Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a]

This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world.

OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]

Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude, because they think it's a better product.[c]

Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position similar?

---

[a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...

[b] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-sh...

[c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

Hi Ronan, thanks for the article and for answering questions.

My question is, how do you know when an enormous project like this, conducted over an 18-month time span is "done"? I assume you get a lot of leeway from editors and publishers on this matter. How do you make the decision to finally pull the trigger on publishing?

The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated?

Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It was founded by the parents of the psychologist who coined DARVO, directly in reaction to her accusing them of abuse.

Dissociation is real (I have a dissociative disorder, and abuse I “recovered” but did not remember for much of my adolescence and early adulthood has been corroborated by third parties) and many CSA survivors have severe memory problems that often don’t come to a head until adulthood. I know you didn’t dismiss her claim, but the way the public tends to think about recovered memories is shaped primarily by that awful organization.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him.

All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around the Pentagon's decisions, not Anthropic's. And nobody seems interested in examining whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one. That seems like a story worth writing.

I had a question about reporting conventions. In the paragraph where Altman is said to have told Murati that his allies were "going all out" to damage her reputation, the claim is attributed to "someone with knowledge of the conversation" but the attribution is tucked inconspicuously into the middle of the sentence (rather than say leading upfront ("According to someone with knowledge of the conversation, Altman...")) and Altman's non-recollection appears only parenthetically.

As a reader, am I supposed to infer anything about evidentiary weight from these stylistic choices? When a single anonymous source's testimony is presented in a "declarative" narrative style like here (with the attribution in a less prominent position), should we read that as reflecting high confidence on your end (perhaps from additional corroboration not fully spelled out)? And does the fact that Altman’s non-recollection appears in parentheses carry any epistemic signal (e.g. that you assign it less evidentiary weight)? Or is that mostly a matter of (say) prose rhythm?

Nice biography from Loopt to OpenAI. Why no mention of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency https://x.com/sama/status/1451203161029427208 in this piece? Was there nothing interesting to report in that area?

Ronan Farrow on Hacker News. Now I’ve seen everything.

I just spent a while reading the article. I really appreciate you writing it. In my case, it made me like Sam Altman a lot more. But I was only able to conclude this because of all the evidence you took the time to put together. It paints the picture of someone trying to do something very difficult in a rapidly changing environment and a lot of pressure, but still making the important choices and not shirking them.

Wonderful work and writing, Ronan -- I'm appreciative of your careful balance between objective fact-finding and synthesis.

For me, a big worry about AI is in its potential to further ease distorting or fabricating truth, while simultaneously reducing people's "load-bearing" intellectual skills in assessing what is true or trustworthy or good. You must be in the middle of this storm, given your profession and the investigations like this that you pursue.

Do you see a path through this?

Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and others continue to do journalism like this? (including commenting on HN?)

Just wanted to say what an incredible person you are! Catch and Kill and the related reporting was awesome too!

Hi Ronan, absolutely wild to see you here in the belly of the beast.

I have not read the article yet, because I get the physical magazine and look forward to reading it analog. I therefore only have an inconsequential question.

I love the New Yorker’s house style and editorial “voice,” and I have always been curious about the editing process. I enjoyed the recent exhibit at the NYPL, which had some marked up drafts with editor feedback and author comments.

Did you find that your editors made significant changes to the voice of the piece, and/or do you find any aspects of their editing process particularly notable or unusual?

Can’t wait to read this one, and hope the HN crowd treats you well.

Great reporting.

Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star behind all this that’s not centered on himself?

Have you considered doing a piece on Aaron Swartz? Timnit Gebru? Michael O. Church?

There's a very minor typo in the article:

> “Investors are, like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”

Should be:

> “Investors are like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”

I know why the cantilevered pool statement is there and why you mentioned it.

I’m sure you don’t know half of the totally fucked up things Sam did to get “revenge” for the slight of a leaking pool.

what model was used to create the visual at the top of the article?

Dang, can you substantiate that this is actually Mr. Farrow like he claims?

Or Mr Farrow can you post some evidence somewhere we can see?

This is brilliant work, guys. Did you get any pressure to soften or spike the story?

Hard hitting journalism here. Is the person who lied for years to promote himself trustworthy? More news at 11!

Stop pretending you aren’t Woody’s son. The contact lens are beyond cringe.

Love the visual. Fantastic.

From time to time I have been accused of being an apologist for Sam Altman, but I have always tried to assess information based upon what it says instead of whether it matches an existing narrative. You list a number of distortions in your article which show the problem. If you are a good person, bad stories about you may be fake. If you are a bad person, bad stories about you may still be fake.

My prima facie view on Altman has been that he presents as sincere. In interviews I have never seen him make a statement that I considered to be a deliberate untruth. I also recognise that people make claims about him go in all directions, and that I am not in a position to evaluate most of those claims. About the only truly agreed upon aspect has been how persuasive he is.

I can definitely see a possibility of people feeling like they have been lied to if they experienced a degree of persuasion that they are unaccustomed to. If you agree to something that you feel like you didn't really feel like you would have, I can see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than accept that they had been intellectually beaten.

In all such cases where an issue is contentious, you should ask yourself, what information would significantly change your views. If nothing could change your view, then it's a matter beyond reason.

I think you will agree that there is no smoking gun in this article, and it is just an outlay of the allegations. Evaluating allegations becomes tricky because I think it becomes a character judgement of those making the claims.

I have not heard a single person in all of this criticise Ilya Sutskever's character. If he were to make a statement to say that this article is an accurate representation of what he has experienced, it would go a long way.

I think Paul Graham should make a statement, The things he has publicly claimed are at odds with what the article says he has privately claimed. I have no opinion if one or the other is true or if they can be reconciled but there seem to be contradictions that need to be addressed.

While I do not have sources to hand (so I will not assert this as true but just claim it is my memory) I recall Sam Altman himself saying that he himself did not think he should have control over our future, and the board was supposed to protect against that, but since the 'blip' it was evident that another mechanism is required. I also recall hearing an interview where Helen Toner suggested that they effectively ambushed Altman because if he had time to respond to allegations he could have provided a reasonable explanation. It did not reflect well on her.

I am a little put off by some of the language used in the article. Things like "Altman conveyed to Mira Murati" followed by "Altman does not recall the exchange" Why use a term such as 'conveyed' which might imply no exchange to recall? If a third party explained what they thought Altman thought. Mira Murati could reasonbly feel like the information has been conveyed while at the same time Altman has no experience of it to recall. Nevertheless it results in an impression of Altman being evasive. If the text contained "Altman told Mira Murati" then no such ambiguity would exist.

"Later, the board was alarmed to learn that its C.E.O. had essentially appointed his own shadow board" Is this still talking about Brockman and Sutskever? I just can't see this as anything other than a claim he took advice from people he trusted. I assume those board members who were alarmed were not the ones he was trusting, because presumably the others didn't need to find out. The people he disagreed with still had votes so any claim of a 'shadow board' with power is nonsense, and if it is a condemnable offence, is the same not true of the alignment of board members who removed him.

Josh Kushner apparently made a veiled threat to Muratti, the claim "Altman claims he was unaware of the call" casts him as evasive by stacking denial upon denial, but without any other indication that was undisclosed in the article, it would have been more surprising if he did know of the call. I also didn't know of the call because I am not those two people.

The claim of sexual abuse says via Karen Hao "Annie suggested that memories of abuse were recovered during flashbacks in adulthood." To leave it at that without some discussion about the scientific opinion on previously unremembered events being recalled during a flashback seems to be journalistically irresponsible.

In depth reporting is great. This is a really tricky topic to cover over the course of 18 months. A year and a half ago OpenAI was ascendant, now it's -at best- stalling and, more likely, trending toward irrelevant.

Do you think the recent conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War, and the apparent bootlicking by OpenAI has fundamentally altered the public perception of OAI? Are they the baddies now in the general public opinion?

I have the feeling that if you write an article in that style, the subject of the story becomes the hero even if you insert a couple of negatives. In the same manner that Michael Corleone becomes the hero of The Godfather.

I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted.

On the positive side, the Kushner ad Abu Dhabi involvements (and threats from Kushner) deserve a wider audience.

My personal opinion is that "who should control AI" is the wrong question. In the current state, it is an IP laundering device and I wonder why publications fall silent on this. For example, the NYT has abandoned their crown witness Suchir Balaji who literally perished for his convictions (murder or not).

Hi Ronan,

I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.

However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in.

I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted you to know.

You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income from me.

Damn, just wanted to say reporters are scary... The amount of detail here is huge. You think of hackers as the ones good at doxing... Nah, its reporters.

Any plans to tackle any of the other folks who might be mentioned in the same sentence as Altman, like Darius Amodei?

As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.

I hope ronan farrow doesn't mind his article being shared like this

Well I'd hope they're transformative, they're using transformers after all. We just need to pay attention to them, that's all they need.

I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.

It's because they're really good at the kind of busywork the average white collar job requires. Most people are out there writing documents and making presentations. Only when you use them for actual complexity does the shortfall become clear.

I'm going to write a silly comment here: For a moment I thought you wrote "... LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that they're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon."

I liked that mental image a lot! (I try to maintain being uncertain whether Deckard was a replicant)

They also prefer some less common spellings. For instance, just noticed “vender” instead of “vendor” in an article this morning.

It isn’t for all repeated vowels; only for when the 2 vowels don’t make a single sound. So “chicken coop” wouldn’t have a dieresis

This was a great article, and absolutely savage in some of its characterizations.

They're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that people working in such influential positions find them appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that lowest common denominator audience.

The people shaping the future have no taste.

I also find that interesting.

And not intending to defend the motives of anyone involved, but I'm hoping we can not worry about literally all jobs being destroyed, and AI companies amassing all the wealth in the world.

Don't we need at least some humans working and earning to buy these AI services? Am I not being imaginative enough? Is it possible for the whole economy to consist just of AI selling services to each other?

I realise that even if AI destroys most jobs, or even just a lot of jobs, and amasses most wealth, or a lot of wealth, it would still be a terrible thing for humans. The word "all" could have just been hyperbole, and it is still a valid point. I just want to know people's thoughts on whether entire replacement is possible.

I don't think they were useful at all. If anything they pulled down YCs up to that point stellar reputation.

He's a liar and untrustworthy. Based on their public statements, that's a big part of why the board fired him.

Of course, (despite the fact that Altman previously publicly stated that it was very important that the board can fire him) he got himself unfired very quickly.

It's because we only really know one economic system but we've known many people

The entire thing is a joy to read, you should really set aside some time to cleanse your palette in this age of LLM prose. I mean just look at this juxtaposition

>Altman continued touting OpenAI’s commitment to safety, especially when potential recruits were within earshot. In late 2022, four computer scientists published a paper motivated in part by concerns about “deceptive alignment,” in which sufficiently advanced models might pretend to behave well during testing and then, once deployed, pursue their own goals.

(plus it finally resolves the mystery of "what Ilya saw" that day)

Also since it wasn't stated clearly

>“the breach” in India. Altman, during many hours of briefing with the board, had neglected to mention that Microsoft had released an early version of ChatGPT in India

That was Sydney if I understand correctly.

This thread set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector.* I turned that off as soon as I saw it.

(* This was predictable from the title, because the question in it was inevitably going to trigger an avalanche of crap replies. Normally we'd change the title to something less baity, and indeed the article is so substantive that it deserves a considerably better one. But I'm not going to change it in this case, since the story has connections to YC - about that see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....)

It's not surprising. I made this comment on HN before, but if you follow him on Twitter, it's pretty remarkable - the CTO of one of the most important technology companies in the world and he has never (that I've seen) posted something with some technical insight, or just anything interesting about technology. It's just boring truisms, cliches, empty statements, etc.

Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth.

The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.

it is disappointing, but is it shocking that people most driven by gaining money/power are the ones the most successful at achieving it?

Sociopaths don't have much going for them in life other than winning status games.

> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning'

If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".

If all they do is "just" brute-force problem solving, then they are already bound to take over R&D & other knowledge work and exponentially accelerate progress, i.e. the SciFi "singularity" BS ends up happening all the same. Whether we classify them as true reasoning is just semantics.

Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.

Yeah and everything is just atoms. If you reduce anything enough it’s not real.

calculator is superhumanly intelligent

Even if your motivation is some utopian vision of the future, you should not be trusted. Utopia is a thought experiment in a philosophy of living taken too far, not something to be reached for earnestly.

lol thats like 99% of planet earth, including the animals

> there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any lies if the lies are in service of something they themselves agree with.

Or if the person lying is in a position of power?

It's the golden rule of news article headlines: if the headline is a question, the answer to it is always a negative.

And if you think you don't have to ask if someone can be trusted, you're usually wrong.

It off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. I've turned that off now - this is obviously a serious article.

HN generally downvotes and/or flags anything that paints ycombinator in a bad light. As Altman was president of yc from 2014 to 2019 that could be why this is getting downvoted.

Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.

Life would be so much easier if I was that forgetful

In American English, "insure" can also mean "to make sure" as in "ensure", in additional to meaning "to take out insurance for".

The New Yorker prefers insure to ensure. They have a unique house style. I commented on another thread about alternative spellings like vender instead of vendor, too.

Dictation likely and not caught by editing.

But nobody is going to just gift him the same valuation on the next company. It's not like his execution is OpenAI's moat right now. So where would he be going that's a better deal for him?

IMHO, nobody is remotely worth $1B, period.

The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows that the system is flawed.

The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is very flawed.

We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their money.

And OpenAI's influence is hugely exaggerated compared to, say, Google.

Can you give more details?

It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.

What's the point of living in an advanced society if you just sit around watching it decay around you? Our ancestors fought for our indifference today, and with attitudes like yours we'll watch our children fight for it again tomorrow.

Your point is that it's ok he's untrustworthy because lots of people in power are?

The answer is no, he can't be trusted

I think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Nevertheless, the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altman recalls the exchange differently/does not remember.

I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have a good definition for.

We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they're in that third category we haven't named, where they're very good at manipulating people, but also can feel conscience, guilt, remorse, etc, perhaps just muted or easier to justify against.

E.g. if you think you're doing something for the betterment of mankind, it doesn't really matter if you lie to some board members some year during the multi-decade pursuit.

I was with you right up until the final paragraph, but this made me do a double take:

> OpenAI is too important to trust sama with.

...wat? They made a chat bot. How can that possibly be so existentially important? The concept of "importance" (and its cousin "danger") has no place in the realistic assessment of what OpenAI has accomplished. They haven't built anything dangerous, there is no "AI safety" problem, and nothing they've done so far is truly "important". They have built a chat bot which can do some neat tricks. Remains to be seen whether they'll improve it enough to stay solvent.

The whole "super serious what-ifs" game is just marketing.

Uncrappified link: <https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...>

It set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now.

I only saw this thread by chance and almost didn't look, because the title made the piece sound like a flamebait blog post. Fortunately I saw newyorker.com beside the title and looked more closely.

There is dwindling space for sincere independent accountability reporting on big tech like this to a) be created, since it's incredibly resource-intensive and so many resources flow from Silicon Valley, and b) actually reach people, since more platforms are now owned or otherwise influenced by interested parties.

Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting in your communities, and subscribe to investigative outlets when you can.

In this case, "Ick, no!"

Well I just canceled my Claude Pro subscription because of the mysterious limits that I don't experience with codex, even after paying for "extra usage". If Anthropic can't figure out their capacity problems they are in trouble.

how is gemini winning in general llm. what is general llm .

>>and Gemini in general LLM?

You might be. Or at least I feel like Gemini is actually dumber than a house of bricks - I have multiple examples, just from last week, where following its advice would have lead to damage to equipment and could have hurt someone. That's just trying to work on an electronics project and askin Gemini for advice based on pictures and schematics - it just confidently states stuff that is 100000% bullshit, and I'm so glad that I have at least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would have easily hurt myself.

It's somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me every week, but it just doesn't follow instructions and keeps repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now, like it's some kind of giant joke that all these companies are playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that don't seem that intelligent.

I also use claude at work, and for C++ programming it behaves like someone who read a C++ book once and knows all the keywords, but has never actually written anything in C++ - the code it produces is barely usable, and only in very very small portions.

Edit: I just remembered another one that made me incredibly angry. I've been reading the Neuromancer on and off, and I got back into it, but to remind myself of the plot I asked Gemini to summarise the plot only up to chapter 14, and I specifically included the instruction that it should double check it's not spoiling anything from the rest of the book. Lo and behold, it just printed out the summary of the ending and how the characters actions up to chapter 14 relate to it. And that was in the "Pro" setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real life person did that I'd stop being friends with them, but somehow I'm paying money for this. Maybe I'm the clown here.

This is above your comment: https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.c...

People do vary even if none are perfect. Demis Hassabis has a pretty good reputation amongst the AI leaders. Altman seems unusually shifty.

Please don't leave us hanging; what makes you immune?

And they both peddle the same altruism smokescreen. Sociopath leader playbook.

Yeah, some people can more than others.

What might feel like "damage control" is more likely to be the outcome of the even-handedness you get with serious, rigorous reporting. Something the New Yorker is known for.

Some people have far, far more power over our lives than others. More than they deserve, frankly.

Yeah, but one person can fuck a lot of shit up.

The brighter the picture, the darker the negative

just like Zuck.

Annie Altman is more credible than a serial scammer

OpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.

makes sense if you think the point of journalism is just to take everyone down a notch instead of... um... informing the public of bad actors

"the local drug-dealing pimp is so passe, we need to investigate the most upstanding members of the community just to be sure" is a frankly insane strategy