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Sam Altman: Genius Good Guy or Elon-esque Bad Guy?


BeardIP

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Posted (edited)

In the same vein from the Elon thread, I think Sam Altman of Open AI needs to be discussed as he ascends to power and wealth on the backs of something that will be a staple for the next decade(s) a la Elon Musk.

Pros: 

  • Started OpenAI as a public good for mankind, took no equity (made his billions in other YC backed ventures and orgs like Stripe and reddit). 

Cons:

  • Seems to be pivoting away from this and is trying to commercialize AI to such an extent that sustainabile and ethical AI has taken a back seat to go-to-market and valuations (and causing quite a bit of boardroom drama from last November to last week)

 

Edited by BeardIP
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Anyone who tries claim with a straight face there is no possible way they could be expected to license IP to train their AI is either glue sniffing stupid, or straight up bald faced lying. 

You guess which of these two options is the guy who got into Stanford. 

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Just now, Samson's Wig said:

Business leadership has always been filled with a certain percentage of people who tend towards corruption, god complexes, and general neuroticism, but now we've allowed engineers and computer scientists into the executive suite. This was never going to end well. 

Yep.  It always drew a heavier-than-normal slice of sociopaths.  Now, it draws an even higher number, with an added benefit of a higher rate of other psychoses and harmful neurodivergence.  Wonderful.

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Rather than engineers per se. I think it may be a newer breed of "engineer" in what may be best called the "techbro."

In the "software" space or community, since the dotcom era, I have noticed a certain disrespect for various norms in business that is both good and bad.  In the bad "vein," the notions of "disruptiveness" and related airy ideas have created a kind of "I'm so special"-ness that seems to bring some extra pathology to the c-suite and boardroom. 

Probably unrelated to this particular topic is the disrespect for intellectual property (except Altman and others demonstrate it amply).  Questioning the regimes is legit, but the "everything should be free and easy to access" is a dangerous thing, particularly at the hands of tech companies.  Google and their hand-picked commissioner of patents Michelle Lee, did great damage to the US patent system.

As noted on the enshittification thread, a part of it is that these guys can attract VC investment and even public investment without even turning a profit.  But soon enough they have to engage in the worst sorts of end-stage capitalism to turn the buck, leading to enshittification of the product.  There's also some corporate and personal enshittification that seems to come along with it.

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Posted (edited)

Dude is a feral beast like all other techbros. (The successful ones I mean)

Like musk, as a businessman he is cutthroat and cold blooded looking out for his business’s best interests.

The question is will he turn into the same red pill swallowing simpleton that Musk has become. So far no, what happens in the future … ?

Edited by Captain Ron
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It only takes one clip for me to understand this person has no business being as powerful or influential as he is. There needs to be way more pushback on these assholes. 
 

The worst part of AI/tech bros is they are in a field that most people are clueless about, and the instinct is to trust them based on their intellect  and financial success. We must absolutely hold these people in check and question everything before they destroy society.

 

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3 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

I would argue that no one in private companies should be this powerful/influential. That’s not just Altman, but Elon, zuck, etc.  they have all proven they put their own profits over the good of society. And then they all shrug their shoulders, like they aren’t to blame but society for taking part and government for not regulating them. 

I don't want these fuckers engaged in any "altruism."  I just want them to apply a "first, do no harm" approach.  And maybe have a tiny, miniscule amount of a conscience and moral compass.

I am not holding my breath.  Our entire society is in complete free-fall.

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30 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

It only takes one clip for me to understand this person has no business being as powerful or influential as he is. There needs to be way more pushback on these assholes. 
 

The worst part of AI/tech bros is they are in a field that most people are clueless about, and the instinct is to trust them based on their intellect  and financial success. We must absolutely hold these people in check and question everything before they destroy society.

 

"human, in person, fantastic experiences" 

Like zoos, concerts Texas football and hitting on women?  We need to monetize that shit!

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6 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

I just want them to apply a "first, do no harm" approach.  And maybe have a tiny, miniscule amount of a conscience and moral compass.

Google-dont-be-evil1.jpg

 

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I think back to that Senate hearing where all these fucking olds tried to take down Zuckerberg and he just toyed with them. These politicians can barely turn on a computer and are the wrong people to challenge these assholes.

Now with AI, who the fuck is gonna step up and do something about this? Who can successfully challenge the authority of people like Elon, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc.? 

Don't like making generalizations, but the average techbro is probably extremely limited in these areas: social skills, perspective, wisdom, and work/life balance. You absolutely 100% cannot let these people shape our workforce and overall culture.

As parents we will need to work our ass off to make sure our young children grow up with values and healthy social abilities. We're too fucking busy. Who's gonna fucking step up? 

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Business leadership has always been filled with a certain percentage of people who tend towards corruption, god complexes, and general neuroticism, but now we've allowed engineers and computer scientists into the executive suite. This was never going to end well. 
Interesting, I listened to something recently about the issues with Boeing. A theme was how, prior to the acquisition of McDonnel Douglas, Boeing was run by engineers. Afterward, it was run by bean counter MBA types who focused on cost cutting and chasing profits
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37 minutes ago, hornbri said:

I think it is become pretty clear, as smart as he may be. He has no business running a company as big as OpenAI. Between the unforced error with Johansson and this new equity claw back issue, you see the holes the business has. 

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees

I've met Sam a couple of times - he's nice enough in person and his employees generally like him.  He's Silicon Valley to the core, with all the good and bad that comes with that.  Good: Smart, well connected, thinks creatively, is hardworking.  Cons: Has a transactional view of the world, Peter Theil-esque capitalist who enjoys way too much power with way too little oversight.  These problems existed before Sam Altman that our country is still grappling with.  Silicon Valley today is 1980s New York City with jeans and Patagonia vests - would you trust 1980s bankers with civilization changing technology without oversight?

The vested equity thing is a stupid critique and not a big deal.  Yes, it's not common in SV necessarily, but it is outside of SV.  SV employees are special snowflakes that get employee friendly terms that others throughout the country often don't in equity incentives because: (i) the tech "standard" comes from California, which is generally quite employee friendly, (ii) equity is more akin to wages in start-up land because people often take less money to work at these companies in exchange for the upside of equity incentives, and (iii) there are no non-competes in California, so tech companies are always in danger of getting their best talent poached/desired candidates turning them down because they don't like certain provisions of the stock plan.

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11 minutes ago, Keef said:

I've met Sam a couple of times - he's nice enough in person and his employees generally like him.  He's Silicon Valley to the core, with all the good and bad that comes with that.  Good: Smart, well connected, thinks creatively, is hardworking.  Cons: Has a transactional view of the world, Peter Theil-esque capitalist who enjoys way too much power with way too little oversight.  These problems existed before Sam Altman that our country is still grappling with.  Silicon Valley today is 1980s New York City with jeans and Patagonia vests - would you trust 1980s bankers with civilization changing technology without oversight?

The vested equity thing is a stupid critique and not a big deal.  Yes, it's not common in SV necessarily, but it is outside of SV.  SV employees are special snowflakes that get employee friendly terms that others throughout the country often don't in equity incentives because: (i) the tech "standard" comes from California, which is generally quite employee friendly, (ii) equity is more akin to wages in start-up land because people often take less money to work at these companies in exchange for the upside of equity incentives, and (iii) there are no non-competes in California, so tech companies are always in danger of getting their best talent poached/desired candidates turning them down because they don't like certain provisions of the stock plan.

Vested RSU clawback is common? In what world do you live in? Show me which fortune 500 companies have clawback RSU 

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15 minutes ago, immamac said:

Vested RSU clawback is common? In what world do you live in? Show me which fortune 500 companies have clawback RSU 

I take it you've never been a part of a PE backed company or a closely held private company, which almost always have them if they even let you keep your vested equity following termination (most have mandatory repurchase provisions).  Vested equity clawbacks are also very common in public companies (required now, by Dodd Frank, and many are more expansive than that).  Take a look at the "detrimental conduct" language in Bumble's EIP, for example: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1830043/000119312521045254/d106038dex106.htm.  People don't read their docs.

Are they actually enforceable?  Depends on the state and depends on the judge, but a lot of companies have them because they like the scary language to point to so they can coerce separating employees into signing a separation agreement.  And put yourself in the CEO's shoes here.  You have a company where reporters constantly hound your employees wanting them to leak.  You just had a highly public spat with the board.  You are highly desirable as a place to work and you have plenty of cash to pay hefty salaries.  You want people to abide by their confidentiality agreements and the threat of cancelling their options is a great way to do that.  His job is to protect the company and its shareholder value, and I'd bet every dollar in my bank account they signed proprietary information and confidentiality agreements upon starting employment.

Again, I'm not defending Altman.  There are plenty of reasons not to like him and we should focus on those.

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17 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

I don't want these fuckers engaged in any "altruism."  I just want them to apply a "first, do no harm" approach.  And maybe have a tiny, miniscule amount of a conscience and moral compass.

I am not holding my breath.  Our entire society is in complete free-fall.

These companies are run by rich white guys. Most of these guys had money growing up, maybe they didn't all have emerald mines, but they came from affluence and never had to pull themselves up from their boot straps. And because they were white and males they never faced any sort of threats in their lives. They were on the top of the race and patriarchal food chains - they don't know threats. They have never walked down a street and wondered about the people walking behind them. They haven't seen a police car drive by and wonder if they are being profiled.

Asking them to consider the harm they could cause - they don't understand it, because they have a singular view of the world and it's never included any sort of threat or consideration for others.. Why is everything swipe right, swipe left? Because that is how tech bros see dating these days. Their platform cause body issues for teen girls? Shocking these guys never considered that. Etc etc.

It's almost like these people have some sort of benefit or because of the color of their skin and their gender. If only we had some short 3 word phase that could describe it.

1 hour ago, Hank Kingsley said:

I think back to that Senate hearing where all these fucking olds tried to take down Zuckerberg and he just toyed with them. These politicians can barely turn on a computer and are the wrong people to challenge these assholes.

Now with AI, who the fuck is gonna step up and do something about this? Who can successfully challenge the authority of people like Elon, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc.? 

Don't like making generalizations, but the average techbro is probably extremely limited in these areas: social skills, perspective, wisdom, and work/life balance. You absolutely 100% cannot let these people shape our workforce and overall culture.

As parents we will need to work our ass off to make sure our young children grow up with values and healthy social abilities. We're too fucking busy. Who's gonna fucking step up? 

Congress hasn't passed shit not because they don't understand this tech, a lot of the members of congress do. The problem is that they are over run with lobbyist money that kills anything before it has a chance. Klobuchar and Lummis introduced bi-partisan social media legislation back in 2022. It was shut down once lobbyists got to other senators. These companies got rich and quickly formed a lobby to protect their interests.

As far as what you can do to help raise your kids in this environment? Read. Jonathan Haidt's books are a really great resource for this, especially The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation. I also found Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy and to a lesser extent iGen by Jean M. Twenge to be pretty good in this respect too. All of them have the same basic premise - we are over protecting our kids in the real world (not letting them have open play that is important in development) and under protecting them online (letting them go any and everywhere online and with mobile phones), and the results are what we see with kids coming of age today.

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This was written a couple of months ago but I just came upon it: https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/

Yet the world I fear is one where these people are allowed to run rampant, turning unique content into food for an ugly, inbred monster of an internet, one that turns everybody's information sources into semi-personalized versions of the same content. These people have names — Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which has its own model called LLaMA), Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft — and they are responsible for trying to standardize the internet and turn it into a series of toll roads that all lead to the same place.

And they will gladly misinform and disadvantage billions of people to do so. Their future is one that is less colorful, less exciting, one that caters to the entitled and suppresses the creative. Those who rely on generative AI to create are not creators any more than a person that commissions a portrait is an artist. Altman and his ilk believe they're the new Leonardo Da Vincis, but they're little more than petty kings and rent-seekers trying to steal the world's magic.

They can, however, be fought. Don't buy their lies. Generative AI might be steeped in the language of high fantasy, but it’s a tool, one that they will not admit is a terribly-flawed and unprofitable way to feed the growth-at-all-costs tech engine. Question everything they say. Don't accept that AI "might one day" be great.  Demand that it is today, and reject anything less than perfection from men that make billions of dollars shipping you half-finished shit. Reject their marketing speak and empty fantasizing and interrogate the tools put in front of you, and be a thorn in their side when they try to tell you that mediocrity is the future.

You are not stupid. You are not "missing anything.” These tools are not magic — they're fantastical versions of autocomplete that can't help but make the same mistakes it's learned from the petabytes of information it's stolen from others.

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Recommending Jonathan Haidt books as an antidote to the world sold to us by techbros is a, uh, interesting choice. That'd be like recommending Jordan Peterson a few years ago for the same thing.   

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20 hours ago, Samson's Wig said:

Business leadership has always been filled with a certain percentage of people who tend towards corruption, god complexes, and general neuroticism, but now we've allowed engineers and computer scientists into the executive suite. This was never going to end well. 

That's a load of crap, it has nothing to do with educational background or job function. Silicon Valley has been driving innovation since the 1940's and the vast majority of those companies were led by engineers. The Bill Hewlitt's and David Packard's of the world that launched Silicon Valley would be disgusted by the Elon Musk's of today. I think its just more a reflection of what is valued in our society today. Our currency should replace "In god we trust" with "fuck you, imma get mine*"

* dont forget to smash that like button and subscribe to my daily bullshit

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21 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  It always drew a heavier-than-normal slice of sociopaths.  Now, it draws an even higher number, with an added benefit of a higher rate of other psychoses and harmful neurodivergence.  Wonderful.

They are cut from the same cloth as Vivek Ramaswamy. They genuinely don't know and don't care how completely insufferable they are.

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3 hours ago, Hank Kingsley said:

I think back to that Senate hearing where all these fucking olds tried to take down Zuckerberg and he just toyed with them. These politicians can barely turn on a computer and are the wrong people to challenge these assholes.

Now with AI, who the fuck is gonna step up and do something about this? Who can successfully challenge the authority of people like Elon, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc.? 

If you want to challenge those three, ask them where the clit on a woman is.

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2 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

Recommending Jonathan Haidt books as an antidote to the world sold to us by techbros is a, uh, interesting choice. That'd be like recommending Jordan Peterson a few years ago for the same thing.   

Elaborate? Both of his books I recommended talk specifically about the negative affect of social media on kids and offer solutions to parents how to counteract or avoid these effects. Jordan Peterson has always been a misogynistic asshole.

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Like Peterson's books, Haidt's books offer a decent amount of (extremely obvious) good advice and "common sense" arguments with a veneer of intellectualism. But he rarely supports his arguments with actual data, where he does he often portrays the data selectively and dishonestly, and it's all part of an attempt to appeal to a conservative audience by offering arguments in support of the status quo.  This isn't a commentary on some of his arguments about the harm of safetyism or social media.  But the substantive parallels to Jordan Peterson (or at least the Jordan Peterson that existed before he seriously damaged his brain and destroyed any filter between his thoughts and his public speech) are pretty clear once you know the pattern.  Be wary of intellectuals who get rich selling appealing ideas.  

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1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

Raised $230m, value themselves between $750m and $1b, and produced...

  Reveal hidden contents

image.gif.4d59766c466eac01336b861f52034ccf.gif

 

There's a lot on the line regarding whether or not this company makes it. All those dildos walking around all day with earbuds in talking obnoxiously loud could really use this to accessorize their look and finally attain certified self-important douchebag status. 

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8 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Like Peterson's books, Haidt's books offer a decent amount of (extremely obvious) good advice and "common sense" arguments with a veneer of intellectualism. But he rarely supports his arguments with actual data, where he does he often portrays the data selectively and dishonestly, and it's all part of an attempt to appeal to a conservative audience by offering arguments in support of the status quo.  This isn't a commentary on some of his arguments about the harm of safetyism or social media.  But the substantive parallels to Jordan Peterson (or at least the Jordan Peterson that existed before he seriously damaged his brain and destroyed any filter between his thoughts and his public speech) are pretty clear once you know the pattern.  Be wary of intellectuals who get rich selling appealing ideas.  

He gets paid by selling books, and loses no money if all his hypotheses turn out to be false.

There's no guru who will ever have all the answers.

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I should add, in this context when I say "conservative" audience I don't just mean like rabid far right people. In this context, that includes centristish and center-right people who are open to more far-right conservative ideas if they're presented in the right frame. E.g., Haidt isn't saying black people are stupid, he's arguing that liberal college students are morally in the wrong when they protest Charles Murray because of his "scientific" speech. That Charles Murray's pseudoscientific racism is and should be widely considered an acceptable idea in polite society goes unsaid.

And more specific to how this ties back to the topic of this thread, none of these conservative-ish "thinkers" who sell their status quo reinforcing message to their audience will ever encourage any substantive changes to how our modern society functions or is structured. They make their fortunes telling you why trying to do something that might limit Sam Altman's wealth and power is bad, actually and they're all promoted by guys like Andreesen, Musk, and Altman.

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Posted (edited)
23 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Rather than engineers per se. I think it may be a newer breed of "engineer" in what may be best called the "techbro."

In the "software" space or community, since the dotcom era, I have noticed a certain disrespect for various norms in business that is both good and bad.  In the bad "vein," the notions of "disruptiveness" and related airy ideas have created a kind of "I'm so special"-ness that seems to bring some extra pathology to the c-suite and boardroom. 

Probably unrelated to this particular topic is the disrespect for intellectual property (except Altman and others demonstrate it amply).  Questioning the regimes is legit, but the "everything should be free and easy to access" is a dangerous thing, particularly at the hands of tech companies.  Google and their hand-picked commissioner of patents Michelle Lee, did great damage to the US patent system.

As noted on the enshittification thread, a part of it is that these guys can attract VC investment and even public investment without even turning a profit.  But soon enough they have to engage in the worst sorts of end-stage capitalism to turn the buck, leading to enshittification of the product.  There's also some corporate and personal enshittification that seems to come along with it.

Agree completely that "techbro" is the better name for the type of person we're discussing.  Also agree completely regarding intellectual property. Patents and Copyrights were put into the Constitution for a fucking reason, and that reason is still important.

Edited by Samson's Wig
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21 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

In part.

But "we the people" have fucked ourselves.  Because we are super-stupid.

You’re not wrong but you have GOT to snap out of the multiple year Eeyore Funk you’re in, you Berating Bald Bombastic Blowhard Bolivian. 

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1 minute ago, Rex Kramer said:

You’re not wrong but you have GOT to snap out of the multiple year Eeyore Funk you’re in, you Berating Bald Bombastic Blowhard Bolivian. 

As soon as I get a compelling reason to conclude that we're not on a shitboat captained by shitheels heading to Shittown floating on a river of liquid shit, I'll be HAPPY to do so.

So far....not seeing any such reason.  In fact, the river of shit just keeps rising.

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