
>Most of them say nice things to be likeable, not because they actually mean or will do what they say.
I disagree with this take. I mean I’m sure there’s snakes out there. What I see in life though, is that most people don’t say enough nice things, even things they genuinely feel. They hold back from calling their dad or wife and saying “I love you”. Or giving a compliment to someone on the street if you like their outfit that you can tell they put time into.
I think a lot of salespeople are just good at “opening the gates” a little.
Personally I’ve been on a quest to be less stoic when it comes to expressing joy, and I highly recommend, especially for typical computer science personalities.
But Sam the CEO has totally failed to manage the narrative throughout this episode. [A CEO needs to communicate better]
Surely he could have stated it was a disagreement in direction? Instead he left it open to rumours: rumours which mostly assumed the board had good reason to sack him (everyone presumed the board couldn't be that stupid plus he didn't defend himself). : Many of those rumours were extremely damaging to Sam. Even if he couldn't say a thing, he could have got other third parties to endorse him.
Nadella and Eric came out looking pretty good.
I read it in the middle of purchasing a new car in 2010, and had signed paperwork and a purchase agreement to buy car at $X. Next day I'm told "My manager won't let me sell for anything less than $X+Y", after I'd gone through all the trouble of filling out all that paperwork.
Fortunetly I'd just finished a chapter in the book outlining this EXACT sales technique, that relies on a person being more willing to go through with an action if they've committed something to it... like filling out half an hours worth of paperwork. Said no thanks, and found the exact same car an hour away at less than $X.
Haven't underestimated the impact of a salesperson since, and no longer delude myself trying to believe somehow I'm special and immune to such things.
There are no qualifications to be a CEO, ultimately, except the board happens to want you as CEO.
It’s just a title.
Elon Musk has entered the chat...
The unfairly maligned genius ceo whose on company fired him for some bullshit reason and then had to publicly embarrass themselves by begging for him to take them back?
That makes him look pretty cool - and I didn’t even know who he was a couple weeks ago.
Same reason top football players contracted with Mino Raiola.
A scum bag (or tough/sleazy negotiator depending on how you see it) who can be a scum bag without everyone hating him is an exceedingly rare talent.
Sam seems to have it and is valued accordingly.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
It seemed to really get to the depths of his personality, both the impressive parts, and with some very subtle jabs.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like your coworkers, but something about the manipulative nature of it triggers an “ick” feeling that I can’t really put into words.
I’ve also spent very little time in the Bay Area, but from afar, there does seem to be something in the DNA that makes people there more susceptible to cult like behavior.
However, I absolutely would have been livid at the board and wanted Sama to come back if I was an employee, simply because I would have joined being aligned with the 'commercialize and make money' side, and not the other.
So I think a lot of OpenAI employees probably don't care if Sama is CEO vs someone else, as long as they get to ship and get paid. The board firing sam wasn't just a 'let's get a new CEO' it was a pivot from 'ship and make $$$'.
Some people wear flags as lapel pins to show their solidarity with a cause, some wave flags in the street, some post black images on social media.
Others remove the captials and punctuation from auto correct and post in lowercase.
Many aides in the new administration assigned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, discovered Monday that their computer keyboards were missing the "W" key — a critical problem given their boss' name is George W. Bush, and he is often referred to simply as "W," to distinguish him from his presidential dad.
Corporations have been acting in this capacity (making massive changes to the ecosystem, human lives, etc) just fine. The corporate "organisms" have caused humans to erect massive projects to shave a few milliseconds from HFT, for example. AI-based decision support tools will just make that process more efficient.
Corporations have been acting in this capacity (making massive changes to the ecosystem, human lives, etc) just fine. The corporate "organisms" have caused humans to erect massive projects to shave a few milliseconds from HFT, for example. AI-based decision support tools will just make that process more efficient.
I like your thinking man, I want to hear more of it. Where can I read your blog? When I have time, away from saving the world of course. Hahaha! :)
I will never understand peoples obsession with HFT. It is a shockingly small industry when compared to what it does (one of the reasons pay is so good). The bias is totally unwarranted: if a retailer were to come out and discuss how engineering efforts that improved response times increased sales, we would all read and congratulate them. But when HFT do it, they are lambasted.
I'm not bein doomer, this is just what I see going forward.
I think AGI can be positive, but it depends vastly how we configure that. And this is not the path that I see is best. That's it.
I get if you're a 100% AGI optimist and see any dissent to that as out of touch, but it's a leeetl disrespectfully reductive to try to frame other people's views that way, don't ya think?
Given that the board provided very few details about their reasoning, the ideological divide seems like the most likely explanation because it's the most nebulous by nature. Also likely given the climate of hype/doom surrounding ChatGPT.
Of course it was flagged within a few minutes.
Ahhh now I get that, all humanity, exclude noone :D
> pointed to Altman’s aggressive fundraising efforts for a chips venture with autocratic regimes in the Middle East, which raised concerns about the use of AI to facilitate state surveillance and human rights abuses.
Also, in general, when you have a CEO that's passionate, they tend to be bossy. If you don't have that, then you're just passing the time until the VC money is gone.
BTW, Sam was wrong about GPS-powered dating at Loopt. He was not wrong about pushing teleco's to free up GPS instead of hidding behind some wall of forbidden access.
How do we know he wasn't so much "fired" as "reassigned" or "differentially delegated"?
I've worked for the type of people you mention and no one followed them when they leave. 95% threatening to leave in this case is hard to ignore.
I work for a startup that's on the cusp of having an exit event valued at 70 billion dollars. Drama within the board, who I have no connection with, has reduced the probability of that happening to 0. There's a chance another company will hire me and my co-workers and match our total compensation in liquid stocks we can actually sell.
It's really hard to imagine why I or anyone else would sign a letter that turns back the decision impacting the exit event or join the company that'll actually let me cash out the equity portion of my compensation. It definitely reflects my feelings for the CEO and not my own self interest.
Because if it was me working at OpenAI, I would've signed it just out of peer pressure even if I disliked him. As the CEO, Altman undoubtedly shaped senior management that would've one way or another put pressure on everyone else under them.
When I was salaried, my main concern would've been to just get my pacheck and keep things going as smoothly as possible in my day-to-day with the least amount of drama. And I feel like a lot of people are like this.
There's very little risk in signing if everything falls apart, but there's a lot of risk to not signing if Sam comes back on as lead.
> I find it hard to believe
I also find it hard to believe that anyone on HN interested in this space doesn't at least have a "friend of a friend" who works at OpenAI. Based on what I've heard (which is nothing particularly quotable), it certainly gives off the vibe of being exactly that "kind of environment"
I'd rephrase that to:
- "95% of the staff were ready to follow him and join Microsoft"
Amid so much confusion and uncertainty, the prospect of joining Microsoft through an acquihire would appear quite appealing and like the safest choice. This sentiment is strengthened considering the team's approval of Sam's leadership.
Have you never had that employee or colleague who threatens to leave once a year? Curiously around pay negotiations?
Nobody joined Microsoft. Nobody left. Two people were fired. Lots of threats were made, every one magically leaked within minutes to Twitter.
Nobody followed anyone anywhere. Instead we saw $81bn vaporise, and the people who stood to gain from it panic and throw their weight around.
Manipulation doesn't even necessarily feel bad. Just promising something, or offering a place inside the "in-group" could do the trick for most. It's when you're up against someone whose job it is to safeguard something (like someone on the board dedicated to a mission) where you start needing to get a bit more gangster with your tactics.
As for the rest of the non-researching roles, most of them were hired after Altman's expansion for commercial operation. The existence and future prospersity of their jobs rely on having someone like Altman to push for profitabilty/go-to-market vision.
The 95% will lose a huge chunk of money if Sam leaves, at least their fortune are all in serious jeopardy. So, money might have played a bigger role here.
If he does come back and you didn't sign, he'll make your life hell; if he comes back and you did sign, you will be rewarded for your loyalty.
If you had such a chance to sit around while everyone else grew your potatoes, you would.
>I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this:
> "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.
> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.
> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."
> I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944
I think the article mentions what may be this same incident, without saying how it was done:
> Rabois noted that Altman, as a Stanford dropout, persuaded a major telecommunications company to do business with his start-up Loopt — the same quality, he said, that enabled Altman to persuade Microsoft to invest in OpenAI.
From the earlier comment, it seems he persuaded the telecom essentially through fraud though maybe not legally so.
It is similar to dressing the part you want - at least when that mattered. You buy more expensive clothes than you should be able to afford so that people think you are more successful than you are, and then they are more willing to bet on you, and then you become more successful.
There is nothing that is a red flag for me in the above story.
I also had a prospective first client want to visit our offices so I quickly rented an office and asked my part-time contractors to all come into the office that day to fill it out. It worked! And then I could afford an office and hiring those part-time contractors as full-time employees. So it was sort of a self-fulfilling.
Personally, if I were the prospective customer, I'd be angry at being lied to, and my message to my team would probably be that we'd be foolish to depend on this startup after they've shown from the start that they're dishonest.
If I were an established company, I think I'd also have our lawyers look at situation, to make sure the institutional knowledge was captured, and to see whether there's anything else we needed to do.
(For example of something else to do: though I'd treat things as confidential by default, in some future n-ary relationship/deal, is there a situation in which I'm obligated to mention to a third company that we previously had negative vetting info on the other company.)
But in the context of current startup culture, I don't think "fake (fraud) it till make it" is that unusual. And it's been normalized.
But I still don't want to do business with dishonest startup founders -- whether it's because they're naturally lying liars, or because they're surrounded by frequent dishonesty and they're not smart enough to cut through that.
There's a deceptive "fake it 'til you make it" aspect to both, and both play towards inflating the current appearance of scale/traction/experience, but I don't find them particularly damning.
Please note any positive connotations for the word 'revolution' should be abandoned at this point. Revolutions are short-term 100% bad and long term coin-toss bad, or worse. VCs love those odds.
You should listen to How I Built This. Tricks like this when starting out are pretty common, be it unicorn startups or personal businesses. So common that founders are openly willing to admit to it on public radio. In almost all cases, both parties came out better. It's not as if the client is at all upset at this "fraudulent" behavior.
The best career decision I ever made was to prioritize working with Good People and one of my few regrets was putting up with smart jerks for so long.
>> Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.
Sam gives me a manipulative vibe but the way he was booted with knives out was also pretty gross. No clue what else was going on behind the scenes.
Edit: if the people who booted him were really doing it in the name of safety paranoia, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t Machiavellian. The motive can be whatever but conspiring to boot someone like that is still a knife in the back.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. These types must have weaknesses of their own. I’m growing the cynicism necessary to tolerate them, but I’d like to know more robust strategies to manage them and keep them in check.
I find it hard to truly hate people, but with this type I can muster some pretty flowery invective on the spot.
Someone who politics for more time (with some aptitude) will generally beat out someone who doesn't.
One of the marks in favor of being cutthroat about pre-registering KPIs and expected outcomes, and then evaluating solely based on them.
In the end, I think it comes down to organizational culture.
The companies I've seen with healthier executive ranks all had a very strong culture/tradition of "brook no bullshit" and shunned/discouraged up and coming colleagues from doing the same. As well as a focus on a central, objective mission (e.g. "Does this help us X?").
You still got bad apples, but their behavior wasn't nearly as pervasive as I've seen other places.
[edited]: sorry means to replied one comment replied to this comment
However, sunlight is the best disinfectant. A bully cannot stand in isolation unless he is enabled. But if left too long they can amass too much power as the bully can manipulate enough people to vote for him (see Trump) or manufacture the vote.
In those cases it takes a far larger force to bring about change.
That feels exactly like why the board did what they did. Reading between the lines of everything that has been published, the actual sin that led to Altman's firing seems obvious:
(1) Altman went to a board member and proposed something that would decrease the board's power over him (probably kicking someone off the board)
(2) That board member tells other board members about the conversation
(3) Board asks Altman if he had that conversation. Altman denies it
(4) Board fires him for lack of candid communication with board
(5) Board doesn't explicitly say what happened publicly, because it's inside baseball. But they absolutely know it did happen, because it they were first parties to it
This feels less about safety vs commercialization (in the immediate future) and more about not having faith in a CEO caught in a lie while trying to remove oversight.
You must be a sociopath to think that's a good idea.
> “Sam lives on the edge of what other people will accept,” said one of the people who had worked with him closely. “Sometimes he goes too far.”
Silicon Valley has a profound problem with (a lack of) morals and ethics.
I've had a chance to work with some HR people who genuinely wanted to improve the work environment on their respective companies (I know! Please believe me, lol).
One of the bigger issues was corruption in general, of which this sort of behavior could fall under. The line of reasoning for that is that people usually resort to these behaviors in order to immorally/unlawfully attain some material benefit to them (it is very strange to find a pure blooded sociopath that just does it for the sake of it). When people artificially distort any system that is set up (for acquisitions, promotions, terminations, you name it) so that it no longer serves the company's interest but that of a group of rogue employees, well ... that's corruption. This framing is nice as it makes company exec's take a look at it from a business' gain/loss perspective instead of "meh, it's just employee's gossip".
Anyway, the proposed solution was a sort of ombudsman for companies (it's actually a tech thing, not an actual person), a private channel where people could raise these issues without fear of retaliation. There cannot be a clear cut criteria by which one could define whether a particular employee is being corrupt or not, but we've observed something like a bi-modal distribution where problematic individuals truly stand out! Quoting Warren Buffet, "there's never just one cockroach in the kitchen"; you usually observe a lot of employees with no comments on them, a few getting like one or two remarks per month (and you can just ignore those, shit happens everyday) and then you have this guy who is getting 10+ comments per week and that's who you really need to sit down with and ask what's going on.
Obviously this relies on the HR person being fair and honest, not part of the plot, and that comes with its own set of caveats; but at least, it's much easier to control that for one person than for 100s. Overall, the whole thing felt like an improvement.
But, conclusion, the app didn't go much farther than being used at a couple companies, and then we realized it would be very hard to monetize, the team disbanded and we all moved on to other things :P.
you don't reach the top without screwing over a lot of people along the way
He’s the CEO of OpenAI, which is responsible for the most-discussed advancement in technology for the past year. So it’s not that unusual for this to be discussed on a technology-focused forum.
He’s also the centre of a massive firestorm, where extremely atypical corporate behaviour was very recently taking place. Again, highly relevant topic for a forum that deals with startups.
In short, it’s news, and specifically news of interest to people on this site. No need for cults or obsession.
This whole thing feels like Altman expected some back and forth here between him and the board, but in their inexperience they vastly overreacted to what was probably “standard” corporate maneuvering. He assumed there would be steady escalation, but they went right for the endgame well before passing the many opportunities for compromise that usually show up in fights between CEOs and their board.
Why do people follow movie stars?
Because we’re human, and we gossip and obsess over high performers.
For no other topic have I seen so many flagged stories, and all of them are the ones that paint Sam in a negative light.
I realize your perception was that all the negative ones got flagged, but this perception is most likely a function of your own preference (you're more likely to notice it when a story that you agree with gets flagged, because people are more likely to notice what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Probably Sam feels like all the positive stories are getting flagged :)
I wrote a longer explanation about how we treat story floods like this from a moderation point of view, if anyone wants to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357788.
Edit: and this applies to the OP, which actually does contain SNI. I've turned user flags off on this submission and changed the title to be the article's HTML doc title, which is more specific.
Which I find ironic, because I’ll see the same people looking down on non technical people idolizing celebrities, but not recognize that it’s the same thing in a different field. The height of Elon worship was identical to Swifties imho.
This isn't evaluating products for use with pluses and minuses.
Attacks on reputation need to be very, very well substantiated or they are libel (business libel in this case). It's also morally wrong, it leads to the worst kinds of resentful discussions, and frankly, this is not really the place for that if indeed you want justice.
In this case, the board made a decision that broke the reliance of all OpenAI stakeholders on Altman's leadership, with no evidence and little explanation. If OpenAI was transitioned properly and with due care to another CEO, it would have been business as usual.
I don't sympathize with @sama, more so, my personal opinion of him is that he definitely shows off a lot of psychopathic traits, but that said ...
... I'm also ok with keeping those topics outside the scope of this community, which is mainly tech-related and that's what I enjoy about it. Personal affairs belong elsewhere, IMO.
What I did see is lots of people wondering how he lied to the board. Almost a week later and we still don't know how he lied to the board. We can all speculate away but there has been zero evidence of wrong doing, what else are we supposed to do? I guess we can just call him a sleaze-bag like you do.
Btw, this is the most probable reason right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
My impression was rather a overwhelmingly "wtf is going on?"
edit: I still don't know enough, to judge anyone involved
I've always said that in another country, like Germany, it might take time to get to know someone and, if you don't know them, you certainly shouldn't ask how they are doing. In the United States, we say hello and ask how people are, even if they are complete strangers.
This is a generalization, not something to be used for every single person, or culture, but it's a good indication of how cultures deal with trust up front. Here in the US, we'll give you "trust credit" and then roll over you like a semi truck if you screw up later.
Given how the board handled this whole situation like an amateur hour shit show, you will be hard pressed to argue their competence and qualifications in their favor.
Rather, you are doing exactly what you are claiming from others, you’re seeing two unqualified board members, who happen to be women, and defending them because they’re women even though this whole situation displayed the incompetence of the entire board, Helen and Tasha included. The only one taking a sexist position is you.
If the board handled this situation like competent adults who had ever spoken to an attorney, we wouldn’t all be having this conversation in the first place.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
He came to visit our office (YC '12 company) a few times and spoke with our team in very small fireside like gatherings. Dude always gave me a very creepy vibe. Something aint right there.
Even the worst criminal in the world should be declared "not guilty" if they were caught for a crime they did not commit for which the prosecution did not make a convincing case. In law, there no "innocent", only "not guilty" and most people surmised that sama is not guilty in this context irrelevant of a larger backstory.
In real life I use all available evidence for scoring outcome likelihoods. I score this guy high on sleazebag, and this article just increased this score.
Did they? You should try scrolling through the original thread and ctrl-Fing [edit: removed the single word that was getting me downvoted to oblivion, my point is that people were quick to jump to very serious/troubling conclusions to explain his firing and explicitly weren't jumping to innocent] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611
https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
> I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore.
> (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.)
> I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you.
I don't know how to use twitter - is she responding to someone, or talking to herself?
It also has revealed that non-profit philanthropic business models are little more than marketing ploys designed to fool the gullible, and that 'corporate values' statements should be viewed in the same light as the self-serving claims of narcissitc sociopaths are. In particular OpenAI's vague claims about 'ensuring AGI benefits humanity' were so subject to interpretation as to be meaningless (e.g. some may claim that cutting the size of the current human population in half would be a great benefit to humanity, others would argue for doubling it, see the history of eugenics for more of that flavor).
For-profit entities who are upfront about the fact that their only interest is in making money for their investors, executives and stock-holding employees are at least honest about their goals. Of course, this means their activities must be subjected to independent governmental regulation (which is the outcome that the whole 'we have values' BS is intended to avoid).
What is your reasoning for stating that closed-source proprietary LLMs are a bad idea and that anyone with long-term interest in the subject (AGI?) should switch to open-source models?
Open-source tends to foster monopoly and relies on free labor (see Google, Meta). AI also relies on free labor.
> The scariest sociopaths are the ones you let in to your house, who met your family, who you broke bread with
> ...
In a comment:
> Just heard some disturbing news about someone who I once thought highly of
> not just common, it’s start-up gospel from Altman’s longtime mentor, venture capitalist Peter Thiel
— according to whom? Is it supposed to be common knowledge? Is this even a helpful parallel?
In comparison, reporting on FT on this same topic is a lot more subdued and matter-of-fact.
Not said: "...but has consistently spoken in support of Sam Altman."
This article is incredibly disingenuous. Almost to the level that I'd cancel my Washington Post subscription over if I hadn't already for similarly bad journalism.
WaPo has been an atrocious wreck lately and I’d be surprised at someone still subscribing to it while actually reading their content in anger. Hastily drumming up some palace intrigue puff piece like this has been their business model for years and I don’t see the appeal.
Then I got fired on the spot for just talking a little more angrier at the manager because they put me on a task that nobody communicated to me they wanted in 1 month, and then when I realized after the leader was compaining that they wanted the task in 1 month I was like "do you realize you placed me in a project I dont know, the devs themselves don't know some answers I'm asking for the project, i have to implement a whole driver for getting API signals etc." you get the point. The leader asked me to put me in a project he did not even code in ever, and he thought it was gonna take 1 month and took 4-5 months and when I realized that he thought that I contested. To the point that the first manager agreed with me that "yeah it's not a 1 month task." and he was one of the best programmers in the company and was just a manager now. Like the first manager on the line agreed with me but on a 1-1 meeting, so his voice was not heard to the leader.
So I contacted the second manager on the line to have a conversation with the leadership about this task and that I had these concerns, and after realizing he agrees with the leader despite him not even remotely knowing what we were doing, I was kinda pissed off not gonna lie. It was the first time I actually just kinda exploded to him which diplomatically ngl is bad move ... but i was angry because I've pissed blood for this task, coz "the leader wanted it in 1 month" and I did unfortunately work days and hours just because I felt like it out of pressure, and I thought that I DIDN'T want to be fired for this stupid task taking "longer than the leader thought should take" despite him not even having direct experience on the project or the Data Aggregator API they placed me to get data from.
But was I fired because of MY mistake? No. I was fired, on the spot, without notice, after working for 3 years and doing so many things for that company, coz I made somebody angry.
And please believe me when I say that when I told this same manager "hey this other guy (not the leader) treated me with disrespect" he just said "yeah you know how he is we all know, he is just this way". Like what the hell? So, I'm so bad you're gonna fire me on the spot for making you angry just so you can powertrip, but he's "just the way he is"?
You guys get my point. You can get fired, without it being your actual fault. Yes, you may have some responsibility, as I had to be more diplomatic but I'm a human too. I can be angry about some things too some times. But I didn't fire anybody on the spot for making them angry.
I'm not claiming Sam's case is the same. But I do claim that just because you're fired, doesn't mean you're on the wrong. It seems like a cliche point to make that "you were fired thus it was your mistake". Things are just not that simple sometimes. You may be fired just because you pissed off somebody and he couldn't keep his feelings inside and powertripped without second thinking, like the board of directors did when they fired Sam without a proper discussion with all the individuals first and making sure it's the right decision.
Step 1: Dazzle an influential person
Step 2: Persuade them to hitch their reputation to you
Step 3: Do whatever you want with minimal repercussions
1. Jessica Livingston did not co-found a company with three random men.
2. She and Paul Graham were dating, she was job hunting and being jerked around and he said one day "Why don't we start a company?"
3. Within a day or so, he called his two co-founders from Via Web and asked them to come on board like part time or something and they said "yes."
4. They initially hid their personal relationship as a dating couple to try to appear professional.
So they have a long history of being very private people and because I am a woman who has struggled to get any traction and blah blah blah, when I learned Sam was gay, I figured "Ah, that's probably the real reason he was appointed President of YC: Paul Graham wanted to protect his marriage while retiring from YC and was concerned about his pretty, younger wife working closely with a man other than himself. So he appointed a gay guy to take over 45 percent of his duties."*
So if that had anything to do with the hiring decision, not announcing the firing would be in line with long-standing personal policy to keep his private life private and not talk to the world about his marriage to Jessica Livingston and it wouldn't exactly be shocking if that meant it (hiring him) wasn't the wisest business move.
She eventually also retired from YC, so her being there while Paul Graham is home with the kids is no longer relevant to who runs things at YC. They are both founders and presumably major stock holders, I imagine they both still have influence there.
/"wild speculation" from an outsider who has never met any of these people but did sort of politely cyberstalk Jessica Livingston for some years trying to figure "How does a woman become a successful business founder?"
* "45 percent" because Paul said somewhere that he continued to do "office hours" with program participants and called that "10 percent" of what he did at YC before retiring. They also hired Dan Gackle to take over as moderator of Hacker News when Paul Graham stepped down.
So Paul was not replaced by Sam Altman. They hired two full-time employees that I know of and Paul continued to work part-time at the business while his wife worked full-time and presumably kept Paul up-to-date about daily goings-on over breakfast/dinner, so he likely continued to have significant influence on company decisions and day-to-day stuff invisibly via his wife.
It's hard to square that whole thing with the way people talk about him here. But every once in a while it hits; this is the guy who wanted to collect everyone's bloody retina pattern, all for a crypto so obviously bad in nearly every fundamental aspect.
I want to build global apps where I know every user is real and limited to one account but currently that's impossible. I don't know enough about Worldcoin to know if that's it though.
It's almost invariably the case that to most of us, people who are powerful and effective appear "manipulative". In fact, they are manipulative, which is how they achieve so much. It's only a problem if they are manipulative in the service of goals that are unethical or harmful.
See also: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... - successful, powerful people ("sociopaths" in vgr's comical treatise on office politics) are people who create and shape reality. Those who are not able to create and shape reality themselves (the "clueless", according to vgr) benefit from having someone create a reality for them, while at the same time, take offence at the manipulation.
it's worse. The article say he invested in companies he was being paid to evaluate for YC, perfect reason to end an exec career. And then was NOT fired.
I think hurting your own business versus being a scumbag scammer will get you much different treatment, even from PG.
But AirBnB was defended by PG and Altman fired? You see me confused.
What I've ment, PG defended - as far as I remember[0] - all AirBnB unethical things, while the article says he fired Sam Altman.
[0] I might be wrong and need to search for the comments, if not deleted.
Did Paul Graham fire Sam Altman?
Is there factual information about this - has pg said anything?
Not saying he's good or trustworthy, but it's unfair to speak badly about him without evidence or even examples of wrongdoing.