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

> just their usual marketing

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

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

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

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

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

I have the same feelings

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

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

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

Two words: Delusion and overconfidence.

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

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

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

If only that sentiment was reciprocal!

When the job losses hit in earnest and the vague handwaving about making it right all inevitably turns out to be hollow, those on top will be exceedingly comfortable using violence to keep the underclass in line. It has happened before and it will happen again.

Sam eagerly pursued DoD contracts to weaponize AI. And then lobbied for legislation to ensure OpenAI cannot be held accountable if people are killed due to their systems.

> OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots.

It was only a matter of time. The font on the dollar sign kept increasing, eventually selfish humans will always crack. Keeping it open had to be instilled with it becoming a public utility. Private companies don't do altruistic things unless they benefit.

> Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.

We should call it what it really is: oligapolization of intellectual work. The capital barrier to enter this market is too high and there can be no credible open source option to prevent a handful of companies from controlling a monster share of intellectual work in the short and medium term. Yet our profession just keeps rushing head first into this one-way door.

The thing about the rich is that they have access to sufficient levels of abstraction that they can commit terrible, disproportionate violence without it looking that way. And then fools who crave the simplistic safe comfort of moral absolutes come to their aid.

Throwing a petrol bomb at a building with children inside is about as evil as murdering 150 students at an all-girls school. I'm obviously not defending that.

I didn't think Hacker News needed an explicit "calls for violence are bad" guideline but the comments here have shown otherwise.

>> It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever. We have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model

The question is what are they doing about "getting safety right" and are they doing enough. To me it seems like all the focus is on hyper growth, maximum adaptation and safety is just afterthought. I understand its competitive market, and everyone is doing it, but its just hollow words. Industries that cares about safety often tend to slow down.

Agreed. Sam's full of crap and the way we tackle that is with conversations, not violence. He deserves to grow old like anyone else, violence isn't an answer.

Like this, for sure not. And Sam has not, even with that article, done anything to warrant violence.

Is it okay to profit off of a machine that kills innocent people? Would it be immoral to attack the builder of that machine, if it stopped the operation of the machine?

> It's never OK to physically attack someone like this.

I broadly agree. But… there are some who have lived who made the world a worse place. Who gets to decide? Trump has done a bit of this Sort of deciding and it hasn’t gone great so far and there is no sign that it’s actually helped.

He's saying that just so he can use if another company gets bigger than OpenAI ("you can't have all the power"). If OpenAI were the top dog by a large margin, you wouldn't hear him say a peep about this (as was demonstrated by his actions with the charter).

"Like this" is doing some serious work in that statement!

If Sam disperses his power, we can believe him. So long as he's just concentrating wealth and power, he's just another tech bro.

I've never understood this specific taboo against physical violence. Firing a thousand people or stealing their wages, ruining their life and their families', passing unjust laws that threaten the well-being and happiness of a million, that's ok! A punch in the nose, that's not ok!

There are far worse things than physical violence against one person, and with the end of the rule of law there isn't any other recourse. The one value that is common across all cultures is that the wicked must be punished for their wickedness; expect to see violence against oligarchs and CEOs spread like fire.

If we are going to say violence isn’t okay then it is important that we be clear about the boundaries of what we define as violence.

Theft is a nice analogy here. The default model of theft is property crime but the largest type of theft is wage theft.

If we fret about violence done against individuals but not violence against groups our attention is going to end up steered in a narrow direction.

‘Working towards prosperity for everyone’ was extremely hollow as well. If he believed this, he would be running his company as a cooperative and not as a for-profit company.

Well said, I condemn the violence as well. I had to stop at that point too though, it's so blatantly disingenuous and hypocritical.

Violence is language that needs no translation. Everyone across the world, every culture, every country, every social group - from elites to homeless can converse in it using the same vocabulary.

It is useful to have some degree of mastery in this discipline. Sometimes it is the only language that can deliver the important message to an unwilling listener.

I categorically reject that assertion. Two simple examples: 1) when you see someone assaulting someone else, it's absolutely ok to attack them, and 2) the American revolution!

It's like that old joke:

A man offers a young woman $1,000,000 to sleep with him for one night.

“For a million dollars? Sure, I’ll sleep with you.”

He smiles at her, “How about $50, then?”

“How dare you! I’m not a whore!”

“Look, lady, we’ve already agreed what you are, now we’re just negotiating the price.”

Similarly in this case, you can't make up absolutes and assert the're true, while ignoring that the real world is more complicated. And once you do realize the world is complicated, you realize there aren't absolutes: everyone is a prostitute, terrorist, or whatever other bad label you want to throw at them ... it's just a matter of degree.

So no, it's not always wrong to physically attack someone like this. You can debate specifically whether Altman has committed enough violence himself to justify violence against him: that's something two people can reasonably disagree on. But you can't just say "violence bad" like its some great pearl of wisdom, while ignoring that violence has in fact been good many times throughout history.

That's not true.

As a defense contractor Altman is a legitimate target for a country that the US has attacked like Iran.

The US is engaging in military action against many countries and has threatened to annex or invade allies.

In that context Altman is 100% a legitimate target to those whose sovereignty is threatened and whose people are being killed.

AGI will be democratized when its discovered.... just right after AWS, Microsoft and Oracle finish their 6 month beta test.

Can't say I feel sorry for the guy. Anyone who actually believes his platitudes about "democratizing" AI is far too naive. If he really believed that, he'd make a torrent out of ChatGPT's weights and upload it to the pirate bay.

The fact of the matter is these AI CEOs are actively trying to economically disenfranchise 99% of the human race. The ultimate corollary of capitalism is that people who aren't economically productive need not be kept alive any longer. Unproductive people are nothing but cost, just let them die. A future where the richest classes can turn the underclasses into soylent is now very much within the realm of possibility.

If this doesn't radicalize people into actual violence, I simply have no idea what will. "Attacking someone is wrong" is a completely meaningless statement to make to someone who believes society as we know it today is going to be destroyed. Honestly, I can't even blame them.

> It's never OK to physically attack someone like this. Full stop.

I agree. The French Revolution was really, really mean.

Turns out the article was not in fact incendiary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

unpopular opinion but i think it's written quite well

New England colonists had a habit of ransacking and burning down the houses of government officials throughout the 1760s and during the Revolutionary War. Got bad enough that most did not sleep in their government housing.

Can you explain the petty, self important, trolling manner? Which traits are intrinsically negative?

Genuine Q

Maybe they're about to open source their weights?

This question doesn’t apply to Sam, but since you made a general statement, I’m trying to understand.

When it comes to people who openly incite or directly use violence. why do you think it’s unethical to attack someone like that? If one responsible from directly or indirectly killing hundreds, what’s the ethical argument to not use violence against that person?

Not trolling or anything I’ve been just thinking about this for a while and trying to understand what am I missing in this argument.

Why did I need to scroll halfway down the page before finding a comment that says it was wrong to firebomb his house and nothing else?

I find myself resenting him and his ilk on a daily basis for what they did to the computing space which was once sacred to me with their profiteering. But nothing justifies violence, not even close. Simple as that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I couldn’t find vulnerabilities in Sam’s devices so I contracted a rando over the internet to Molotov his house” sounds fairly implausible :)

So all these things he's saying are going to leave people scared and afraid, on that we agree. What's the disingenuous part here?

Don't get me wrong: others talk of a pattern of dishonesty, or that he's too eager to please*, and I'm willing to trust them on this because I found out with Musk that I don't spot this soon enough.

But what, specifically, do you see? What am I blind to?

* given how ChatGPT is a people-pleaser and has him around, Claude philosophically muses about if its subjective experience is or is not like a humans' and has Amanda Askell, and that Grok is like it is and has Musk, I think the default personalities of these models AI are influenced by their owner's leadership teams

The Epstein regime all seem really manic and probably fearing the French bourgeoisie treatment. They tried to get Luigi on "terrorism" charges

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

Very reasonable response when you take a step back.

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

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

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

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

Yes, very ironic. OpenAI was declared commercial through words and narratives, AI itself is hyped up with words and narratives. His Trump sycophancy are words and narratives. And that is just the start.

It isn't just irony---It's lack of self awareness! (sorry for increasing the pain that Altman et al. inflict on us.)

I wonder if this is the first time in recent history (or ever?) that he has felt this way. Must be nice.

You might as well say it's bad to be human.

What FOBO smells like, is what's happening.

Using an article about a home housing a child being firebombed to platform your irrelevant opinions about the victim is a bad look.

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

> Now what about millions of photos of all the other families possibly affected by him?

His name allegedly isn't even clear on his own! Ongoing lawsuit brought by his sister. (Amended as recently as a week ago and discussed in a flagged submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640048 ).

I think he's just trying to remind people that someone can both be a CEO of a powerful company you might disagree with/hate as well as a real human with a husband and child and that trying to set fire to his house could kill those people.

I personally wouldn't go as far as to say the Farrow article caused this but it seems fair game to respond to an article that had an over the top cover image of an animated Sam Altan picking and choosing faces with a photo reminding people he's human like everyone else.

From someone Molotoving his house? What do you think he should have learned from that?

https://xkcd.com/1053/

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

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

It's like a baby on board bumper sticker. But for your house.

Gross man, get help. Living with your family isn't using them as a sheild.

Yeah it’s like they don’t want their children murdered, crazy

It's sad that loony tunes conspiratorial thinking sounds all the more credible. What a time to be alive.

> The only thing surprising here is how naive you guys are.

Is it really, though? I could have bet money that would be the case. HN crowd is very gullible.