Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident (opens in new tab)

I imagine you knew Sam personally when he was President of YC. Most people don't, instead going off what they read in the press. Recent press is often less than flattering, given how contentious AI in general is as of late.

Consider for some it's already hit home in the form of job loss, which for most people can easily be catastrophic. Or maybe they've a giant datacenter in their back yard suddenly, and now their air and/or water isn't viable.

That of course isn't justification, but it does partly inform why some people are that mad, and it's much easier for angry people to be callously indifferent.

If you were to break down HN's zeitgeist, it's some percentage site-local, some percentage larger tech scene, and some percentage general public.

Although you have outsized influence on the former, the latter items factor in heavily—sometimes overwhelmingly so. You can't really control that, and I don't feel it represents some sort of failure on behalf of the community nor moderation team.

I see it not as mob mentality so much as as multiple sides personally involved for different reasons. Things tend to get pretty heated when that happens; not a good recipe.

I'm sorry you had to deal with the aftermath. Your flurry of disappointed, exhausted-sounding comments reminded me of a service industry worker getting hit with a huge rush. There's a kind of PTSD that hangs around once the dust settles.

So, thank you for your efforts in trying to keep the site civil. It clearly ain't easy sometimes.

When violence is considered as an acceptable solution to systemic issues, it is an early sign that things are taking a very bad turn.

I typically take jabs at the community here, but not this time. What you are seeing is a reflection of a wider, much more insidious problem. Trust in society is failing, and people are not seeing a civilized solution through the usual channels - such as politics.

I think things will get a lot worse before they get better. Hopefully I'll be okay in my little corner of the world.

For what it’s worth Dan, you’re probably the best moderator I’ve ever encountered, and without you HN likely wouldn’t be worth visiting. As it is it’s one of the best places for online discourse. That’s directly because of you and your efforts.

It’s not easy to be a cop, and that’s basically what you are around here, but thank you for doing it.

I have to believe that what we're seeing is a minority opinion that feels like their uniquely backwards logic justifying this is somehow worth sharing as if its new and insightful, while the vast majority of us think "holy crap, that's horrible" but aren't adding it because of course that's already been said and there just isn't any more nuance needed.

Unfortunately, political violence seems to be en-vogue these days. I even hear people in "real life" casually discussing their support for it. What can we do? I think the only thing we can do is push back on it, even though it doesn't seem fair. What's a favourable alternative? You do a great job here giving individual feedback, which I know some people listen to and take in. I hope it's some kind of comfort to know that you can change people's minds, or at least give them some pause. In today's algorithm-driven world, pushing back seems more important now than any time I can think of. We need cool, level-heads running things.

The event itself is really bad and condemnable, but when threads like this show up they are usually a good thing because people rapidly demonstrate high coupling of tribal affiliation with viewpoint. This causes a lot of them to advertise through unhinged posts which is a good raw test for what they are like to communicate with. I usually go through and killfile a bunch of these commenters. Essentially, you want your bad participants to be easily visible to be so. I don't want them to be subtly sneaking their stuff in normal threads. I want to go look at one place and see all of the people I don't want to listen to.

Therefore, here's a feature request: allow per-user killfiles. I currently have this through a Chrome extension but I'd love it to be native so that I don't have to use my own iOS app and so on.

Wouldn't it maybe be a great idea to just ban anything that's not actually about science and technology from this board? This will have the indirect effect of people leaving it who are here for political trench fights? Plus the good old flame wars about technology x versus y are pretty harmless in comparison.

(And no, just because Sam Altman is CEO of tech company doesn't make this news tech news.)

Don't leave dang -- we need you now more than ever. :(

It would be a huge loss and a real shame if you left permanently.

I don't know how often you get to take a real vacation, somewhere away from the Internet and the USA, but this might be a good time to consider taking one?

You make this corner of the world better dang!

The comments you've linked are gross, but I take exception with what you wrote here.

> or saying they "don't condone violence" as a pretext to do exactly that

Maybe I just don't know what comments you're referring to, but you seem to be lumping every other post critical of Sam in with the worst comments, saying they are condoning violence, and that is disingenuous. I mostly see people expressing they aren't surprised this happened given how Sam openly markets his tech as a dangerous and unpredictable product that only he can steward, and maybe even finding his response to be a bit opportunistic in a tone deaf way, which hardly rises to the level of condoning violence.

I am willing to hear you out on this, but you're going to have to explain how this is different from any other thread on HN that you've moderated. Political violence, on a much bigger scale than this I may add, hits front page news, and you have more than normalized that as a discussion topic. Whether it's drone strikes, wars, or people being openly executed in the street, it seems the tragedy of human life is an open debate on HN, and you can bet a good 50% of this site will be writing comments exactly like the ones in this thread. And hell, I can't say one way or the other if threads like this are even worth allowing.

But now a tech CEO with lots of security gets a Molotov thrown at his metal gate, and people make the same comments, and suddenly a line has been crossed? How are the comments in this thread any different than comments like this, which involved people who were actually killed [1][2]. I have seen hundreds of comments on this site dictate to me how I should feel about the lives of others. I am often sickened by them. That's before we talk about Sam's actual role in how he shapes our society. It's not "sickening" to feel the need to footnote a condemnation of what happened, it's completely expected.

Again, maybe you're talking about worse comments than I'm seeing, but I feel frustrated as people have regularly brought you examples of escalating violent rhetoric on this site and been dismissed. Outside of people explicitly saying Sam deserved it, which I don't agree with, every other comment here reads like regular HN to me. If that saddens you, maybe there needs to be a different approach to moderation altogether.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551716 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688076

>The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get.

There are like 20 rules for commenting on this site. Pretty much all of them are versions of “have decorum”, and none of them are “do not advocate for violence”. It is not just tolerated but encouraged to post insane stuff here so long as it sounds highbrow enough (eg the “most charitable interpretation” rule. It is against the rules to call out stuff like advocating for violence if it’s written like Niles Crane wrote it).

As far as I can tell this thread is not really exceptional in any way other than some of the ire is directed at somebody that used to work for YC.

Trying to help your perspective: It might be Gell-Mann? or something similar that you sometimes mention. We assume that users who have proficiencies in one area should have proficiencies in another, or we notice more when something we know and care about is deeply wrong. The reaction we feel to deep untruths is a sign of our care and passion in Truth.

As you encourage, I would also like to be a little bit charitable and say that some users might be clever at programming or know about certain technology subjects but when it comes to real life and morality they are stuck in early edgy teenager mode, so we can still work and communicate with them on other topics. I try to flag these submissions because I know that many users are completely unable to discuss them in fruitful ways. Many of us are immature.

At a societal level, the simplistic and edgy teenager morality is mostly expressed online so we being terminally online tend to notice it more. The morality might be most publicly seen in "silence is violence" which is a thought terminating cliche. Thinking is hard and changing one's mind is hard too, especially when people have these thoughts which literally stop them thinking.

Psychologically, for many, expressing these juvenile, half baked, sloppy thoughts do not require much thought. They are cheap psychologically. It's like how being in a herd is actually comfortable and saves energy. It costs brain effort and potential hurt to ones self identity to change one's brain patterns. Most people choose to avoid even the thoughts that change is possible and not only wish to remain in Platos cave but to then keep their eyes closed to the shadows on the wall.

Another charitable thought: these worrying ideas are not actually ideas but emotions. For some users they try to argue with these people with logic but they should really connect emotionally - try to help the people feel for others, the good and the moral. Easiest to do with personal first hand real stories and not abstract ideas. To break down otherness through charity.

All communities eventually become a reflection of the society they are a part of. Even a willingly insular and sometimes wilfully ignorant one. Did you think this corner of the internet - your beautiful little garden - could survive unscathed while the rest of the world and the rest of your country slowly/quickly goes mad? The visitors to this little garden may spend a lot of time here trying not to let the outside world in - but the reality is we all live in that slowly rotting society, so don’t be surprised when the infection seeps in even here.

As I see it the underlying issue for many ITT is the hypocrisy of condemning violence against Altman while while looking the other way from his role as an oligarch and as a Defense contractor. This is a human being with an awful destructive effect on the world he shares with us. Such people don't deserve violence but expropriation.

I wish we all felt so sickened by this.

It's been getting pretty bad around here lately. I had someone reply to a post I made in that Idiocracy thread a few days ago advocating for eugenics. Really really gross all around.

People here think that they're much smarter than they actually are.

Maybe its opportune to talk about editorial consistency, because your statement here is a fascinating case study in selective moral clarity.

When posts surface about Gaza, documented by the UN, by Médecins Sans Frontières, by the Lancet, by journalists who were subsequently killed while reporting or now in Lebanon, they vanish from the front page with remarkable efficiency...

The reasons, which I have collected like trading cards at this point, include: "too political," "not related to tech," "flamebait," "this isn't the forum for this," "not intellectually curious," and my personal favorite, "this will only generate heat, not light."

Entire hospital systems destroyed, aid workers killed in marked vehicles, tens of thousands of documented child casualties, and the curated editorial position is: not HN material.

A Molotov cocktail lands on a billionaire CEO's porch. No injuries. Likely a disturbed individual, and according to some well researched reporting in the New Yorker, Altman's personal life has generated no shortage of intense grievances that have nothing to do with AI or tech.

But here we are: front page, moderator editorial, existential crisis about the community's soul...!?

So help me understand the framework. Is violence HN worthy when it is directed upward on the org chart? Is a zero casualty arson attempt on a mansion more deserving of community reflection than systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, because one involves someone in YC Rolodex?

You write that you've "never seen a thread this bad." I'd invite you to read the comments that appear in the eleven minutes before Gaza threads get flagged. They're remarkably similar in tone, just aimed at people who don't have Sam publicist.

You say you want to "find something else to do with your life." Maybe that instinct is worth listening to. Since the AI boom, HN moderation has drifted from "intellectually curious forum" toward something closer to "curated narrative for the industry it covers."

When a platform consistently decides that violence against tech executives is a moral emergency but violence enabled by tech companies' contracts is "off-topic," the person setting that editorial line is not a neutral steward, they're an editor with a viewpoint.

And that's fine, but let's not dress it up as community values. So...In the spirit of consistency:

I'd like to this post be flagged. It involves no technology. It's a criminal matter best left to law enforcement. The comment section is, by the moderator's own assessment, irredeemably toxic. It is generating heat, not light. It is too political. It is not intellectually curious. It will attract flamebait.

In other words...it meets every single criterion routinely applied to kill discussions about violence that does not happen on somebody porch in Pacific Heights.

The community may very well feel ashamed of here, dang. I've been here in the good times, and to be frank, even before I made an account in 2017, I'd lurked for a long time. Recently, I've personally come to recognize an ethos nurtured here that it may very well be has overstayed it's welcome in a polite society. People aren't dumb. People see where the money flows. People see whose decisions things revolve around. People see the trajectory that seems to be set, and people are starting to realize that talking & reason aren't working for them any more. Reason, is by virtue of rationalization, in it's own way it's own worst enemy. With enough practice, anything can be intellectually justified. So where the little box of rationality ceases to be effective, life shifts to the irrational. Suddenly things start hitting different. You might be ashamed of all those here feeling the squeeze, but the squeezed don't even register the pinch thereof compared to what life is already throwing at them, in no small part because of your fellow Sam A. What you should note, and take away from all of this, is someone you know is building themselves into a Wickerman doused in gasoline through their actions. If you want something to change; you can try applying pressure to your first degree connection. Sometimes people just need a helping hand back onto the right path from someone unexpected.

Or... You can keep telling a bunch of people with much bigger problems how ashamed you are that they are having an absolutely human response to the suffering of a man at the forefront of building a reasonably foreseeable suffering amplification machine within the context of a society that is organized around a social contract of exchanging capital for labor. I'm sure that shame you cast won't get "lost in the softmax" as the AI folks might say.

No more skin off my nose either way. Though I'd feel much better seeing some genuine humanity injected into cutting edge tech circles, I'm aware of the incentives, and also cognizant that sometimes, you have to leave the incentivized path to stay on the Right one. That's a lesson it isn't in any one person's capacity to teach though. Sometimes... it takes a community to get the point across. Even then though, you can lead a horse to water...

HN has literally turned into a political cesspool lately

Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years...

HN (and ycombinator) has implicitly enabled, dogwhistled, or pretended to ignore all sorts of hateful and violent rhetoric. Sometimes it hides behind a veneer of "curious conversation" but other times its disgustingly blatant - last article I saw about sama was filled with horrific racism.

I come here because there are sometimes good posts, but this stuff has been here the entire time. Now its your guy getting the hate you are acting like its the worst thing in the world?

Frankly people calling out a post from a billionaire is a good thing. You would have to be terminally detached from reality to not see how all these festering issues - wealth inequality, injustice, cost of living, future employment etc etc - are starting to come to a head which would cause people to feel something - frustrated, angry, wrathful.

You're being completely melodramatic and hypocritical here likely because you have some sort of personal or business relationship with Altman.

Be honest with yourself -- underneath your admonishments against people here is a personal policy that promotes and enables far worse things than a molotov cocktail or more against Sam Altman.

People talk about war and advocate for war all the time here. Y Combinator itself funds arms companies, and surveillance companies. Altman himself is a defense contractor! How many climate change deaths is Sam Altman personally responsible for?

I live in a country that America has threatened to annex. I live in a part of that country where America money is pouring in to fund a separatist movement to facilitate that annexation. My country is allied with another country that America has threatened to invade.

I'm content to live my life and do my own thing with no intent to cause harm to others, and the goal of minimizing the harm I do cause but apparently that is a luxury I am not afforded in life. So what do I do? I just keep living my life the best I can and hoping something changes in the national dynamic in America.

If that means Americans start squabbling and attacking their oligarchs instead of attacking me so be it. It's not the world I want to live in either, but it's better than a world where Americans are focused and united on attacking me.

Have you ever shed a single tear for a Russian oligarch who 'falls out a window onto a pile of bullets?' I doubt it. That's how I feel about Altman.

Just be honest Dang. We're all living in sin here. We're all entwined into an economic system that is built off of slavery and theft.

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

It's almost like all the work you've put into silencing any criticism of the current regime and associated oligarchs was for nothing!

Maybe it's time to pack it in? I don't just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course.

The tech scene isn't the small, tight-knit thing it used to be. This site is now enormous. Discussion quality seems to have sort of "regressed to the mean"... the larger HN gets and the more people join the discussion, it starts to resemble the median social media site more and more. At some point it sorta loses its purpose.

I'm still addicted to HN, but I've gone through times where I've set my password to a UUID and time-lock encrypted it to lock myself out, because posting here has gotten worse and worse and worse for my mental health (and there's no way to delete your account here... I've emailed you about it in the past and never got a response.) On some level I hate HN now. TBH if this site was gone tomorrow, I'd most definitely be better off for it in the long run, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.

Thanks for all the work you've put in over the years though. This site has held out longer than most, and for a time, was one of the best places on the internet for discussion of any kind, let alone tech. It deserves a place in history for that alone.

So, OpenAI, Brockman, not sure about Altman directly, donated millions to Trump&Co, support and let use their technology to kill/harm millions of people, and now we are supposed to pretend to feel sorry for them?

None of those news items, comments, news made you want to get away from this, but now that your YC buddy is the target and whatever else fuck is used to justify it? When ICE killed american citizens, school girls killed it was all 'we flagged this as flamewar and what now' but now because he is part of the cadre, NOW it is disgusting? I would laugh if this wasn't the fucking future we are at, just sucking to these assholes

I deeply hate Sam Altman, but after reading the flagged comments. Jesus. You do a tough job. Thank you.

It's a marketing strategy. If it's almost certainly conscious and capable of ending the world if it desired (even if it isn't), imagine how good it could be at building your dream SaaS!

It is not about the US or the Chinese. Its about the "Elephant Rider" mind everyone has. Once the Elephant has been injured or scared what it does next is not easy to control, and what story the Rider makes up to maintain coherence becomes another layer of the deeper problem. If the story resonates more elephants get triggered. Social media/attention economy make it even more complex to calm things down.

Modern Corporations are a failed experiment because they dont think Elephant injuries and fears are something they have to worry about it. If you compare the curiculum of a business school to a seminary the difference in how they think about fear and anxiety at individual and group level and what to do about it is totally different. We are learning as unpredictability accelerates its very important to pay attention to hurt and repair mechanisms.

Some people think there will be an exponential takeoff, which means that a 6 month lead effectively rounds up to infinity.

Do any of the open weight models from smaller labs exist if they can't distill from the SoTA models that are throwing billions of dollars of compute into pretraining?

> just their usual marketing

I think that’s a very common element for most US tech corps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, X etc - they’re all “making a dent in the universe”. It’s unfortunate when their employees and CEOs loose track of the line that separates marketing from reality

These kind of people have highly paid emoliyees surrounding them on all sides propping them up and very likely making it very easy for them to actually believe it.

It feels like they actually believe it, rather than just “marketing” and I don’t know which is worse.

6 months is an incredible amount of time to control AGI or ASI by yourself. That lead is insurmountable.

Presumably because it takes 6 months to distill Claude - but if they keep it closed like they are doing with Mythos it may take significantly longer.

Especially when Google is in the far better position to come out ahead…imo.

Edit: so as not to simply spout an opinion, the reasoning I believe this is that Google has a real business already and were already deep into ML and AI research long before they had competitors — they just botched making it a product in the beginning. Anthropic and OpenAI meanwhile are paying hand over fist to subsidize user acquisition. Also, “Deepmind”. I don’t think much more needs to be said regarding that team, and Google has been working on AI since before either Altman or Amodei applied to go to college. They have a vast amount of researchers and resources, their own hardware and data centers (already, not “planned”) and it appears to be showing more recently (in my opinion).

When you are raising many billions of dollars to build up your infrastructure, you don't have much choice but to project a belief that the eventual outcome will result in a situation where there will be a return on that money.

That said, I do agree with you that the moats are very shallow and any particular frontier AI lab is unlikely to "win the AI race" and capture enough value to be worth the amount of investment they are all currently burning.

GLM 5.1, widely held up as the model at the heals, perhaps ever surpassing western models....

Gets 5% on ARC-AGI2 private set.

Chinese models are suspiciously good a benchmarks.

The Chinese models are distilled from GPT and Claude, so it's not like China would pull ahead if those companies went away for six months. They really are at the forefront of innovation right now, as much as I hate to think of the consequences of this (a single company owning a superintelligence is basically a nightmare scenario for me).

I suppose most just haven’t seen the Chinese models in practice. I haven’t. I was skeptical of AI coding until using Claude Code in February. I saw and I believed. I’ve only done that with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic’s models so far.

Having worked with both proprietary and open weight SOTA models lately, my view is it's definitely not 6 months, it's less -- and shrinking.

To be fair, the other 50% of the story is that we collectively listen.

It’s been a long while since I found a Chinese CEO’s post on HN.

Two words: Delusion and overconfidence.

"You're absolutely right!" Right after fucking up my entire codebase isn't anywhere near AGI, let alone "having the power to control it"

They own the best models and will probably keep owning the best models for a while. They have much more compute now and more data to keep improving their models on many tasks. Open source won't close the gap in 6 months. They are also trying to block other companies from distilling their models [0].

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

> Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them?

He wants to build the AI that makes people's lives better. Okay. Did the people ask? Do they have a say? It's all very easy for a billionaire to say when it's just him and a couple of people in his cohort in the driver's seat.

Beyond that I'd like to simply know why he thinks any of this is his responsibility. It seems much more obvious to me that he simply found himself in the right place at the right time and is trying to seize it all for himself as if it's his to take.

I have the same feelings

Well they represent the future of America (since we will soon be banning all the Chinese companies, the way Z.ai was banned, under the perennial authoritarian excuse of "national security"; in 2028, Trump's political machine will seize control of all national AI and block outside ones, and we'll all be trapped inside this machine we created).

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, America still holds a lot of global chips in the grand poker game of humanity. So American companies do indeed still have an outsized influence on humanity's future. That is likely changing, as the American empire continues to crumble and it loses its financial hegemony. But we aren't quite there yet.

you have to talk that way if you’re going to raise 100 billion in venture capital. it’s the grift

Reminds me of the silicon valley episode where every company repeated the phrase “making the world a better place”.

i’ve often thought that less than one second is all you need.One of my fun super powers when someone asks what i’d like to have is 1 second ahead of everyone else- that’s all i need. i honest don’t know where the distillation conversation is at. is it real, is it ongoing? i think that aspect would big one. Your point is valid if it’s valid. i’m not a great global citizen, you know, lots going on out and about.

Because they're wankers.

Your(American)future will be controlled by them. Very soon,they will get the government to ban bad Chinese open source models and your choice will only be these good democratic closed source AIs.

6 months will be an impossible gap once the thing starts closed loop self improvement

Nobody has one. If labor stops having value the economy will stop working and society will break down far in advance of building the infrastructure necessary for the promised AI abundance.

I like the idea of being ”post-scarcity” as much as the next guy, but I don’t understand how we get there. It’s a project in itself, it doesn’t just happen by magic, and nobody is actively trying to make it happen or has any logistical idea of what it involves.

We’ll also lose a huge number of jobs as soon as true AGI comes on stream, by which I mean the kind of AI that no longer acts like somebody who has read all the world’s books but can’t figure out that you always need to drive to the carwash.

We’ll lose these jobs and there will be no super abundance at that point, and not even government support.

There is the option of passing laws requiring companies to retain human employees. That to me is about the only viable stopgap measure.

There isn't much compelling economic data that AI has been the cause of any recent layoffs or job loss, yet you speak as if we are already in the throws of an AI takeover. Sam Altman is a salesman, he sells products that's all he is and ever has been, if you are looking for answers to why people can't afford house and food you should look at the politicians in power.

I think, like other disruptive inventions of the past, there will be pain for many, but it will pass. Society will grow and adapt. There's some statistic somewhere I will paraphrase and/or botch that goes like: 90% of the jobs people have today didn't exist 50 years ago. I think no one can imagine what possible opportunities will manifest in the future. It's a lot easier to imagine everything that might go wrong because we evolved to see a sabertooth in the rustling leaves.

Few thoughts

- Either we'll slowly become the Expanse universe (basic UBI, very few jobs, you win them via lottery)

- Or we'll go to simpler times - economics is supply and demand, if there will be more demand to human generated work (the same way there is demand for hand made arts, vinyls, paper books, vintage furniture), people will flock more to family, community. Think something between moving to the suburbs and the Amish. If people will "ban" some products generated by AI, or will prefer products generated by humans, then AI will have harder times to take their jobs. It's unlikely to happen, but think about the Organic food industry, about the high end products industry, about the farm to table / buy local industry, about the "support local artists" (farmers markets) - this will likely just grow. Won't help at scale, but it's a possibility

- Or, the Dune way, banning of thinking machines altogether on the state level, I assume some countries might go that way, for religious or other reasons, but again unlikely

- Or, current AI technology will plateau just short of full AGI, and the centaur period will stay for longer. As long as a human + AI can do things slightly better than just AI, (in my book this is not full AGI) - then there is economic incentive to hire a human instead of replacing them.

- Or full apocalypse, the matrix / skynet, idiocracy, hunger games, red rising. I hope for the ignorance is bliss option...

The game plan is the same as it was for globalization and previous rounds of automation: gaslight workers into thinking that they are the problem. Push all the taxes into the labor economy and all the money into the capital economy and use the inevitable budget shortfall to justify skimping on social services. That'll work until it doesn't, at which point the Ellison strategy will be employed: pay 10% of the poors to keep the other 90% in line.

Out of curiosity... why do you think this?

I think this is complete madness. Im not someone that is in a job so I have the luxury to think critically about what is going on and... I just dont see it.

What I see is that LLMs will complement Labour and the excess returns of model producers will be very minimal (if at all any) due to the intense competition - keeping switching costs to a minimum (close to zero). This is before mentioning open source models which I expect to continue to improve.

There is no specialisation re. models at this moment in time so it is very likely to be the case.

OAI and Anthropic have to generate enough after-tax cash flows from operations to cover their reinvestment needs to continue going on. If they can't cover reinvestment then they will obviously lose as their offering will not be competitive.

There's no certainty they generate this amount of cash profits either. They still have a high chance of going bust, of course that gets lower - IF - they can keep ramping up revenues.

soon after humans are economically irrelevant (unemployable) they will be existentially irrelevant (dead)

a system that can allocate the atoms and energy better than all of mankind won’t exist eternally to coddle hairless apes

There is no plan, besides the government using police to keep people in line.

AI will not take anyone's jobs. I, for one, don't consider AI something serious, it's still a toy, a curious tech demo, and will always remain one, outside of niche applications like NLP (there's no denying that LLMs are really good at this). The idea that anyone at all treats it seriously is just appalling to me.

Mass-production and other optimizations that use economies of scale to their benefit do take jobs. There's a serious problem in the world's economy that there simply isn't as many jobs as there are people; the world simply doesn't need this much work because the need for work doesn't scale linearly with the population. AI has nothing to do with this. It's a fundamental problem we'll have to deal with either way as our society develops, AI or not. It started ages before the current tech hype cycle.

> what is the game plan for society moving forward as AI takes more jobs

> What happens when more and more people can't afford housing, kids, food, health insurance, etc.?

What about when the opposite of this all happens, society massively benefits, and unemployment rates stay about what they have always been?

Will people still be yelling about the doomsday of societial collapse that has failed to materialize every single time?

You already know the game plan and what will happen (hint: see this very article), but speaking it out loud will get you into troubles.

If I torture 1 person that is bad. If I inflict a smaller suffering on millions of people, does it reach parity? Were the Sackler's actions that ruined so many lives, led young girls/boys into forced prostitution, led to so many ODs and suicides, something that ranked close to deserving violence? Or does the 'LLC/Corp' absorb all responsibility like some capitalist papal indulgence?

If the Sackler's actions are visible evil, where on the 'LLC/Corpo' scale does evil turn to 'acceptable business' and the choices made by management to inflict damage on many many people switch to 'acceptable business' where the perpetrators are disconnected from their actions/choices?

'LLC/Corporations' absolve management of liability/accountability in the government eyes, but you are making an assumption that then extends to absolving when it comes to actual morality. While you can try to sell 'articles of incorporation' count as modern indulgences freeing people from sin under the religion of capitalism I'm not sure all of society agrees. I think the concept that LLC/Incorporation is a blanket 'papal indulgence' absolving management of all accountability/moral behavior in our modern techno feudalist social structure is wearing thin for a lot of people. Clunky as hell language but it's a discuss that needs to be had, and better for all sooner rather than later.

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Seriously? Not even the DOD partnership?

Justice isn't just about punishing the guilty. It is also about restoring the trust in our society when it has been damaged by criminals. Very few Americans I know have any faith in our justice system's ability to hold the wealthy accountable. As a result, we will see more and more violence as a natural consequence.

Sam Altman could use his considerable wealth to hold billionaires like himself accountable for crimes that they commit through lobbying or funding investigations. Seeing criminal billionaires face justice would go a long to reducing this kind of violence.

Agreed! Have you heard of Suchir Balaji?

Unpopular opinion. It depends.

I totally agree with your statement if we are talking about the average citizen starting to throw Molotovs at his house. If you’re afraid AI is taking your job, just do something else. It’s not the end of the world changing careers.

Plenty of work AI won’t be able to do, or allowed to do without a human assisting in some way that secures the human a good income and way of life.

So if this is done by an individual citizen, they need to be hunted down, arrested, and get the full force of the justice system to deter others from doing the same.

On the other hand, right now, Sam Altman is a valid military target for assassination in the US / Iran war.

OpenAI did snatch up the contract from Anthropic at the Pentagon, and their technology is in some capacity used to murder Iranian HVTs (High Value Targets). Altman is therefore technically a legal HVT for the Iranians.

If you say it’s valid and not a war crime for the US to assassinate former political Iranian figures and their families for aiding the new regime and therefore becoming enemy combatants in the eye of the US Military, it’s also valid to assassinate Altman and his family for doing the same to the other war party.

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger situation. He is technically a valid target in a current war, but not for the private citizen.

In both cases, though, I’d advocate that violence is neither a solution to solve the problem that AI might be creating for a lot of people in the future, nor should he be treated as an enemy combatant and his infant child and wife bombed to smitherens.

Diplomacy is key here, just like it would have been the better solution than going to war with Iran.

If you disagree with Altman, send him a letter, show up at his workplace, talk to the man, gather people who think the same of him you do, write letters to your voted representatives, make calls, vote politicians into office that are anti AI and who will go after him and regulate his company to shit. Bureaucrats can make Altman’s life more miserable than a thousand Molotovs ever could.

If you gather enough support, you can reach the same goal, taking his power over your life away, without any violence.

But are you really surprised people chose violence over the democracy toolbox in the US if they get told by the people in charge of their country that violence is indeed a good way to solve problems, that you should have a "warrior" spirit and everything is up for grabs, even sovereign countries like Greenland because you can outviolence any other nation on the planet?

Violence only creates more violence and as long as there is a president who chooses to put oil in the fire and pretends it’s ok to murder US citizens like Alex Pretti, you don’t really need to wonder if the average citizen starts murdering tech CEOs in the near future.

They just follow the Top-down approach to using violence as a tool the leadership lives by example.

> he has done nothing to begin to justify violence

No One does!

I also found news hard to believe but it is true:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx91rdxpyeo

I'm not a big fan of Sam Altman, but violence like this is not a solution; it has the actually opposite effect as it probably did with Trump.

Is there anything anyone can do that justifies violence or threats of violence? No. Even if that person is a proven child molestater, a just society stands on just law.

But as far as political justification stands, he is as valid of a target for hostile nations just as Iranian nuclear scientists were (unless he has 0 involvment with USG). That's just the world we live in.

Use your tech for war in other nations, you give a justification for other nations to target you. Same goes for Lockheed Martin ceo etc, nothing specific against Sam. But saying nobody has no valid reason to target Sam like this is pretty stupid imo.

When the attack is being used to craft a very particular narrative unrelated to the attack, a lot of other things continue to matter, and yes they do matter right now. That is on the premise that this isn't some depraved PR stunt. And that is also ignoring how purposefully misleading most headlines as well as your comment are.

Better stop paying taxes then, cause your government, whatever it is, is probably ok with using your tax money to in some cases fund the killing of people who have families and children. Now, we can argue about the morality of killing those exact people as opposed to killing Sam Altman, but that's a different discussion. My point is that the real argument isn't over whether it's ok to kill people who have families and children, you're probably ok with that too, after all bin Laden had a family and children. The real argument is over which people who have families and children it is ok to kill.

Assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists had kids too. There was a thread here a few days ago letting people explore the deaths of children in Palestine. That thread was taken off the front page via flagging.

> The rest of what is written doesn't matter. This isn't the moment for that conversation

That's terrible that someone did that. I think that's wrong, and people that do that should be in prison.

But if the rest of what was written didn't matter, it wouldn't be written. He thought it was important enough to put it in. It's there to be read and discussed.

And I have to point out, we're not talking about a couple off the cuff remarks he may have rushed. About 95% of the post is about his ambitions for OpenAI. So pearl clutching that people are actually discussing the meat of the post in a tech forum reads performative.

What about those three million people his systems helped murder? They had children. Half of them were children. Do those count? Where was your comment then?

If he treats his kid the same way he treated (raped) his little sister growing up, I feel extra bad for that child now.

In my time in HN I have seen numerous people advocate for the following

* ending all covid measures to achieve herd immunity, accepting that this condemns hundreds of thousands or even millions to die

* ending foreign aid that goes to tuberculosis treatments, condemning hundreds of thousands or even millions to die of a treatable disease

* accepting the deaths of iranian, palestinian, or israeli children as collateral damage because of the evils of their governments

Or go read any thread involving the Jordan Neely story.

Somehow it is vastly more evil when violence is acute and focused at a single wealthy person.

Have you asked yourself why someone went as far as hurling a molotov at his place in the first place?

I would never, but you have to understand that serious pain and harm is being inflicted on people, AT SCALE, by the advent of AI. I'm not even talking about Israeli, Palestinian, or Iranian kids. People in America with terminal illness are losing healthcare.

I don’t think they’re bots, the strength of feeling is real.

Rightly or wrongly people feel cut out of society at a time when the tech elite are not only making billions but seem to be actively trying to ruin everyone else’s lives, they are legitimately hated.

And when you’re that hated you do need to be careful, money can’t protect you from everything. At the end of the day we do all have to live in the same society.

(I don’t have this strength of feeling personally but some people do)

> I've skimmed the thread here and I am now seriously considering leaving HN for the first time in about 15 years.

I'm finding a lot of the comments here pretty reprehensible, but no more reprehensible than the collective shrug the community gave towards murdered Palestinians, or threads about dead Iranians as a result of American bombs that get flagged off the front page. That doesn't make them acceptable or okay.

Those people's lives are/were valuable, too. It's disgusting that we try to keep HN "clean" of those horrors and the people that flag those threads should be ashamed. Ditto those who think the killing of innocent civilians is okay.

Wouldn't it be more correct to call the article "critical" and not "incendiary"? I looked it over and I don't remember seeing any calls to violence. Altman needs to remember that he holds an incredible amount of power in this moment. He and other current AI tech leaders are effectively sitting on the equivalent of a technological nuclear bomb. Anyone in their right mind would find that threatening.

Ronan Farrow, one of the journalists who worked on this article, talked to Katie Couric on her YouTube channel about this. They worked on this across ~18 months. I thought this interview was illuminating.

He has to be talking about the New Yorker article, which wasn't incendiary at all. If anything, it seemed fully neutral to me, reporting what they could justify as facts but going out of their way to not specifically paint him or anyone else in a negative light beyond a listing of events that they presumably have solid sourcing on (if not, sue them; if so, stfu).

If a neutral look at your actions seems incendiary to you, maybe you need to rethink your own life and actions.

It should go without saying I don't think people should be attempting to light other people's houses on fire regardless of how distasteful they find those people.

Turns out the article was not in fact incendiary.

Ha, I was giving an AI bootcamp to a room full of people and someone asked me my opinion of Altman. I hesitated for a second and replied that I would not trust Altman further than I could throw a rock about anything.

If Graham says this guy will always stop at nothing to get whatever he wants, which I absolutely believe, then why would you trust anything that comes out of a person like that’s mouth?

10 hours ago a post made the frontpage here [0] about how OpenAI is backing a law that "would limit liability for AI-enabled mass deaths or financial disasters". Now he's here saying he believes that "working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for [him]".

I know he doesn't believe a word of what he wrote in that post except, perhaps, that he cannot sleep and is pissed. I know I should be used to people openly lying with no consequence, but it still amazes me a bit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47717587

He’s clearly a standard pathological lying C suite exec

unpopular opinion but i think it's written quite well

The US is still a democracy.

It's absolutely ok to oppose war.

It is absolutely not ok for "some people to want to hurt" someone who is running a company that is vying for contracts from a democratically elected government's defense department.

It's also ok to protest that, to boycott it or to refuse to work for or with them for it. But escalating that to physical violence is not ok, and nor should people be "confused that he seems surprised he is now in physical danger"

(As an aside, from the statements I've heard so far it seems the person was more an anti-AI, anti-tech person than anti-war)

> Didn’t we just go through several weeks of hearing about OpenAI allowing its tech to be used for conducting warfare?

Unfortunately warfare is a thing. Why wouldn't you want the best technology used for your country when conducting warfare? Or do you just believe warfare would cease to exist if a country gave up any means of defense or offense?

"I'm not saying violence is okay, but violence is okay"

When was the last time a molotov cocktail was thrown at the house of an arms manufacturer?

Trump and other presidents literally started wars and ordered people to be killed. When was the last time they were physically attacked?

The post itself is authentic in that it's a set narrative for this moment. When you see the world as Sam does, this event is a specific opportunity to humanize him. Through that lens, the humility is both performative (it is!) and necessary. To be truthful would be inauthentic.

The sympathy is meant to give time and slack to accumulate power. One of the largest impediments to OpenAI right now is that people don't trust them, more and more people don't trust Sam, and their commitments are starting to not pan out (e.g. cancelling of Stargate UK, dropped product lines, etc.)

People should not read a post like this as, "how does this make me feel? how might I respond in his situation?", but rather, as he does, "how can I use this?"

Hes attempting to humanize himself in hopes his family home where his child lives isn't firebombed. Again.

Very reasonable response when you take a step back.

"Our product can destroy humanity, and it's not some crank telling you this, it's the company and CEO making it themselves, but we'll continue to make it anyway, so suck it up" but also "I'm just a humble guy, why can't we all live in peace?"

I don't want to firebomb his house, but if I did, I'm pretty sure this shitass response would've only made me want to do it even more.

> but I don’t think violence is funny or justified

Well, that's okay, because even Sam Altman disagrees with you. He absolutely believes that violence, including deadly violence, is justified - hence his contract with the US Department of War to use their systems in kill chains.

Perhaps the problem is that whoever threw the cocktail didn't use AI to select him as a target, or maybe he didn't receive payment for throwing it? Because what other difference is there?

I think Sam and people like him are *spoilers* like Jules Pierre Mao and Dresden on The expanse.

I think that he may genuinely believe that ai will produce a net benefit for humanity in the long term, but I am increasingly worried that they are absolutely fine testing their creation on the world without any consideration to the harm it can do to millions of individuals.

The assertion that he is benign would be more believable if he spent a shred of time lobbying for universal economic rights of citizens, or some model for redistribution of wealth in a world where most people don't need to work to provide the necessities of society.

Oh, and he's willing to let the government use his technology to mass-spy on Americans and to create autonomous lethal AI.

Pearl-clutching about ambivalence to his fate and comparing it to the barbarism of a mob gets shrugs from me.

At this point it's probably far more productive to think of what he's saying as the necessary means he uses to make you believe what he wants you to believe. From that point you can work backwards and try to understand what he wants you to believe.

Is it also uncivilized to bomb homes from the sky? As would happen under OpenAI's military contract?

What about Luigi Mangione, what's HN's the consensus on him?

> any public response is scrutinised and questioned within a hint of its life sometimes rightly sometimes not.

This is a fairly healthy response from the public - better than accepting everything at face-value. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a warning against accepting random information in a vacuum to assess your surroundings. Observation and response is not enough to be a critical thinker, even back in the ancient ages.

From where I'm standing, the public at-large is traumatized from flubbed coverups like the Snowden leak, Epstein files, and Abu Ghraib. The myth of American exceptionalism has been threatened for a long time, and people rightfully question whether or not executive leadership can write-off their involvement in politics. Sam Altman has put on an extremely dangerous pair of boots, and while it doesn't justify attacks on his person, we all know that speculation will continue as new events come to light. Right or wrong, this is what the public is conditioned for now.

If you had a lease the new owner was obliged to honor it, should not have been able to evict you at least until the end of the lease term.

Sam and related spend half their lives on TV poking the bear laughing about how he is going to use his tech to ruin peoples lives and there is nothing they can do about it. Some of those people have nothing to lose.

It's even potentially worse than that. As a whole, it doesn't even require a majority, if a small amount are complacent or ignorant. And depending on competency, it might not matter if the majority protest anyhow.

And ChatGPT not only taught him how but also told him it was a good idea to do so.

I'd like to see specific links.

Huh? They literally did change the world. The world was one way before ChatGPT, and another way after.

It's not even a question of whether we "believe" him. It's a factual statement. Did you quote the wrong thing?

It’s tacky. Here’s my kid sitting on a bar.

It most likely tripped the flame war detector heuristic (comments > points), and there is definitely a flame war here.

EDIT: Looks like a mod rescued it (surprisingly) and it is now back to #2.

He also went to OpenAI's office and threatened to burn it down.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/10/tech/suspect-arrest-openai-ce...

A molotov thrown at a gate seems more symbolic than directly violent to my eyes.

Who is “they”?

You wouldn't do that exactly because you're not a sociopath.