I find it hard to believe this was the kind of environment he was cultivating at OpenAI if 95% of the staff were ready to follow him out the door.
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 can believe the staff likes or even loves him, but the following him part was mostly because of money/shares and because they know he's influential and well connected to people with money. And peer pressure may have had a part in that letter signing. You don't want to be on the side of the losers if Altman gets his way.
mostly because of money/shares
How do you know?
I don't obviously. But since those people were ready to jump ship to Microsoft, I am pretty sure they care more about their own careers than 'creating AGI that benefits humanity as a whole in the first place'
Didn't most sign the letter before they knew they had any offer to join Microsoft in any capacity?
Also maybe I'm just too risk averse but if I were concerned about money I wouldn't be putting my name on such a list. Although at some point past 50% it would feel pretty safe because what are they going to do, fire everyone?
"We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary..." so no, they knew.
Didn't most sign the letter before they knew they had any offer to join Microsoft in any capacity?
I very much doubt it.
Presumably they're jumping ship with Sam, and I'd assume that they'd assume that Sam would uphold the same perceived integrity at MS
Sam's integrity would be at home at Microsoft, for sure.
Occam's razor.
Maybe the simplest explanation isn't the right one for 100% of the people that followed Sam (or were ready to), but it's the right one for 90% of them, which is what matters for practical purposes.
Follow the money.
These people are at the top of the AI industry, they’d make bank in a ton of jobs if they left tomorrow. They weren’t getting equity at Microsoft yet they still chose that opportunity as an alternative.
Clearly they care about working on the most interesting AI around instead of continuing to work under a CEO and board whose whole plan is to cripple AI development. Both the interim CEO Shear and likely coup leader Toner made it clear they are anti-AI and want to slow progress. Toner specifically said she’d be okay with the company collapsing as that was in line with the charter.
Occams Razor is people working on the most interesting stuff in the tech industry want to keep working on it rather than follow some radical EA doomer plan to kill it off well before we get near AGI.
These people are at the top of the AI industry, they’d make bank in a ton of jobs if they left tomorrow.
I know a signatory of the letter and I can assure you that they were nowhere near the top of the AI industry six months ago.
But being at OpenAI, they now probably have the reputation of belonging to the top.
They weren’t getting equity at Microsoft
This is wrong.
Of course. I mean come on you may love the guy but your primary reason for following him will still be money. Why would you want your years of work to go down to 0$?
Memetic thinking aside, Ilya signing that letter might have sealed it for them. Though, working for someone as formidable as sama in itself is a great pull, nevertheless.
working for someone as formidable as sama
His name is Sam Altman. And why is he so formidable?
And why is he so formidable?
Commenting on an article that portrayed him as such?
His name is Sam Altman.
Unsure what your point is; sama is his hn username.
I don't know the usernames of people discussed in articles and prefer not referring to people colloquially.
And I had assumed that you meant formidable in a positive sense. To me, he seems like a manipulative grifter. We even see that in his response to being fired. Instead of discussing facts, he was trying personal power plays, manipulating the media and employees, and trying to simultaneously start a new company, get a new job at Microsoft, and weasel back in as CEO of OpenAI. That seems to track as someone only concerned with himself.
Through all of this, it has remained confusing and disturbing just why he is considered so important to any of this. He seems completely replaceable. I haven't ever read or heard anything from him that didn't seem to come from some startup 101 playbook, almost like a cosplayer.
almost like a cosplayer
If only growing startups were as easy as cosplay.
And I had assumed that you meant formidable in a positive sense
Yes, I did. See also: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1727386273936199893
prefer not referring to people colloquially
If not everyone, at least for hackernews participants with 12k+ karma, you'd think they'd know very well who runs hackernews, or used to.
The money vs. mission question was what I was trying to answer with this hypothetical polling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357485
(It seems obvious that hitching your wagon to Mr. Altman probably has a much better chance of making you rich, than does playing harps on a cloud at an altruistic non-profit. The question is what you actually want.)
but the following him part was mostly because of money/shares and because they know he's influential and well connected to people with money.
In other words, they believed in his leadership, direction, and ability to serve their interests more than they believed in the board's.
I don't understand why so many people are performing mental gymnastics attempting to turn the unanimous support behind him into somehow being evidence that he's the antichrist. Why wouldn't the employees act in their own self-interest? What's wrong with them acting in their own self-interest? I would assume all employees everywhere, more or less, act in their own self-interest and I don't think that makes them or their preferred leadership evil incarnate.
OpenAI is more religion than company. Sam could be a deeply flawed leader and still have extreme loyalty due to what OpenAI has achieved under his leadership. The people at OpenAI are believers in a mission and that means they’re far more likely to allow personal failings to slide. He’s more a Musk figure than a whoever-the-ceo-of-McDonald’s-is figure.
do you have evidence to back this up?
I don't think its necessary to prove anything he says, the keyword is 'could'. We don't know, and people who actually do don't spill it on HN just because we would like them to.
These are generic statements about cult-like leaders, Musk is a prime example. Its hard won affection, not just smooth BS, we here all know that.
That being said, people generally don't change, just situations (barring some catastrophic accidents or similar). Whatever actions given person did in the past describe them well enough in present. Again, generic but IMHO always valid so far.
"OpenAI is more religion than company" sounds like a factual statement to me.
"95% of the staff" -- this is Kim Jong Un approval rate territory. caution advised.
Vladimir Putin had 77% of the vote in Russia’s 2017. If Putin can’t fake a 95% approval rating, surely the OpenAI numbers must be real.
This is reminding me of the Ewok defense.
Looks like I need to work on my sarcasm phrasing.
95% of the staff were ready to follow him out the door.
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.
I don't work there, but can guarantee that 100% of the staff wanted to be paid. They're going to follow the person that is going to make them generational wealth.
Working at Microsoft doesn’t give you generational wealth like it doesn working on an AI startup, with a few exceptions. These AI researchers are in huge demand at plenty of companies and investors. It’s equally as plausible they just want to keep working with this collection of very smart people on the cutting edge of AI rather than have to start over from scratch somewhere else, as OpenAI was basically DOA under new coup leadership.
Isn't this how you gain power? You influence as many people as you can through suggestion that you can give them what they desire? Then grow that group to be large enough so that you're cemented within the org?
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.
Dunno, you have to be able to deliver on some of those promises of desires fulfilled. And as you get older, your ability to see through it should only increase. At that point, the only real question becomes: is it to my benefit?
FWIW, while I follow this saga, I am kinda waiting to see the full retrospective. I think we don't know everything relevant yet.
I suspect the signers were a combination of wanting to follow their comp out the door and a bit of Tom Wambsgans from Succession: "Because I've seen you get fucked a lot, and I've never seen Logan [in this case Sam] get fucked once."
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"
It’s not exactly a secret. The company structure was a setup that allowed a high degree of internal alignment (at a level of a cult, it seems). And at some point there was a need to realign with making a lot of cash. This resulted in an alignment on this goal, and of course everyone who is in on it is supporting Sam Altman’s moves.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
If there _was_ a good reason to fire Sam, and the board had appropriately and clearly communicated their decision, I think less of the staff would have signed a the petition to walk. From the public's perspective, and probably most rank and file employees, this decision came from left field and had no logic behind it. The waffling and back peddling that followed certainly didn't help perception
I feel the same way, however.
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.
I don't know anything about the specific situation, but in general this is totally possible with a tyrannical leader.
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.
Cult of personality and connection to the 1% of 1% given our tech fueled economy skews worker motives.
If you had such a chance to sit around while everyone else grew your potatoes, you would.
I want to know other people's opinion on this.
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.
If you give me the choice between making a lot of $$$ by working for a for-profit company or staying at a nonprofit with limited upside I'd also choose the former, even if I don't like the CEO much. Don't know where this myth of "people followed him" comes from. There is no evidence for it.
You don't need to manipulate all employees. Just key ones ;)
Well maybe they were not as good at manipulating as others can be.
When Ilya signed the letter, most of the researchers would follow suit.
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.
I find it hard to believe this was the kind of environment he was cultivating at OpenAI if 95% of the staff were ready to follow him out the door.
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.
95% threatening to leave
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.
This endorsement of Sam from 2011 is actually pretty damning, though it is so long ago if it were the only thing it wouldn't be a huge red flag:
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.
This is sort of par for the course in the world of early stage startups. No one wants to be your first customer as it is risky, but you need that first customer. So you "fake it until you make it."
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.
There is nothing that is a red flag for me in the above story.
Elizabeth? Is that you?
If Elizabeth Holmes had been able to pull off some successful product that made a lot of money, no doubt all the "fake it 'til you make it" she did at the beginning (showing demos that didn't work, sending tests to outside labs and saying they were run on their equipment) would have been forgiven no doubt.
Just another nostalgic Silicon Valley "hustler" story.
Only that Theranos product was techically impossible. Which makes the whole thing even crazier, nobody did even the slightest due dilligence there. Seems to be par of th cours so, other exhibits are FTX and WeWork.
The core FTX crypto exchange business was very profitable. But Alameda wasn't. Also everyone at FTX was committing fraud.
Based on what financial statements do we know FTX was profitable? Also, the stole customer funds.
Based on what financial statements do we know FTX was profitable?
The crypto-exchange part I have read many times it was profitable. Running an exchange is a profitable endeavour as you just take a cut of all transactions. As long as you control your costs it is a money printer.
The rest of FTX was full of fraud and Alameda was a money sink via unprofitable speculation. Also likely helping laundry money as well via poor KYC.
Running an exchange is a great business though if you have the volume, doesn't matter if it is crypto or futures or stocks.
No, crypto exchanges are only profitable as a result of massive wash trading and scamming. If they had to actually compete the margins would be hilariously low. Probably even lower than a typical bank because the product is just worse.
She really only got into trouble because her lies became obvious and she risked people's lives. If it was some CRUD app and she didn't get enough customers or whatever, more than likely she'd have gotten money for another company.
she risked people's lives
She was found not guilty of that bit. The conviction and jail time is only for defrauding the investors.
If Elizabeth Holmes had been able to pull off some successful product
Like Loopt?
I believe such behaviour is harmful and that we shouldn't be rewarding those that engage in it.
The bad behaviour is predicating the purchase on seeing the office.
Having an office doesn't make a company real, nor any more or less likely to execute on the project
Both can be bad. Even more so when you don't know which party established the idea as bad in the first place.
A purchaser who insists they only see white employees in the office is bad. Anyone that forces their non-white employees out of sight to secure that purchase is just as bad, if not worse.
To play along is to accept the notion, to contribute to it's perceived validity, and to harm anyone who happens to be honest. The result is that people we'd be better off without are pushed upwards in society.
I think OPs point was that this was sama finding the line of what was the most egregious thing that is acceptable to admit in public which is almost certainly not the most egregious thing he's done and could be a large part of the explaination of why people's opinion of him knowing certain private actions diverges so much from everyone else.
Interesting viewpoint, lie is a lie and amoral is amoral. We can wrap it in nice package or act like 'it had to be done because others are doing it', and it may be a correct statement. But its still a plain in-your-face lie.
If that telco would know truth they would most probably cut them out, not due to their size but due to their lies. This is not how trust is built, this is how you lose it very quickly and for good.
Maybe we need to accept that this is expected from all startup owners/ceos. Fine with me too, but its still amoral. We define our own legacy, if we ever care (and these mega egos do care a lot).
This is sort of par for the course in the world of early stage startups
It’s so par of the course that I’m willing to bet it didn’t happen.
Remember BillG sold an OS to IBM for the Intel 8086 that was not even owned or written by Microsoft at the time.
And somewhat ringing of these current events, his mom was on a charity board with the head of IBM.
Every good CEO is also a Confidence Man/Woman.
No, not really. Not even remotely. Business is ruthless, that's fine. It has to stay clear of fraud and deception. And funny enough, most old school companies do, mowt of the time.
VC capital optimises for revolutionaries thus they get revolutionaries.
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.
What about the industrial revolutions?
I put that in approximately the same place as the founders of Reddit making alts and posting things on early Reddit or Porsche labeling its first-ever car design as Type 7.
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.
I think that level of honesty isn't unusual in Silicon Valley.
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.
I'm also neither a Sam Altman booster or detractor, but the types of activities described here (and honestly, sometimes much much worse) are very common at startups.
oh sht, this guy can persuade clients and close deals? Better keep him away from the company!
What am I missing? The worst sin is trying to look bigger than they are?
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.
This whole saga whiffs of Machiavellianism
I would not be surprised if this is the beginning of the end for the company.
Nah. Microsoft still exist and is thriving. Altman is the new Bill Gates except he is better at retaining ~~cul~~ employees. Many at HN love him for those qualities.
Can you clarify the meaning of 4 tildes surrounded by the letters 'cul', for those of us who are new around here? Thank you
I believe they meant to use the tildes to indicate a strikethrough text format, as with markdown. The "cul", I would guess is an unfinished "cultists", even though you'd typically strikethrough a completed word. When trying to indicate a "change of mind" it would be better to use a dash: "Better at retaining cul- uh, employees."
as Machiavelli said:
> Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.
I meant the dark triad personality traits, more than borrowing from The Prince.
On just Sam’s part or all around? Seems like there might be quite a lot of it.
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.
I have interacted with him a few times and when he decides to help, he will help you all the way with an almost maniacal focus and drive. For what it's worth I have never heard bad things about him from individual interactions.
When people complain it's a 'you said, he said' situation where the manipulator inevitably wins
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.
Unfortunately, it's a time disparity issue.
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.
One of the marks in favor of being cutthroat about pre-registering KPIs and expected outcomes, and then evaluating solely based on them.
That's the only thing off in your comment. Those KPIs are always set by politics, always have surprisingly subjective measurements, and always have unpredictable consequences that are cleared out by politics.
An environment with all formal strictly set objective metrics is one of the easiest ones to manipulate.
The worst option, except for all the other ones.
What's the better alternative?
Yea I’m fortunate to have worked in more good companies than pathological ones, so maybe whatever my strategy is has worked so far.
This is basic bullying. I would ask for specific examples of the performance decline. That will also be a "he said you said" situation.
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.
Absolutely. Also reporting these out of the ordinary behaviors before they become problematic is also a way to keep these guys in line. Once they see that you have a systematic way to report (replace report with "ask if this is normal practice within the company"), they’ll avoid you.
But if left too long they can amass too much power as the bully can manipulate enough people to vote for him
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.
(I'll hijack your comment a bit, just want to share my experience working in something related to it)
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.
Worldcoin
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.
909 people followed Jim Jones to jonestown and died, so?
[edited]: sorry means to replied one comment replied to this comment
I have had similar experiences.
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.
Yeah, the craziest thing for me to come out of this was how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent". Poor poor sam altman, he's a victim. He comes across as a sleazebag to me.
I subscribe to the HN RSS feed, which shows flagged items since they're published on the feed before they're flagged. The craziest thing that stands out to me is how so many negative stories on Sam Altman end up being flagged, even though they are just as legit as the positive ones. I'm almost 100% certain that HN is highly manipulated for this story.
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.
HN is strongly anti-controversy. So when you have a large enough minority of users who rally around flagging certain topics, they easily get taken down even if there’s otherwise interest in the discussion. I don’t think it requires owner manipulation. You can see it in how things like any coverage of Palestinian perspective getting flagged immediately while coverage of far-right ancap politics lingers despite both being contentious political topics (where ancap discussion is controversial but detractors lack the habitual urge to flag brigade and are more open to discuss).
There are topics where I'm interested in discussion but I don't think HN is mature enough to discuss them so the early comments are very thin ideology or discrimination so I just flag the article, even if it was good. I'm probably not alone in this.
That’s my point: yours is a weaker urge than the calls to take down Palestinian perspective as being terrorist sympathizing and antisemitic that come from that particular flag-brigade set (as one example), compared with diffuse concern over immaturity
"to take down Palestinian perspective"
I sometimes also do other things than reading HN, but what stood out to me, was that I read nothing about the conflict here at all and anything related to it was flagged. Likely because it would evolve into a flamewar after 3 comments.
Strongly anti-controversy?! This whole thing has been like Christmas come early for me. There's a strong contingent of people here who have no illusions about Altman's ambitions.
That being said, Hacker News is primarily for news, and it's tech-oriented. I would not expect Palestinian broadsides (whether for or against) to fare well.
This website is YCombinator. Sam was with YCombinator
Did you read the article? Sam was fired by YCombinator.
But is this really a solid fact? PG did not comment on it and all the other sources are anonymous.
We don't moderate HN according to that. I wrote extensively about this yesterday if anyone wants a verbose explanation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372059
A large contingent of people here (and anywhere) are prone to hero worship, especially if it tends towards trendy topics like generative AI. The natural reaction to criticism of an idol is to shut it down so you can maintain a singular narrative lest you have to deal with cognitive dissonance.
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.
The difference between Elon and Swift, is the scale to which they are able to use capitalism for their means. I think Elon is scarier for that reason. (Not absolving Swift of that, though).
I would say the bigger scary thing is how they capitalize their fame to progress agenda, in addition to what you said.
One of Swift’s big appeal outside her media, is that she presents herself as a blank canvas for her fans to project themselves on. While I wish she used her platform for more positive advocation , it’s a lot better for her to be neutral than Musks’s aggressively negative use of his platform (especially in recent times).
Isn't the scale proportional though as Elon has 6 companies and Taylor has only 1?
Fascinatingly Taylor Swift has convinced her fans to rebuy re-recorded versions of all of her earlier albums. Not just one album either. So far it has been 4 of them with 6 in total. Her justification of this is purely capitalistic. This is kind of unprecedented, and the success of this for her has been quite spectacular.
See:
https://time.com/5949979/why-taylor-swift-is-rerecording-old...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/arts/music/taylor-swift-1...
https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swift-taylors-version...
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
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've noticed this as well, although empirically.
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.
Some of the rss feed items are being straight up removed rather than just the typical flagged/dead that you normally see - none of them have looked extremely legit to me though.
Similar to Elon Musk stories..
I don't know what you mean by "manipulated" but these flags were, and are, coming from users, not admins. The likeliest explanation isn't sinister—it's that readers were fatigued by the tsunami of stories about this saga, and were flagging the ones that didn't seem to contain significant new information (a.k.a. SNI: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
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.
Isn't he also the one wanting to scan everyone's eyeballs?
you mean how google scans everyone's fingerprints and apple scans everyone's faces?
I think it is quite different though, in that biometric-as-a-device-authenticator features keep your biometric data on your device. The plan with worldcoin is to create a central database of this data.
Supposedly Worldcoin deletes your biometric data after it's done generating a hash of it. If you don't believe that, then why would you believe that Google and Apple don't secretly send your fingerprints and facial scans off device?
For one, those entities operate in the US, and are subject to US law - it may not be great at times, but that's a start.
Worldcoin on the other hand went to the third world and went through Africa offering people almost a month's wages to give up their biometrics. That, to me, should merit a deeper dive into what they are doing and why.
Biometric data as authentication vs. differentiate my shitcoin so I can get in on the crypto grift.
Yes, that's how he means it. What's your point? Make a point.
... Are you implying all biometric data is equal? Strange take.
If fingerprints and faces are the same as retinas, where do you draw the line - or is there just no privacy line for you anywhere, as long as a billionaire somewhere is making lots of money?
So that puts him in good company?
I think part of this was also your classic case of tech industry misogyny, too. There has been a lot of thinly veiled sexism in the discussions about Helen and Tasha vs Sam.
If you’re referring to discussing their qualifications to be on the board, I don’t think that is in any way driven by sexism. There were numerous comment threads discussing the qualifications of all the board members and these two stood out as being specifically unqualified, and D’Angelo stood out for having clear conflicts of interest.
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.
defending them because they’re women
There’s absolutely nothing in my comment that even implies I’m defending them and their actions, and also absolutely nothing in my comment that implies any of my statement is based on their gender.
I seem to have struck a nerve with you, though. I think the commenter doth protest too much.
I suggest you reread your comment then. You claimed the only reason people questioned their qualifications was sexism.
They never said the word "only" or implied it.
They did not explicitly say it, it was definitely implied, since their entire comment was to claim that is was misogyny and sexism that were the motivations for commenters questioning these board members qualifications. I invite folks to actually look into qualifications of all of the board members, unless it's changed they're on the OpenAI website.
I think part of this
There has been a lot of thinly veiled sexism
No, they didn't imply it, and they didn't claim it was the primary motivation. They just said it was a contributor. You are perceiving a stronger claim than they made.
It's literally the only claim they made. There were no alternatives, so of course it's perceived and implied to be the strongest claim.
They said what they said, trying to weasel out of it doesn't make the case.
You introduced sex into a discussion where their sex is completely irrelevant.
I'm old enough to realize that I have no idea who someone is until I sit with them for a time, and even then I only have a slightly informed way of determining whether they are ethical and can be trusted.
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.
I'm not completely sure if it works the same in the States as it does in Canada, but asking strangers/distant acquaintances how they're doing is never a real question. People aren't actually asking. You basically have 4 or 5 canned responses to supply from "great, you?" to "living the dream...", all of which don't say much. Any more and you're being a nuissance.
I always give a short candid response to those questions. Sometimes it brings follow up questions.
My wife says I should just always say good or great.
I think your wife is right lol
She usually is, but it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
But it's OK to assume he's a sleazebag?
If he pushes WorldCoin? Yes. No doubt.
This. This tells me everything I need to know about this guy. It tells me that he would happily enslave everybody if that boosted his shares.
https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-a...
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.
yeah exactly. everyone is speculating on an event we know virtually nothing about, involving people virtually no one here knows or knows well, in a realm of business virtually no one here has experience with (serving on board of $90b company)
He's a YC guy who made a lot of money in tech and this is a YC website full of people wishing they made a lot of money in tech.
I think you will get downvoted soon (and I for mentioning this) but this is the simplest and most logical explanation on this thread by far.
It is a bit of a cultish environment no doubt. But there are a lot of very very nice people here too.
I would not say nice. Smart, and sometimes cordial, is how I would describe people here.
I know people are innocent until proven guilty but it does seem rather bizarre also that he's had literally 0 media scrutiny / never been asked about (to my knowledge) the fact his own sister claims he abused her for years when they were young.
People are innocent until proven guilty in the legal system, where we have is a strict process for assigning a binary guilt outcome.
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.
I also use stupid sayings sometimes too
If you use the "innocent til proven guilty" principle in your day to day interactions you're bound to get fucked by every 2nd person. Well, maybe not that bad but you will still get fucked because you don't have the same resources as a court does to figure out if someone's fucking with you or not.
You just don't have access to tax funded investigators working for months to figure out if the other person tells the truth or not.
So it's down to: Something's off? I'm not trusting you. Especially when you want something from me.
how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent".
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
This was so buried that completely escaped me. But it's full of nuggets
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?
She is just posting into midair, but at a time when Sam was in the news and it was implied she was talking to him.
While I am certain there were people on both sides of that camp, I never saw a overwhelming outpour of people framing him as a victim. Most of what I read was people confused as heck, including myself.
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.
It's also par for the course in these scenarios for the public story to be completely fabricated and have nothing to do with whatever thing actually pissed off the board, so we may never know what really happened
There were way more people who framed the board, than Altman as someone who did bad. At least until Monday. There were a ton of hearsay why ousting Altman is bad, without any context and internal info. And many of them was written by PR people. For example, "the last time when this happened was with Steve Jobs 1985". This is clearly a statement which wants you to direct towards that Altman is the victim. When it's not even true, because it happens all the time, like with Emmanuel Faber at Danone.
Btw, this is the most probable reason right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
"how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent"."
My impression was rather a overwhelmingly "wtf is going on?"
edit: I still don't know enough, to judge anyone involved
People love to see things in black and white without nuance, "oh you think the board should reverse the decision, that must mean you think Altman was innocent and should never be fired!". My read was that most people here (at least on sunday and monday) viewed the board as making major missteps, that doesn't mean all of HN is "team sam"
It’s just another hot take instant reaction of a new headline. Social media threads on controversial topics are always a whiplash, people love the swings in narratives, the opportunity to be contrarian or superior to the other people commenting on the topic, because they knew better.
A new headline by a journo seeking their own clickbait angle comes out and the flood of “See it was really just [black/white] position and you were all wrong” is the most classic stereotypical social media take to a now past it’s prime story, when IRL it’s as nuanced and shades of grey as ever.
Your comment and sentiment is wildly inappropriate. You don't even bother to raise an accusation, just smear a person's character. We should all expect better from this forum.
Ok, my accusation is that this guy wants to scan people eyeballs, and monetize that.
I don't know about sleazebag, I've mostly been confused as to what exactly he brings to the table. Dude gave himself scurvy after all.
This feels like a wild misreading of the situation based on a simplistic good/bad dichotomy. People were mostly stunned at how poorly the board handled things and that sama probably wasn't as bad as the board was trying to make him out to be which is wildly different from him being good.
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.
This entire thing has seemed to be the board saying "don't be the guy who went behind our back to summon the Devil" and everyone saying "but the Devil promised us Unlimited Moneys!" And HN agreeing that Unlimited Moneys are what startups are for, and everything else is excusable.
I think most of what you saw as support of Sam was support of ChatGPT as a consumer and b2b product, which is pretty clearly his baby and was put at risk by this drastic change. A _lot_ of people on this site are betting their futures on this technology right now and would very much not like to see that boat rocked.
Victims can be sleazebags, and sleazebags can be poor victims. Both things can be true. Not everyone that is identifying a victimization is feeling or advocating sympathy. It's not black and white.
I have no doubts about it. The good thing is that now I know a place I don't want to work for.
I just don't get his cult of personality. He's an underwhelming intellect but a top-notch promoter. And Worldcoin, seriously? I can see in 2019 wanting to be in on the grift, but let it die.
I don’t think it was everyone, I think there were just some loud voices. I also attribute that to human nature rather than anything organized. I’ve made a few Altman-skeptical comments and they generally got upvotes rather than getting flagged into oblivion; this tends to indicate there wasn’t premeditated astroturfing.
It doesn't help that the board publicly accused of being a liar without any evidence. If they simply left it at "Sam's vision no longer aligns with the charter of the nonprofit", I'd bet they would be viewed much more sympathetically.
From Paul Graham's Twitter, three days ago:
"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.
Paul's tweet is an objective statement, it does not say anything about character or values and is not explicitly supportive.
…you think calling someone “the best in the world” is
a) purely factual
b) not supportive
Uh, what on earth would count as explicitly supportive language?
Being the best in the world to deal with a situation is a neutral statement. Putin is the best in the world to deal with the situation he’s in right now, if you need a negative angle on this.
Putin is the best in the world to deal with the situation he’s in right now, if you need a negative angle on this.
Probably not true? It seems like Russia could use another Yeltsin (or Gorbachev) more than Putin for its current situation.
Not for Russia's benefit but for his own.
I think they spent decades growing their economy and preparing to be independent of the west and now our sanctions are useless.
It feels like this situation is exactly what they want (and likely an historical inflection point, where we pit east vs west again). Dropping the cold war was needed because they had no resources (surprise, socialism doesn't work!).
I'm waiting for Taiwan next and then I'd say we are completely *** (especially looking at our reliance on the east for manufacturing / energy and how useless our governments are).
I don’t think most Russians would agree that either of the other gentlemen would be preferable. The 80s and 90s were not a time of great happiness, prosperity, calm, and order.
It seems like Russia could use another Yeltsin (or Gorbachev) more than Putin for its current situation.
He did say best in the world, not best that can be imagined; so unless you are saying there is another Yeltsin or Gorbachev available...
OTOH, Putin is himself an active reason why alternatives aren't readily available.
That’s a really good example of not being explicitly supportive. It’s an objective statement. If I said “Roy Sullivan is the best in the world at being struck by lightning” it may implicitly feel like I’m rooting for him. But I’m just stating a fact.
What would count?
“I think Roy Sullivan is the man to be struck an eighth time. He’s the best at it. I hope he succeeds.”
So the statement is that Sam Altman is the best person in the world at getting fired?
Not sure. But it’s different from saying they support Altman’s endeavour in being the best at it.
Is it though?
When the fact is subjective to begin with?
I would even say “Roy Sullivan is the best in the world at being struck by lightning” is not a fact at all but an opinion.
And by giving an opinion you are passing judgement.
How can you claim saying something such as "Washington was the best president" is in some way a fact? Can you find it in reference books? Is it defined from the laws of nature? Does anyone even believe my quote?
He held the world record, so I’m comfortable saying he was the best at it. If that’s not sufficient and we’re interested in being a semantic pedantic, that’s not a discussion that interests me.
I wouldn't shake my hand with some of the best in the world. Why so damning? Heck we didn't even define in what they are best in, could be contract killing or lying for example (not applying to the actual topic and person, just generic statements).
More to the point, some people are natural leaders, they can process many stressful complex situations in parallel without breaking a sweat. I know I can't, not long term, all the kudos to them.
At least some of them are also amoral a-holes, highly functioning sociopaths (these get more common the more power and money floats around till they become the norm).
If my favourite sports team was in the championship (and the underdog), I could easily make the claim "team $NOT_MY_TEAM is the best in the world" and still hope that my team beats them.
Not saying pg is doing this, of course.
Any person that gets to this position must be good at some things.
Acknowledging it does not mean supporting the person. It is just a factual statement.
Even Adolf Hitler was good at certain things like manipulating masses of people. Saying this absolutely does not mean I support Hitler. It is just a factual statement.
Did you miss the context of the image in that tweet? It's the famous "I have a particular set of skills..." speech from Taken: https://youtu.be/jZOywn1qArI
In other words, he's basically saying Sam is the best in the world at being a ruthless mofo in these situations and obliterating those who oppose him. "Admiring language", perhaps, but I wouldn't really call that "supportive language".
No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with this kind of situation
This is clearly entirely subjective. To prove otherwise, feel free to show me the list ranking how people in the world would deal with this kind of situation and explain why Sam Altman ends up on top of that list.
it's implausible, because the hyperbole is over the top: he's wealthy from writing programs, and clearly has not assessed every single person in the world, so he knows better.
Reminds me of this (first one): https://www.muddycolors.com/2011/09/artistic-insults-from-fa...
I sometimes think that at this level of the game everyone hates everyone else and its all politics. You don't "come out" for or against anyone publicly, you leave all of that under cover. It makes knowing who your friends and enemies are more difficult and it restricts your ability to maneuver. Another quote from my grandfather was "Mutual respect does not require that you like someone."
"like" or "hate" are words for people and petty personal conflicts.
It's counterproductive to take business conflicts personally. PG removed Sam Altman silently without harming his future. There is no reason to be enemies after the issue is solved. There may be deals to be made again.
PG removed Sam Altman silently without harming his future.
When police departments do that to overly aggressive cops, it’s generally considered a bad thing.
This is laughably naive or frustratingly bad faith to think abusive cops are similar to incompatible business partners.
Not to me, when those "business partners" are in charge of some agencies like YC that do influence the society we live in.
That is an astonishingly bad analogy.
Believing that a person is not a good match for a certain business position is worlds apart from a public servant intentionally abusing his legally sanctioned monopoly on violence.
The first kind of person may be well a good match for another position, in another company; the latter is just a criminal in uniform.
There are different sets of concerns governing police accountability, transparency, etc., from those governing various different types of corporations, and rightly so.
It comes down to alignment of interests and alignment of values. I think previous comment is right in suggesting that people's interests and values may not be clear at that level. People often hide them to appeal more broadly.
The more you reveal about yourself, the fewer people you will appeal to because very few people share your exact values. People tend to like people who share some obvious common values and they assume that the values that are unspoken are also a match. In reality, it's rarely so.
As people learn more about the world and themselves, they begin to realize that some values that they didn't consider before are very important and they may be shocked to find that certain people they used to like do not share those values which they took for granted.
It's counterproductive to take business conflicts personally.
100% agree with this, but it is productive to understand what was behind a business conflict. Personal like or dislike can change which alternative of a choice of equal alternatives, someone might make. As Tony Soprano would say, "It's just business."
I'm sure there's some genuine friendships, but it's always interesting to see what people say publicly vs. privately. Also fair to say that there are people I've worked with that I did not, at the time, appreciate but grew to appreciate later on.
Years ago I was at an event talking to a colleague who was absolutely bashing someone (with good reason) and then another colleague walked up. Same person came up and my first colleague changed tone to "yeah, so-and-so is an interesting character."
Because I knew that the other colleague also hated the person, I called him on it. I wonder, though, how often that dynamic plays out where nobody will voice a negative opinion publicly - so people slide by without being called on behavior that shouldn't get ignored.
I've worked with that I did not, at the time, appreciate but grew to appreciate later on.
Exactly right. People are complicated and liking or disliking them is adjacent to whether or not they are 'good' at their job.
I've known people who sucked at their job, but doing the same job in a different environment were stars. That experience led me to disassociate what people do as part of their job from the person themselves. And I can respect someone for doing a good job, even when I find their personal attitude or motivations distasteful.
Complicated.
A similar saying that I learned from a business mentor years ago, "Just because someone is nice to you doesn't make them your friend, just because someone is mean to you doesn't make them your enemy."
It's all politics WAY before this level.
Def not true. People who operate at this level can separate business and friendship. But occasionally when big enough deals fall through it can damage long term friendships, but it's not common. PG firing sama and keeping it secret sounds like PG likes and respects sama but didn't think he should run YC. If he didn't like sama he could have done a lot more damage by making it more public.
The comment you are responding to has quotes of people definitely coming out "for" Sam.
In the made-for-tv movie about OpenAI - PG is played by an actor mimicking Trump, and that's Sam's origin story. "You're Fired"
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."
played by an actor
What is this comment even trying to say?
By the time they make a movie about OpenAI, there will be no more human actors.
Doesn't this show a vested interest from pg and jessica in OpenAI? So it's hard for them to say anything negative.
As a matter of good policy they wouldn't publicly denounce anyone that was associated with YC.
Jessica went out of her way to use the slightly awkward phrase 'founding donor', so she's at least trying to imply she isn't just trying to protect an investment. I'm going to take the generous interpretation of that and assume she means what she says there, and isn't just playing politics and share price PR.
It’s not too complicated. Their interests are/were different.
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.
Mature adults can certainly think that someone else is not fit for one job (running YC) and is fit for another (handling OAI). Good business people are even better at it, knowing that makes them more money. PG certainly seems to fit that.
CEOs are professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft, they use their communications to achieve an end, expressing their inner selves is not the point. You might know a great kind person who is a car salesman, when they are at work a good one comes off as genuine and friendly, the things they're saying include many truths, but their words and actions are primarily designed to sell cars. Assume this is true of any professional communicator when they're communicating.
CEOs are professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft
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.
If you start thinking that CEOs aren't special and unique, then you might start thinking they don't need to be paid 350 times what the average employee does.
Yes.
Then you must not think the job is difficult or impactful, as well.
That doesn't necessarily follow. Lots of people have difficult jobs. Line cooks have to make priority decisions under high pressure, and it's impactful.
Altman founded Loopt.
Not sure how you can say he fell into the CEO position there.
Also at the time he was at YC it was a significantly smaller and less prestigious incubator.
Loopt, Inc. was an American company ... which provided a service for smartphone users to share their location selectively with other people.
Yea, impressive stuff. I'm sure that gave him a lot of experience that led to being one of the few "professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft".
That was not the point of that coment.
You act like he just mysteriously found himself in executive positions when every company he's headed for a significant duration was one he founded. If you didn't even know that then you obviously know very little about him and couldn't even be bothered to do any research at all. This is a simple wikipedia search. So why are you so bothered about someone you know nothing about ?
Watch him at Dev Day.
Yawn.
If we concede that CEOs deserve their place in society then we can claim that we live in a meritocracy, the world is fair, and we deserve the good things that happen to us. It's a very comfortable thought.
all the companies altman has CEO'd are companies he co-founded. Not sure how you "fall upwards" into that.
Yeah I'm not convinced either. No doubt that good communication is a strength in a good CEO. But the only thing I can confidently say is an essential part of being a CEO is that they are blame-sinks for executive decisions, particularly their own.
CEOs are professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft
Elon Musk has entered the chat...
That's the exception for someone born wealthy, buys an existing company, and installs themselves as CEO.
The source for his being born wealthy is his father. Who is known to be a conman.
For example the emerald story seems to be false. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-father-errol-never....
Founder CEOs are a different breed. There's a plenty of successful founder CEOs who don't fit the typical hired CEO pattern. Zuckerberg, Sweeney, etc.
Is Elon a founder CEO of Twitter, Tesla, or SpaceX?
I think he's gone a little more "experimental" and Avant Garde in his practice of the art. /s
This the main reason I don't trust people who are in the business of "selling". On one hand, it's nice being around those kinds of people. On the other hand, it's hard to take any of the nice things they say seriously. Most of them say nice things to be likeable, not because they actually mean or will do what they say. I've learned to pay close attention to what salesmen do, rather than what is said. The actual truth will be revealed by their actions.
I've learned to pay close attention to what salesmen do, rather than what is said.
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.
People could afford to say more nice things. Perhaps it would even devalue the false flattery used by salespeople to their advantage.
OTOH the parent comment's take seems reasonable. Calling your dad and saying "I love you" because you want to be written into the will is sort of the level we're dealing with here.
No need to disagree, both our statements can be true at the same time. I also need to be less stoic, but I refuse to put on a mask to achieve that.
My statement was directed at those who wear that mask all too well. Example, my landlord, who's in real estate and a very nice guy in person. However, he promised to do a few things and didn't do them. So his niceties where just that, nice words and nothing more. I'd rather deal with a less nice person who actually does what they said they will. With limits of course, no one likes a-holes.
"I've learned to pay close attention to what salesmen do, rather than what is said"
I've learned to apply this to every human being. Talk is cheap.
"Your actions speak so loud we can't hear what you say" - Jim Harbaugh
"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" is a great book that touches on this subject.
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.
I don't know if this counts as selling, though.
Selling is making you want to buy the car, agreeing on a price and filling in the paperwork.
Trying to extract more money from you after you have agreed on a price is... extorsion? Fraud? But not just "selling".
It's negotiation, which is absolutely selling. The dealership was counting on me accepting the price hike because the car I wanted was rare and in-demand, and I had already made some commitment to the process by filling out initial paperwork. I knew a manager still needed to approve the terms, but the sales rep made it sound like it was certain.
Turns out this is an incredibly common car sales tactic, enough so that it was explicitly called out in the aforementioned book.
Rather than harumph about how unfair it is, I decided it was better to just learn how to play the game. Unwilling participant or not, fair or not, it's better to come prepared than feel like you're getting taken advantage of.
If anything happens after we shake hands, I walk. Paperwork or not; book or no book.
I don't question the (un)fairness of it, or the game; just the name.
Your guy sounds like Jerry Lundegaard
And probably the car is dodgy if they are pulling tricks like that. If a startup investor does it, probably their “help” is suspect.
CEOs are professional communicators who have reached the highest level of the craft
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.
Good CEOs are good communicators. Most CEOs, like literally any other profession, are not. People like Jobs are exceptions, and for every one of them there are a hundred shitty CEOs who are neither talented nor intelligent, even among the companies that are still alive, but they don’t get discussed here because this is a site about making money first, and tech second, and the crowd here doesn’t like hearing it’s all bullshit. For every Apple there are a hundred Shitty Integrated, Inc. companies that no one talks about, and every one has a CEO.
There are no qualifications to be a CEO, ultimately, except the board happens to want you as CEO.
It’s just a title.
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
I have hung out on HN for over 14 years and took a personal interest in "How in the heck did a pretty young woman co-found a company with three men, date one of them and not have this turn into a debacle and scandal in the headlines???" It took quite a few years for the details behind the founding of YC to come out:
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.
Good observations, a bit of a stretch,
regarding scandal and not scandal, real life doesnt follow rigid ideas of “the power dynamics are too extreme for this relationship to exist”
that’s just tabloid drama
people can be objective mature partners that met on the job where one was an executive and the other doing something menial
That wasn't the "scandal" I had in mind. I was wondering "How in the heck did one of three male co-founders ask her for a date, her say yes and this not turn into three male co-founders fighting over who gets the girl instead of focusing on developing the business?"
Gotcha, its a timeless tale, Paul Graham is king and finds the eunuch to act as a proverbial chastity belt to while watching over the lady
whether thats what happened or not, it is disarming to say the least and many would be more comfortable with the same situation given the option
That is quite a wild conclusion to jump to. What evidence or clues lead you to that.
I spent several years trying to figure this out and I did not keep track of my sources because it was a personal interest, not an "argument" I was trying to make. But here is pg talking about Jessica Livingston and YC:
YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor read applications and did interviews with us.
Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC. At first we tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html
Note: That's from November 2015. I originally joined in July 2009 and the company dates to something like 2007.
Huh the things I heard about Altman a long time before was that he was a couch surfer at YCombinator.
Well I can't edit this and this page has likely been archived so... I'll just write this. Sam was essentially homeless. A failed startup with not much to it. Sure, it was acquired but it gave him essentially just enough to continue trying to pursue his dream. He really didn't make any progress at all. At YCombinator he was essentially stuck for years. There's a lot of fake and editorialized stories about his life and his made up genius. The dude dropped out of college it's not this amazing story. Mentally he had given up everything to try to reach this stage. I don't know the full story but almost everything online I've read is completely different from what I've actually heard.
While I think it's unlikely that you'll summon pg or dang to comment on something like that it's is an interesting take and I wonder if any of those involved have addressed it elsewhere.
Probably not.
1. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston tend to keep their private life private.
2. If I'm correct, it seems unlikely Paul told anyone he hired Sam to protect his personal interests as a married man nervous about his pretty younger wife working closely with another men.
3. If I'm correct, he probably didn't even tell Jessica because that would have come off as "I don't trust you" and not "I am worried about his behavior."
Or, when you fire people, have a clear reason for it. Not being "consistently candid" is not that.
You want companies to post the reasons for every firing on Twitter?
Not regular employees. Twitter is one method of communication.
I’m ambivalent about it in general, but curious in this case specifically.
No. But if you are going to make a statement, it behooves you to fill it with substance.
No, but at least tell the reasons to the CEO you replaced him with. Even Shear was kept in dark and was planning to leave OpenAI.
lying of any type is always grounds for termination. "consistently candid" is just a more PC phrase for lying.
The details matter here. Consistently lying is grounds for termination. Not consistently being outspoken/blunt might not be. "Not being consistently candid" can be interpreted as either.
Candid means speaking your mind; truth. "Consistently candid" therefore means consistently telling the truth, perhaps even to a fault.
Tips on step 2?
A really slick slide deck on how your unicorn will make this person the envy of his peers.
Also amazing amounts of luck, or family connections.
Appeal to ego.
Helps if you make a good prebirth choice to be born into wealth, influence
That's how Jeffrey Epstein made it, starting with Les Wexner.
Trust your gut. No one here has a good story about "Sam I Am".
Steps 1 and 2 are very hard to accomplish.
If Paul Graham fired Sam Altman from YCombinator it's interesting that he appears to have such a favourable opinion of him [0].
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...
I dunno, man. As an English person, to me these tweets sound a lot like he is publicly calling Altman a cunt.
Really? It seems like a glowing appraisal. He seems to think that Sam is devestatingly effective at what he does.
If I didn't know Graham was English, perhaps I would take them at face value - and, indeed, perhaps I should anyway. (And my characterisation was an extreme one!) But: they do just all sound rather coldly backhanded, if you ask me.
I like your way of seeing it and I see the same now. If this is true (the article) then for sure it’s a nice inside jab that only Sam would get.
Also, I doubt pg would hold a grudge for years on end. You learn many lessons in life and some you are bound to repeat because of stubbornness or whatever.
I think with some of pg's tweets he definitely seems to be laying it bare, but only for those people that know what to watch out for.
American, but I read PG's tweets as someone who absolutely does not want to piss off Sam but is willing to come close to the edge of plausible deniability in damning him, e.g.:
The most alarming thing I've read about AI in recent memory. And if Sam thinks this, it's probably true, because he's an expert in both AI and persuasion.
There certainly isn't the paternal warmth you might expect from a proud mentor.
Well, I'm also English and I didn't read them that way. However, I do think that Paul is telling people that competing with Sam in certain domains would be extraordinarily difficult.
The other thing is that if you take a look at Paul Graham's blog posts, he used to regularly thank Sam at the bottom of these -- this isn't something you do if you don't like or respect someone. However, on the other hand, perhaps they fell out at some point? I can't personally make out that signal from the little data there is.
Graham is English. The English have a wonderful talent for making backhanded “complements.” E.g. “you’re a truly unique individual” or “I always feel more intelligent after speaking with you.”
The American convention is to look for the positive and assume that was intended. The English convention is to look for the negative and assume that was the real meaning.
E.g. “Sam is going better than you. Do better.” Could mean “Even that incompetent dipshit Sam is going to do better than you can, that’s how much of a hole you’re in.”
Per Guy Kawasaki (The Macintosh Way), the sincerity of Jean-Louis Gassée's feedback was inversely proportional to the level of praise.
That anecdote prompted me to do the same (in corporate battlefields). Works great.
I am also English. :)
They all say he's good at what he does, but none of them actually sound like he likes the guy.
It’s really funny to re read this with that perspective.
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.
I read it like so.
Rokos Basilisk
Is this why there was a power struggle for OpenAI’s direction?
Clicksaver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
Paul's wife has a huge financial stake in OpenAI, so I suspect massive success there has softened his opinion.
These are donations. How that becomes investment / financial stakes? (It is a question, since how the transition to capped-profit left a lot of questions unanswered).
Anyone able to quote these xweets for people without an account?
The bit about PG and Altman parting ways is interesting I wonder if anyone wants to share more :).
Hadn't seen the tweet from Geoffrey Irving before:
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 a very strongly worded statement. Given how connected Altman is, it's very interesting that Irving would publicly state this.
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.
It's difficult to conceptualize someone who is ruthless, self-interested, and skilled enough to overcome all problems... except your control over them.
Eventually they look at you and decide you're the problem to be overcome.
Might not happen for a while, but inevitably will.
Are you talking about Sam or an AGI?
Nicely worded, but with regard to the OpenAI conflict I wonder if you intended this to be about Sam Altman or the topic of (G)AI safety or both?
This is incredibly well put and not something I've seen articulated so clearly before.
You've got a few billionaire teams in silicon valley not unlike say the NFL.
Team DeepMind Team Google Team Meta Team YC Team OpenAI Team Microsoft Team nVIDIA Team VC Team Thiel
There are probably more...
> I'm left feeling like there are no angels here.
That's my feeling after watching all this play out over the last few days. I don't trust any of these people to be good stewards of anything that is supposed to benefit humanity.
He said it in the Tweet that it was because people were attacking people, such as Helen Toner, that he knows to be good people.
This is the kind of person we have controlling the future of AI. He and Elon Musk. Between these two we are assured complete destruction.
What is wrong with Musk again?
He personally does not like the color yellow, so he required it not used in safety contexts just because of that. So he put workers' safety at risk because he may have to see pictures or tour the area once every quarter. There are more stories like this ad nauseum. Or, you could just read his Twitter feed.
You guys just believe whatever you read. Things that can easily be debunked with common sense. For example, there's a lot of yellow in this factory tour he did:
I indeed see fairly minimal safety colors and patterns in that video. I don't know where you see "a lot".
And you do realize that there have been investigative journalists, federal inspections, and lawsuits regarding this? So all those people are just making it all up so that I can just believe whatever I read?
That’s a rhetorical question, correct?
I don’t see how 1 and 2 are compatible unless you have a really weird definition of ‘nice’.
I think it'd be more accurate to substitute 'polite' or 'courteous' than 'nice'.
Like an AI then.
One of those people whose career Altman helped propel was Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and board member at OpenAI — the person who ultimately fired him.
Ilya was plenty successful before OpenAI and would've been just fine without Altman helping to "propel" his career.
Why did he sign the letter and post:
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.
When you take a shot at someone influential and miss, falling on your own sword is a kinder fate than what will happen when they turn your direction.
Did he miss? Sam was fired.
This subthread isn't about the article; we're on a tangent about OpenAI.
He was fired [at] and didn't die. Now he's back, and looking for revenge.
Board hired him back. They could have said no and stuck to their guns. No shareholders to give them the boot.
Then they’d be falling on their own swords. Literally the whole company was ready to walk away. Never in history has that ever happened, as far as I know.
It's actually pretty typical for coups/mutinies.
Your position is challenged by military brass, so you imprison/execute them. Anyone charismatic enough to take you on is going to have been popular with the soldiers, so now a heavily-armed mob with tanks and artillery is pissed at you. Now you have two problems, with only two solutions-- eat some shit and hope to make peace, or die.
Putin played it safe in flipping the script-- negotiate surrender, appear to resolve the dispute peacefully, then stage an "accident" of the rabblerouser once tensions are lower. Cooler heads always prevail.
Or you could do the King Hassan II strategy which is basically bury them in underground pits with not even enough room to stand up in for 24 hours a day until the first Bush comes knocking and needs a favor and tells you to clean up your PR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazmamart
I guess a L63 DS salary at MS must be the salt mines to these guys.
This is why, the WSJ says: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/openai-s-path-ahea...
"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."
HAHA, I know.
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.
What's that about with Eric Schmidt, Elon and Ilya?
Correction, it was Larry Page (close enough), Elon and Ilya.
Source - https://youtu.be/7nORLckDnmg?si=1T5qyYAdPrMwsEGG&t=73
and your source for this story is?
It seems obvious that tech media are largely not even close to neutral here. Most everything coming out feels manipulative as hell. I don’t know why anyone thinks they have a clear story of what’s happening here.
tech media are largely not even close to neutral here
I don't find that surprising at all. Many of those reporting are highly dependent on "access journalism." I suspect it's pretty hard to be neutral when if you piss off the wrong people they will cut you off.
Indicative that many sources still come from Sam's camp
This statement about Ilya seems just ridiculous to me. Ilya was one of the people who created all these ML/Deep Learning hype with the "ImageNet moment". I don't care much about all this VC stuff, but before 2023, Ilya seemed to me much more famous than Sam.
I can't believe someone that created Worldcoin could not be trustworthy.
Worldcoin alone is so, so damning of his character. Cartoon villain shit.
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.
How so? A universal and tamper-proof ID system sounds like a good idea. In my country we have a pretty rock solid digital ID but the problem is that it's national, so the utility is limited.
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.
that's exactly one of the biggest use cases for WC. the internet needs this and will need it 100x more in a few years
Why does the internet "need" this? Anonymity and pseudonymity are features, not bugs of the internet. Eliminating them will supercharge surveillance and government/corporate control.
The short answer is a lot of potentially useful decentralized protocols completely buckle under the weight of Sybil attacks, so if Sybil attacks were impossible, there is a whole lot more that could be built
So how do retinal scans protect against Sybil attacks exactly?
I don't believe that they do, in fact, it is probably trivial to make a fake WorldCoin identity, but people who support WorldCoin largely support it on the assumption that this is not possible.
I think the people who support Worldcoin do so either on the basis of it being another shitcoin they can make money speculating with, or because they're in Sam's personality cult.
To keep things polite - I couldn't give a nanofraction of a fuck what kind of app you want to build, I am not giving my biometric data on such a stupid whim to anybody, not to US for-profit, when US laws selectively considers remaining 95% of humans on Earth subpar.
So if it's a great idea, and Worldcoin is a US company, why did they not start in the US?
Why instead did they go to some of the least wealthy parts of Africa and ask people to give them their biometrics for sometimes as much as one month's salary? To seed their database? It doesn't really pass the smell test.
their long term project doesn't save or store retina patterns in any way. they store of a hash of it that is mathematically impossible to reverse. it's clear you wildly misunderstand how this works, i would encourage you to go learn more. i'd also welcome you to explain how the crypto side of it is bad in comparison to other uses of blockchains
I don't know what the gaps in your knowledge are to not see Worldcoin as a scam. And I'm not being paid to find out.
But it's a fuckin scam. It's exploitative, and sleazy as fuck. It uses crappy blockchain tech, the orbs are proprietary, and you really ought to think twice before condescending at people who try to help you out on this.
I hear NFT's are gonna really hit soon....
Why are you lying to protect sama’s reputation?
Worldcoin stores the biometric data for opt-in users. They say it themselves. It’s stored “encrypted” which means the original data is retrievable, and kept in Worldcoin’s custody. All Worldcoin claims is that it has safeguards against retrieving the data it does collect and store, like say Equifax or 23andme claim about your PII.
how the crypto side of it is bad in comparison to other uses of blockchains
It sucks and the other uses also suck.
I'm a happy Worldcoin user. If the providers are happy and the users are happy I'm not sure what's cartoon villainish about it?
"but he looks like such a nice boy"
It came as a surprise for me to learn that PG fired Sam. It's the first time that I read this actually, and if that's true, I find it kind of mysterious that it remained a secret for so long. Or maybe I missed the news somehow but I could not find any other mention of that event on Google.
I've fired people and later recommended them for jobs where they'd be a better fit. Not uncommon at all.
My immediate thought. Relatively few have been in management here, perhaps.
It's largely engineers who don't really understand the value of a C-level person, as evidenced time and time again in the comments.
The concept you could fire someone for business reasons and later be their very good friend and recommend them for another job - sometimes an even better one than you employed them in - doesn't fit the single-input single-output mind of a lot of engineers.
It's alright. We all have roles to play.
Your reg dates are 2012 and 2014. As you know, this is hacker news. not c-level news, not middle management news.. hacker news.
Agreed, it's very common to see. In many cases you're talking about people who worked together very closely for years and are verging on as close as family. Also, in higher-level roles you often get fired due to a very specific lack of skills or a very specific weakness that wouldn't be at all applicable for another job.
Ex "this person is an amazing startup CTO but they get problematically overwhelmed when the organization gets to 100 engineers" – you would 1000% recommend that person to a 50-person startup even if they got fired from their job at a 500-person company. They might even be better at it the next time around.
Weird: The most relevant hn post on Altman’s departure from YC is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342184
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?
Nor in 2022 when it was first archived by Wayback (unless archives from previous have been removed)
https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.ycom...
But this contemporaneous TechCrunch article—which is clearly talking about the same blog post—says it did!
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/y-combinator-president-sam...
Thank you for the article, I saw a comment from Sam in the HN post but agreed it did not look obvious that he got fired.
I've definitely never heard of it, and I was pretty shocked when I read it given how much positive stuff pg has written about sama, and the article itself says the firing "has not been previously reported".
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.
sometimes making decisions that are nominally about a higher goal but (not really coincidentally) are self-aggrandizing
"Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong."
It has been a decade, but let me guess, Mass effect 3 Mordin? I rather not look it up lol.
You make a fair point about that tweet, it can be ironic or sincere and it left me a mixed feeling. I am not sure what was PG's goal with that tweet but it did not feel necessary.
It could be that the parties involved have chosen at this moment to re-imagine whatever occurred back then in a less favorable light. Since firing is on everyone's mind, and since you can get media attention points by playing along with a juicy narrative, what might have just been described as a disagreement in the past might now be called a firing. I would be skeptical of takes like this.
We have a tendency to remember the good and not the bad, and we want to see our friends do well. Someone else also pointed out here in the comments that no one wants to publicly state they made a bad call if they can avoid it because it will likely damage them personally. We give others lots of chances, or we encourage and cheer them when others are taking chances on them in the hopes that they'll do better this time even when we would no longer risk our own skin.
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,"
It's oh so weird the article does not mention any of these though...
- 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)
that can't be true- why would sam altman and the rest of their family deny annie altman's inheritance? it's not like they need the money themselves
either this annie character is making stuff up, or the whole rest of her family are some kind of comic book villains
I haven't read enough into the story to make up an opinion. However, purely based on what you're saying, that's completely normal abuser behaviour. You wouldn't be denying the inheritance to enrich yourself, but rather to prevent someone from becoming economically empowered and reducing your power over them. It's a very common tactic.
While it’s true that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, this sort of seemingly illogical vindictiveness is exceedingly common.
why would sam altman and the rest of their family deny annie altman's inheritance? [...] either this annie character is making stuff up, or the whole rest of her family are some kind of comic book villains
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.
Also he does seem to have "crazy eyes" [1].... Yeah it's not entirely scientific but a lot of manipulative exec types have them. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind...
[1] https://www.insider.com/you-can-spot-psychopaths-by-looking-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanpaku
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...
Paging your friendly neighborhood phrenologist! Have you measured the shape of Altman's head yet?
Sounds like Roko's Basilisk knows where he lives.
Wow, that's some incredibly damning stuff, especially from his own sister. I'm a bit surprised to have never heard about any of this before, but I guess the kind of influence Sam has can be pretty effective.
Fyi the gist was a copy of that letter originally posted to board.net. It was created by a user here on HN when the board.net link first came out and its servers subsequently crashed from the HN hug of death.
"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
Is there any major news reporting on the Annie Altman stuff? That looks like front page material to me.
He has always creeped me out. The way pg talks about him is meant to be an endorsement, but it makes Sam seem like a Svengali whose main quality is the ability to manipulate and get what he wants.
Elon is incredibly jealous of Sam. That is why he posted the gist.
it is absolutely fascinating how in all the threads about him, there's all these huge fans, and some people who are apparently highly connected, but no one ever seems to discuss why he has these fancy jobs, why he left others, and why is apparently so well regarded?
It's strangely paradoxical.
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’s actually much less confusing than that. It’s clear he has a knack for becoming a favorite son of billionaire oligarchs who see him as useful.
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.
It's pretty incredible that the upper echelons have so thoroughly psyopped everyone below them that the public runs confused around in an endless maze of ideology, false pretexts and stirred up drama.
This way only insiders recognise the most fundamental realpolitical power struggles of all ages; that the "very confusing" wars, coups or power grabs is not very complex at all but always - almost as a physical principle - stemming from the richest members of society pulling the strings to benefit themselves.
Then some note or some FOIA request will be released in 40 years about the orchestration and no one will care.
Just follow the money, or the networks of people and it's easy to see the undercurrents of class warfare, elite power via the security state or oligarch clubs siphoning money and power away from the public, but that's called conspiracy these days and is dangerous (to the ruling classes).
Yeah this stuff isn't rocket science. If you shut the fuck up and play along and don't make people uncomfortable you get a kitchen renovation and a vacation home and a job for your kid. It's the oldest game there is.
I have only interacted briefly with Sam but I found him to be one of the smartest YC folks. But I will let a Paul Graham essay speak [1]:
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.
Graham doesn't say Altman is smart. He says he's driven. They're not the same thing.
Quite frankly, every time I read one of Altman's essays I am seriously underwhelmed as far as smartness goes.
It's funny, but I adopted a similar approach, and it's amazing how the tides turn in your favor when your name is on everyone's lips. I'm nothing special, but I have an eye for quality people and a great reputation (thanks to it), so I'm the one who keeps getting the calls.
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.
mildly surly sloth
I had to read that twice, but it was well worth it.
What makes you think he has no technical ability?
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.)
This is the confirmation of why people hire him.
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.
He's part of the SV VC royalty? He has the tech/startup pedigree, is good at raising money, and made the right impression on important people.
I really liked the New Yorker portrait 'Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny':
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.
I objected to his choice of Rickover as a role model in a FB comment thread and apparently he had a mutual friend with me so he jumped in complaining that the reporter hadn’t captured everything accurately (not quite to the point of “did me dirty”)
What's wrong with Rickover as a role model? If he'd been able to do for the civilian nuclear power sector what he did for the Navy, a lot of things would be a lot better now.
Rickover effectively seized control of the entire USN submarine arm and ran it as a personal fief for three decades. I don't think that could possibly work with civilian power in the US, because it's NOT a military organization and can't be changed by top-down mandate.
A 1978 USNI Proceedings essay on NR and leadership[1], which won a bunch of prizes, had this great description of Rickover's micromanagement: "Each nuclear submarine is commanded by two people: its captain and the Director, Division of Naval Reactors [Rickover]. The captain has full responsibility for the military operations of his ship as well as for power plant safety. He also has full authority over the military operations. NR has much of the authority over the power plant; its Director has been known to place a call to a submarine’s engineering space telephone and then personally direct the commanding officer how to organize his watch bill."
That level of micromanagement wasn't great inside the US Navy, a military organization (hence the essay) and would have spectacularly bombed and flamed out in the civil power world and is also not a great idea for the commercial world at large. This is why taking Rickover as a model is something that you should do very very carefully. He did some things right, but a whole lot of things can't be brought over to your company, in a way that suggests using him as a baseline takes you further away from a good answer.
I wrote a paper decades ago comparing Rickover and Jackie Fisher- of HMS Dreadnought/HMS Invincible fame- as technological entrepreneur's introducing new technology into their respective fleets. And one lesson I took away was that both of them took a whole lot of advantage of being in a military service where they could issue orders and have them be legally obeyed in a way that commercial people just can't get away with. Employees will just leave your company if you tried a bunch of the crap that Rickover did.
[1]: A badly OCR'd version of the essay is available here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1978/july/leaders... The author, then Lt Ralph Chatham, would go on to have the first ever novel published by the US Naval Institute Press dedicated to him. "To Ralph Chatham, a sub driver who spoke the truth" is how Tom Clancy's _Hunt for Red October_ begins.
Thanks, interesting perspective there that I'm not very familiar with. Will have to check out the USNI essay.
I too, wasn't aware of this or I might have cited it in the thread as well.
It's interesting because you can't argue with the success he achieved, and given how high the stakes were, you can sort of understand the temptation to micromanage. But (having read the essay now) you also can't learn much from Rickover's methodology, or apply it anywhere else. If for no other reason than the fact that few/no similar problems exist anywhere else.
We also can't run the experiment multiple times to determine if he was really relying on luck all along. The Navy's luck ran pretty low at a couple of points (Thresher and Scorpion come to mind).
I think he realized it painted him in a bad light which is why he blamed it on the reporter to me but I really just should have responded with the Edward Teller quote from the 1983 AUR article: 'I liked Rickover better as a captain than as an admiral."
This is what I cited (from the 1983 issue of Air University Review) which makes many similar points but concentrates more on his impact on the organization at the Navy level (https://web.archive.org/web/20130310192210/http://www.airpow...). I also pointed out to him that Rickover didn't think civilian nuclear power should be a thing towards the end of his life as well as some points about the Shoreham plant and the backup turbines.
e: "In time, he became increasingly conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."
The reality is we have to give Sam total credit for transparency. From the USNI and Air University articles mandevil and I cited he was completely open and honest about how he intended to run OpenAI (although he was still at YC then). Let's just hope his next role model isn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naftaly_Frenkel
As a former Submarine sailor, Rickover, destroyed the best part of the spirit of the service with his tyrannical control.
Why are people so obsessed with this guy? Keep falling into the same trap of Cult of the Tech CEO
Why do people watch pro sports? Why do we fall into the cult of the sports personality?
Why do people follow movie stars?
Because we’re human, and we gossip and obsess over high performers.
I was actually just thinking that I really miss the days when it was sports teams and athletes that people obnoxiously worshipped. Need to go back to Patriots fans being the most annoying people around.
Oh that is still happening, I promise you. Though currently the most annoying fanbase is probably the Eagles right now.
He was CEO of Y combinator, of which this forum is sponsored and maintained by.
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.
I definitely get the high-level of interest and reason it's a popular topic on here. What I don't get is the intense emotional investment people have in this person. Not so much on HN but definitely elsewhere in social media.
How AI will ultimately affect humanity is uncertain, so the stewardship of an extremely influential company in that field will be of general interest.
The specific reason for the board shenanigans seems to be related to this tension on how AI will or won’t be handled by the management of the tech companies which create and manage them.
All of these feels very relevant to the general public.
Someone else posted it around here - as religion recedes people need new deities. Couple that with an increase in popularity of conspiracy theories and you get altman and ai.
Like sports I'm here for the drama. It's a distraction to follow. If it doesn't interest you just ignore.
I think it’s his consistency; how does he garner this much respect from SV? Surely, the logic must go, he’s worthy of it.
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.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the events of the past several days. But a lot of the behavior I’ve seen on twitter from Open AI employees, some led by Sam, feels very cult like: posting in all lower case, the heart emojis, rumors of employees calling each other in the middle of the night to pressure people to sign letters supporting Sam.
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.
I think I'm out of the loop on tweet protocol...What's the significance of all lowercase?
People are reading way too much into this, some people just prefer the look of all-lowercase. It's not like this is some super-unique choice to Sam / OAI, it's all over the internet.
All lowercase signals casual aloofness; it says the situation doesn't meet your bar for formality. It's like Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie when meeting with Wall Street types.
It is done to signal solidarity with sama.
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.
maybe they all remapped their shift keys
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121980&page=1
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.
The absolute uniformity was a bit disconcerting to be honest, but I can also see it being just a great display of comradery. I'm still unsure about how to feel about the thing with it mostly resolved.
I found those posts extremely weird, the emojis and lowercase tweets and screenshots of Notes. I would imagine people who were/are in charge of a company on the fast track to being worth hundreds of billions / trillion USD would be a bit more serious, but here they are, quoting each other tweets with heart emojis.
I've talked to OpenAI recruiters. I personally don't like Sama from what I've heard/read, but I would still consider working there due to Ilya and Karpathy.
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 $$$'.
Why would Sam Altman be held as someone irreplaceable....the dude seems like a smart guy but c'mon he is not Jobs or Gates. I remember first time hearing him when he interviewed Zuck about Facebook and entrepreneurship (when he worked for Y Combinator). Now we talk about him as the next Gates or Jobs. I think this was one big marketing stunt from OpenAI, now the whole software and business community talks about them. Big boost in popularity and big downfall for Google when we talk about competing in AI. Sam's biggest mistake was that Worldcoin privacy nightmare but idk what was he thinking about, maybe it was noble idk.
He probably has powerful connections beyond SV. He and Greg Brockman have been meeting heads of state and he has been fundraising in the Middle East recently. I wouldn't be surprised if he is sold as representing US interests, hence few dare to criticize him openly.
Yeah, it’s hilarious people think you just get to travel around the world and glad-hand heads of state without “friends” among the three-letter folks. And even more so when you’re doing it in the context of selling a technology with quite obvious intelligence service and military applications.
And even more so when you’re doing it in the context of selling a technology with quite obvious intelligence service and military applications.
Wasn't Peter Thiel's Palantir meant to be something like military AI for governments to catch threats in the big data. Someone once said that data is the new oil and it's so true, just look at LLMs and OpenAI. That's why Google is held as the world's most powerful data company....not Facebook as a matter of fact.
He surely has connections in SV(he was even a Reddit CEO for a short time) but he has connections in the politics too as far as I can tell. He is representing US interests? Fine. OpenAI is an American company. This was one big marketing stunt, a balloon to see how the AI community would react. OpenAI is the innovator but the future AI innovations will happen somewhere else, that's what history of innovations teaches us. I remember when Elon said the Google is the biggest threat when it comes to AI, then he founded and funded OpenAI and now here we are.
Or is it a big PR stunt for sam?
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.
They wanted it to be something like Apple and Steve Jobs but Jobs was on the another level of computer fanatic.
No one knows when to raise like Sam. Some may say that is his only skill. But, it is valuable skill to have when you are about to be the richest startup of this generation.
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.
I don't think it's marketing stunt. I just think there is a lot of incompetent people involved.
I predict his character arch will be similar to Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick - first the media gushes over him and praises him as a genius. Then the media starts to question him. Then they start to fully dig in and dig up a ton of dirt.
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?
His low life sex worker sister trying to wheedle money out of him saying she vividly remembers something from when she was 4? Vet the allegations before you make claims.
He's literally saying they are allegations and claims, so he's done everything correct:
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.
Stop being a fanboy and get some arguments.
Stop repeating unverified allegations. Anyone can allege anything.
I trust Greg, and Greg trusts Sam.
Transitive trust is a bad idea. The telephone game aka "chinese whispers" demonstrates why.
I dislike the fact that he peddles the AGI angle too much. Literally, way above normal.
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.
there is something about him in watching him speak live and in person
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.
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.
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.
Based on the article and the loyalty shown by openai employees, he appears to be the "difficult to manage" type, rather than the "difficult to work for" type.
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.
IME one almost always implies the other.
Not in my experience, at all. Working beneath someone who’s difficult to work for can make your every day at work terrible. Working with someone who’s hard to work with is much more maintainable since you’re more in control of the interactions and can effect change by working with people higher in the org.
Oh, I mean that if someone’s a bad subordinate or peer they’ll probably also be a bad boss, or vice versa. I’d agree that a bad boss tends to be a worse thing to have than the other too.
But not as a truism. It's possible to manipulate well enough that people above and below you both believe you are working in their interest, but it's quite hard. Great for job security if you can pull it off.
Not my experience at all. Someone who pushes back on their boss to get the team they manage what they need is exactly that type of person.
I haven’t seen that. Some of my favorite coworkers and managers have been people who were hard to manage. It’s because they have strong principles and they prioritize good relations with their peers and subordinates over being promotable.
I understand you are probably talking about people who uniformly act like jerks but I haven’t found them to be as common.
From this story sounds more like "difficult to not work for".
Or you know, he personifies paper millions everyone thought they had in the bank
People love a good cult of personality, don't they
Billionaire-jesus and his followers, reborn every 10 years.
When did this start, actually? the first I can really think of is Jobs (at least in the billionaire category); treatment of Hubbard had a lot of the same vibes, but not the money.
This is a very interesting read from the New Thought original sources: Prentice Mulford’s Your Forces and How to Use Them.
https://archive.org/details/yourforceshowtou02mulfiala/yourf...
It's the vibe in almost all of the big silicon valley companies and probably most of the smaller ones too. Founder worship etc. Just silicon valley culture I assume. I guess it takes a certain mindset to dedicate the prime of your years to making someone else incredibly rich.
Billionaire dalai lama.
Another person familiar with Altman’s thinking said he was willing to meet with the board’s shortlist of proposed candidates, except for one person whom he declined on ethical grounds.
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?
Henry Kissinger is 100 years old
It's a joke. The explanation is that who would have to have worse morals and ethics than Altman for Altman to dismiss considering them on those grounds.
Can’t imagine Kissinger is a popular choice for boards today…
Henry Kissinger?
I think his stock as potential boardmember probably went down with his service on the Theranos board.
Assuming he's as manipulative as the worst reports of him say, "ethical grounds" translates to "doesn't believe my lies"
It is hard to see through the unfolding drama. Since I am lacking data (and we all do), I can only fall back to my intuition. When I was listening to Sam being interviewed by Lex, I had to turn the podcast off because I felt I am listening to a deeply flawed and manipulative character. He left a creepy feeling of "Never ever trust this guy".
Depends on who you are, I guess? He's optimising for business growth and opportunity, I bet VCs and Moloch have him on on their Christmas card lists.
Billions of dollars can paper over some very serious personality traits.
Yeah, Lex gives me those vibes too.
It’s likely that that will eventually be his downfall.
It's something I have to remind myself frequently: leadership got where they are by surviving the cutthroat backstabbing executive gauntlet. I also have to trust my gut when it sends me warning signals about someone, and I get that a lot from "celebrity" CEOs.
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.
Now that he’s back with MSOAI I think we’ve got AGI disaster in 7 years. Thin possibility of good path for humanity. I wish he’d stuck to his guns and gone his own way, no MS, and no OAI. No disrespect to MS, they good, but this path is bad.
If you want to be a doomer, you don't need agi, just autonomous weapons, which ML can definitely help build.
You don’t even need ML for that plus it already exists, Soviets had Dead Hand decades ago, an autonomous weapon system capable of ending the world.
It sounds like he did stick to his guns though right? He still gets to do whatever he wants with the people he picked.
We don't need AGI for an AI disaster. Enough humans using AI-based tools to drive important decisions (read: outsourcing thinking) will stand in place of the "G" just fine.
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.
Kind of interesting that Jessica Livingston (Paul Graham's spouse) tweeted this a couple of days ago:
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...
To be a fly on the wall when Paul and Jessica talk about Sam in private. So many interesting questions never to be answered.
(no other reason than to understand how all the puzzle pieces come together)
On one side Paul calls it AIgiarism and she's throwing donations at it.
Maybe we should all hedge our bets when it comes to our AGI overlords.
YC is invested in OpenAI. Wonder if they want a win-at-all-costs type person (if we go along with this premise) running a company they’re invested in, yet not want him running their company.
From Garry Tan ~2 Months ago: https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1702561008190165448
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
I would like to message jorater warning him about drawing conclusions from a subtweet when there's deviousness afoot, but hacker news doesn't have that feature.
Of course, what is wisdom but accumulated subtweets from your own useraccount.
Sensationalist clickbait title. There's nothing in the article that supports the claim that Altman has been "fired".
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.
nothing in the article that supports the claim that Altman has been "fired".
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.
Isn’t that what PG does? Isn’t that what YC does?
Why was Sam fired from Y Combinator? Why was he fired from OpenAI?
Not saying he's good or trustworthy, but it's unfair to speak badly about him without evidence or even examples of wrongdoing.
Isn't being fired implicit evidence of wrongdoing? Especially when it's not an isolated incident.
It might just mean your skills weren't appropriate for the role you were hired for. It doesn't mean you did anything wrong.
It seems that there are a lot of people who are loyal to Sam because they are scared of crossing him. If this is really the pattern here, then this is probably not the timeline we want to be on.
I'm following the whole story to see if there's a sociopath involved.
Probably most of them.
The fight over OpenAI's leadership is more like celebrity gossip than anything else. The most salient takeaway is that closed-source proprietary LLMs are a bad idea and that everyone with any long-term interest in the subject should switch over to the open-source model.
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).
The most salient takeaway is that closed-source proprietary LLMs are a bad idea and that everyone with any long-term interest in the subject should switch over to the open-source model.
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.
I am not sure but Sam Altman is probably the next Steve Jobs. One of the greatest CEO of our generation.
It seems to me like the PR machine is doing its job pretty well.
Even if Graham supposedly booted Altman from Y Combinator, I don't see any reason to assume that a similar disagreement would have occurred in this case. Citing that history also seems to assume that Graham himself is an impeccable judge of character. And we don't necessarily have any reason to believe that. Seems to me like they're swinging at windmills with this narrative.
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.
And speaking of Graham's judgement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384490
Of course it was flagged within a few minutes.
Hit piece by wapo.
AWS you say.
If this is true, interesting, as PG was several times profits over ethics (e.G. see the AirBnB discussion on HN he participated in).
It is somewhat different. AirBnB founder Nathan Blecharczyk was not shopping around, but rather at some point he was the largest spammer in USA, where even FBI was interested in his dealings. Interestingly, the 3 articles I was able to find on this subject some 5 years ago (and posted to HN at some point) from major news outlets, are all gone now.
I think hurting your own business versus being a scumbag scammer will get you much different treatment, even from PG.
At least one of the arguments against him, that he cared too much about openai to lead Microsoft effectively, probably helps him more than it hurts. Otherwise, idk how much of this was really about Sam altman as much as it was a staggeringly incompetent board that drove employees and investors to unify and protest en masse to save the organisation from itself. I guess there's a chance there's an AGI in the basement but if it was actually about safety they should fucking say what the hell they were freaking out about. But if they leave the only logical conclusion as this being a power struggle between someone who wants to move fast and make bank and a board that wants to kill the company for ego reasons - uhh yeah that's not a hard choice
"Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."
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.
Possible psychopath: https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/psychopathcode/content/preface....
the more outwardly successful someone is by modern standards (ceo, celebrities, other powerful people) the more likely it is they are ethically compromised in some way
you don't reach the top without screwing over a lot of people along the way
A reminder that the "e" in "e/acc" does not stand for "ethical"
Very interesting if this is true, considering how pg has shown huge support for sama during this drama!
The double-dipping charge doesn't seem particularly real — even pg still to this day personally invests in YC companies while they're in YC, even before Demo Day (e.g. Phind). I very much doubt he fired Sam for doing it too. It reads to me like Sam was focusing more on OpenAI (the "absenteeism" that the article mentions was primarily due "to his intense focus on OpenAI") and pg told him he couldn't do both.
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.
Somebody page Kanye to say something stupid so we can flush SA out of the news cycle already. Elon's just not up to par these days.
Though full reasoning for Altman’s initial firing is still unclear, one person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, 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.
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.
Like many hotshot young entrepreneurs, it is possible Sam learnt a lot from the firing and has done a 180 to go on to supporting others (seen by his support from OpenAI rank-and-file). He probably needed that life lesson (getting fired) to grow.
Perhaps the least interesting most talked-about person of 2023.
Graham did not respond to a request for comment.
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.
Red pill: Most very successful people are like this.
Will this tempest in a teapot never end?
It seems like many of Sam's sins are basically securities professionals know as Selling Away.
He may turn from powerful and well liked startup poster-child to simply powerful (like Larry Ellison, Bezos, Gates and countless other CEOs have in the past).
My read not knowing PG and only having dealt with Sam once is that the firing was to push Sam into AI which he already was involved with before the firing...a GaryVee mercy firing to be sure...
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.
Wasn't really following the subject, but amazed at how tendentious the writing here is. Starting with the title, unsubstantiated claims, really weird turns of phrase, etc. Here's an example:
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.
Shortly after it happened the rumor in SF was that Altman was distracted and not really dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Like they had a cash flow issue where they had to ask for a top up from investors which was a bit embarrassing. Anyway, just a rumor.
ive been working for a company for 3 years and i had great behavior, respected the people around me, they hired me from the consultant company because they liked me so much they wanted to take me because i had already done so much for that company that usually employees don't take the initiative to do (performance fixes nobody asked or tickets for performance that were abandoned because the developer just got bored of it, then being congratulated for fixing the performance, making new projects inside the company and them realizing my new potentials and making new tools and services etc.)
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.
I think everyone is missing the point. Sam Altman seems to be a reasonably effective leader (and certainly flawed and a bit sociopathic), but ultimately unimportant and replaceable. This was not about Sam, this was about the strategic direction of a critical Microsoft partner. Microsoft felt Sam would take orders and therefore supported him. If Sam ever asserts himself, he will be gone, just like the board was replaced.
How dare you question the savior of humanity.
“Ninety plus percent of the employees of OpenAI are saying they would be willing to move to Microsoft because they feel Sam’s been mistreated by a rogue board of directors,” said Ron Conway (...) “I’ve never seen this kind of loyalty anywhere.”
95% is the kind of score one sees when there's an "election" in a dictatorship. Unanimity is often suspect.
Is this actually true?
Did Paul Graham fire Sam Altman?
Is there factual information about this - has pg said anything?
Sam is a leader. Let there be no doubt. Does he have foibles? I’m sure. I do. Everybody has people out there who will proffer criticism of them, especially those at the top of the pyramid. Our summer at YC was heavily influenced by him; he always had time for us, and always thought hard about our problems.
I am no behaviorist expert, but for me, someone who in world of trouble can post tweets as relaxing as Sam's, and do smile poses comes of as extremely manipulative.
Must say that a spirited defense from Keith Rabois is not the best way to dispel rumors you’re a predatory sociopath.
Sounds like Sam Altman is a sociopath.
I for one am just totally shocked that a silicon valley executive would exhibit some sociopathic behaviors.
""Ninety plus percent of the employees of OpenAI are saying they would be willing to move to Microsoft because they feel Sam's been mistreated by a rogue board of directors," said Ron Conway, a prominent venture capitalist who became friendly with Altman shortly after he founded Loopt, a location-based social networking start-up, in 2005. "I've never seen this kind of loyalty anywhere.""
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.
I've had the 'chance' to work with some deeply manipulative persons in the past, the kind who goes to your desk and say 'Hey, I noticed you started to speak to X again, and your performance seems to suffer as a result", where X is a friendly colleague that opposed some plan of that person. It is incredibly difficult to keep those people in check as all that behaviour is off the record and impossible to prove. When people complain it's a 'you said, he said' situation where the manipulator inevitably wins. Wether those persons are positive or negative for the company is not all that clear, but they create an incredibly unpleasant work environment.