The brighter the picture, the darker the negative

Archive link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2026.04.06-100412&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2026&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2026.04.06-100412&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.c...</a>

The piece is an interrogation of this very question, at great length and with some nuance. I think what it does most usefully is scrutinize an array of different answers to the question.My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he is identifying something of a true north star when he frames this around &quot;winning.&quot; There are people in the story who talk about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opposed to, say, wealth). I think he probably also believes, to some extent, the story he tells that equates winning, and his gaining power, with a superabundant utopian future for all.However, I think critics correctly highlight a tension between his statements about centering humanity writ large and his tilt into relentless accelerationism.

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?

He’s replying on this twitter thread - perhaps someone with an account can ask there and link his comment here?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;RonanFarrow&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041127882429206532#m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;RonanFarrow&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041127882429206532#m</a>

&gt; You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you areUnfortunately it probably doesn&#x27;t even matter here on HN considering how brigaded down this story is predictably getting.But yeah, it was a fantastic piece.

Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response.The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic&#x27;s relative position. We of course mention the allegations of &quot;circular deals&quot; and concerns about partners taking on debt.

Many of us prefer OpenAI&#x27;s Codex, because we think it&#x27;s a better product.No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI&#x2F;UX and conversation. It&#x27;s better at quality code.

It&#x27;s worth noting Codex has 2x more stories than Claude <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=codex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=codex</a>

Yeah we moved to Claude a few months ago, mostly because the devs kept using it anyway. Altman stuff is interesting but at the end of the day you just go with whatever tool works

Personally, I prefer Claude for coding, but I still prefer ChatGPT for hashing out ideas for my projects (which tend to be game designs). So I use both.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s a better product.[c]Is your understanding of OpenAI&#x27;s current competitive position similar?---[a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_knows_you&#x27;re_a_dog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...</a>[b] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;story&#x2F;2026-04-01&#x2F;openais-shocking-fall-from-grace-as-investors-race-to-anthropic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;story&#x2F;2026-04-01&#x2F;openais-sh...</a>[c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastYear&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=openai&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastYear&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=tru...</a> to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastYear&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=chatgpt&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastYear&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=tru...</a>

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&#x27;s -at best- stalling and, more likely, trending toward irrelevant.

All fair points on trauma and memory.As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman&#x27;s partners and what we found and didn&#x27;t is as described.

That&#x27;s not a fair assessment.
&quot;False memory syndrome&quot; and &quot;repressed&#x2F;recovered memory&quot; are both outside scientific mainstream consensus.

I am very sympathetic to the situation you describe. I certainly think it is possible that Annie is describing something that happened. I think the author did a fair job of representing the allegations, finding the right balance between disclosing that they were unable to corroborate the allegations without dismissing them.That said, &quot;recovering&quot; memories as a therapy does not pass any sort of sniff test and it doesn&#x27;t take a concerted effort to discredit the concept. Human memory is very malleable. Patients with mental health issues (which could predate abuse, or could be caused by abuse) are often in search of answers and that makes them very vulnerable.Could a memory be buried deep in our subconscious, forgotten, only to return to the surface later? Sure, we all forget things and then remember them when triggered by something, whether that&#x27;s a smell or sound or something else entirely. But can we engineer that process, with any degree of reliability? How can we even begin to reliably reverse engineer the triggers?I think it is also important to keep in mind that Annie is rich, and the health care available to rich people can be very predatory. There are endless examples of nonsense therapies for all types of health, from ear seeds to treatments for &quot;chronic Lyme&quot;.Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world apart from &quot;recovered&quot; memories, we shouldn&#x27;t conflate them. If Annie&#x27;s memories were triggered in adulthood, sure, that&#x27;s really no different than remembering something... but &quot;recovered&quot;? That is something else entirely.Correct me where I&#x27;m wrong, I&#x27;d like to learn your perspective, maybe there&#x27;s a missing piece.

False memories are much, much more common than actual recovered memories, unfortunately. OCD is a really common cause of it. People think of OCD as a physical thing, but for many people it presents as emotional rumination and can lead to false memories.

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.

I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.

Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it&#x27;s free.

You could buy a physical copy (and this isn&#x27;t meant to sound sarcastic).

You can walk down to a bookstore or anywhere that sells magazines and buy a physical copy

The public library [digital edition] is absolutely the correct answer. I maintain a library card at 3 different local municipal library systems. My local city&#x27;s library offers access to several Digital Library apps, including Overdrive, Hoopla, and Libby.
It took me a couple searches in Libby to locate the New Yorker and it offered up the current issue right away. The article is on page 32. It is ridiculous that anyone considers to access this from &quot;The Public Internet&quot; or the newyorker dot com website, rather than simply turning to your public library, which has been the go-to resource for basically everyone, for hundreds of years.You&#x27;re already paying for your library with your tax dollars. If you don&#x27;t use it, you may lose it, but you will certainly lose out by subsidizing bums, vagrants, and other families who use the library to their heart&#x27;s content.The public library also features lots of streaming and CD music, videos, and video games, that you can freely check out without any cost. In fact, my local library staff told me that they&#x27;ve abolished overdue fees. Libby and the digital apps will automatically renew or return materials. My physical books even got auto-renewed three times before I needed to manually do it, or bring them back into the building.

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&#x27;t hesitate.However I&#x27;m not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I&#x27;m interested in.I&#x27;m sure you can&#x27;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&#x27;t read it and you won&#x27;t earn income from me.

This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed individuals and companies essentially buying up the discourse.I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to do so.

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

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the piece at all avoids key areas of disillusionment with the technology. Quite the contrary.

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&#x27;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 &quot;who should control AI&quot; 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).

The answer is that there really is no easy answer. It&#x27;s an evolving assessment based on a complex matrix of considerations.You try to reach a critical mass of detailed, rounded understanding of a central question, integrating the most meaningful perspectives, interrogating the weak points and blind spots, and backing up the assertions with documentary evidence or strong sourcing. Eventually, you reach a point where enough sources and materials are reliably triangulating toward the same truths.As you guessed, there&#x27;s external pressures that figure in this analysis—whether competitors are closing in on the same leads; what&#x27;s happening in the broader news cycle that might make a story feel more or less relevant. As you also guessed, I am more fortunate than most writers in the degree to which I get to hold off until something feels fully baked. Mostly, writers simply have to hit a deadline, and resources run out before ambition does. I have deadlines and constraints too, but I get a lot of say in how I organize all of the above.Then there&#x27;s the actual process of creating the story. Writing a densely evidence-based investigative piece is labor-intensive—in this case, weeks of initial drafting, and then much iteration. The fact-checking process at the New Yorker is exhaustive, and can span weeks. Every sentence, assertion, and piece of underlying sourcing get scrubbed by multiple independent pairs of eyes. This story had four fact-checkers working on it for the better part of a two week period, pulling very long hours. This is all brought together in a closing meeting where each sentence is revised and polished in a group.This is all done as additional information comes in—in fact, with these large-scale bodies of reporting, there is very often a snowball effect, where a lot comes in at the end.

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 &quot;done&quot;? 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?

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

I won’t get into behind-the-scenes specifics here but I think you can imagine how pressurized this topic was and the amount of heat that tends to generate. I’m used to getting a lot of blowback and it’s never fun. I just hope the work is meticulous and fair enough, and that enough people see the benefits of that, that I get to continue to do it.

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

I’ve really appreciated how substantive and polite the discourse here is, overall!

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

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?

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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47663895">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47663895</a>

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 so appreciated, thank you! These stories can honestly take a lot out of me so thoughtful reactions mean a lot.

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

Interesting to hear! While this hasn’t been a commonplace reaction, I think if I do my job right it should allow people to read the facts as they will, exactly like this. It’s strenuously designed to be fair and, where appropriate, even generous.

In this industry, truly anything can be rationalized.

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.

I had a question about reporting conventions. In the paragraph where Altman is said to have told Murati that his allies were &quot;going all out&quot; to damage her reputation, the claim is attributed to &quot;someone with knowledge of the conversation&quot; but the attribution is tucked inconspicuously into the middle of the sentence (rather than say leading upfront (&quot;According to someone with knowledge of the conversation, Altman...&quot;)) and Altman&#x27;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&#x27;s testimony is presented in a &quot;declarative&quot; 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?

Normies don&#x27;t know what an &quot;Anthropic&quot; is. They use ChatGPT. Particularly sharp normies might know that ChatGPT is made by OpenAI, and the sharpest might know that Sam Altman is the CEO.Now, they may have heard the word &quot;Anthropic&quot; due to recent media coverage. But they don&#x27;t know what it is and don&#x27;t remember what it makes. The fact that all businesses use &quot;Anthropic&quot; is about as relevant to them as knowing the overseas shipping company for all the shit they buy off Amazon.So articles about OAI will always produce more revenue for the media, because it&#x27;s related to what normies actually use day to day.

For what it’s worth, the story, while focused on OpenAI, is not uncritical of Anthropic. It explores whether there is a wider race to the bottom in terms of safety, and erosion of even some of Anthropic’s commitments.

There may be a reason why Altman is talked about a lot. This article in particular surfaces real information and new perspectives we&#x27;ve not heard in this level of detail before on some pretty significant topics that will be impacting you, me, and pretty much everyone we know not only today but well into the future.You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too and that there are interesting perspectives that we&#x27;ve not heard of on that front either.But just because that&#x27;s true doesn&#x27;t mean this article isn&#x27;t very much relevant and needed.Because it is.

&gt; whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is oneFWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is actually genuine which is practically unicorn rarity in corporate America.We have worked for FAANG so I know where they&#x27;re coming from; this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this question for myself.

OP says they’ve been working on this for 18 months. Most of what you’ve said wasn’t the case until much more recently.

We should stop talking about potential problems or perpetrators, when we have talked about them “enough”?That would be irrational.We should give air time to other problems?I think everyone agrees with that.You have managed to distill a surprisingly pure vintage of false dichotomy, from a near Platonic varietal of whataboutism.

After the US launched its attack on Iran, the ethical AI lab&#x27;s CEO wrote: &quot;Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences.&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthropic.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;where-stand-department-war" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthropic.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;where-stand-department-war</a>

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book (&quot;The Optimist&quot;), 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&#x27;s the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around the Pentagon&#x27;s decisions, not Anthropic&#x27;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&#x27;m not seeing a typo. Just a stylistic difference.

There&#x27;s a very minor typo in the article:&gt; “Investors are, like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”Should be:&gt; “Investors are like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”

Wonderful work and writing, Ronan -- I&#x27;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&#x27;s &quot;load-bearing&quot; 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?

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

Nice biography from Loopt to OpenAI. Why no mention of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;sama&#x2F;status&#x2F;1451203161029427208" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;sama&#x2F;status&#x2F;1451203161029427208</a> in this piece? Was there nothing interesting to report in that area?

It could be titled &quot;Hypergraphia&quot;

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

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&#x2F;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.

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.

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

I have experience in dealing with Sam Altman-like behavior. I hope to explain how their tactics unfold.&gt; I can see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than accept that they had been intellectually beaten.There are two angles to this: from an individual perspective and from a collective one.One&#x27;s interaction with such a manipulator isn&#x27;t a single shot. There is not a single event that they are “beaten”. First, one gets persuaded --- you might argue that there&#x27;s nothing wrong with a skillful persuasion. At some point they realize that the reality is not in line with their expectations. They bring the point up to the manipulator and ask for a change, this time in more concrete terms. The manipulator agrees with the change, negotiates compromises, and the relationship continues. After some time the manipulated party realizes that things are not going in the direction they desire. This time they ask for more concrete terms, without accepting any compromises. The manipulator accepts, yet continues to act against the terms. The manipulated party is now angry and directly confronts the manipulator. The manipulator apologizes and tells that none of it was intentional, and asks for another chance. However, at that point, the manipulator has run out of “politically correct” “persuasion tactics”, and tells blatant lies to make the other party behave.From a collective perspective, even those “politically correct” “persuasion tactics” are discovered to be lies, because what the manipulator told different parties are in direct opposition to each other, i.e., they cannot all be truths.&gt; 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 understand how her behavior may raise a flag for the unsuspecting, but it was exactly the right one. Manipulators prey on the benefit of the doubt. If Toner were to bring Altman&#x27;s behavior into attention of others, no doubt that Altman would manipulate them successfully.It&#x27;s unfortunate that many people are unaware of these tactics and assume the best of intentions, when such assumptions fuel the manipulation that they would better avoid.

Paul Grahams&#x27;s latest public statement on the issue:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041363640499200353" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041363640499200353</a>

&gt; what information would significantly change your viewsQuite simple: show me any single action took by Sam Altman which can not be construed as an attempt to get him more power&#x2F;money&#x2F;influence. You can&#x27;t find it.The difference between what he claims to believe and what he actually does is a textbook example of sociopathy.

Paul made a statement today: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041363640499200353?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041363640499200353?s=20</a>It clarifies he did not fire SamI overall agree with your takeaway, but this is not a criticism of the article itself.

&gt; My prima facie view on Altman has been that he presents as sincere.That is how pathological liars present.

I think sometimes you have to look at the patterns rather than at the single claim. If a large amount of people, that are completely unrelated, tell you very similar experiences they had with Altman, you can take that as a good indicator of his general character.And if this tendency to misunderstand&#x2F;be misunderstood always results it Altman gaining more power, even if we give him the reason of the doubt and say that doesn&#x27;t do it on purpose, it&#x27;s still a big problem, given the responsibility he has.The article also mentions many moments where apparently Altman straight out lied, as opposed to being &quot;very persuasive, if you believe those sources then I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s also possible to think he&#x27;s sincere.
I cannot open the article again to get the exact quotes, but the few I remember were: 
- one time he was claiming he didn&#x27;t send a message, while people were literally showing him the message he sent, with the confirmation of another OpenAI employee
- another time when he accused people of organising a coup, and that someone from the board informed him, and after the person from the board was called in the meeting Altman claimed he never said those words and never accused anyoneThese cases can&#x27;t be put to persuasion, that Altman changed their view, or that someone misremembered, they either happened or they didn&#x27;t

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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 &#x27;blip&#x27; 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 &quot;Altman conveyed to Mira Murati&quot; followed by &quot;Altman does not recall the exchange&quot; Why use a term such as &#x27;conveyed&#x27; 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 &quot;Altman told Mira Murati&quot; then no such ambiguity would exist.&quot;Later, the board was alarmed to learn that its C.E.O. had essentially appointed his own shadow board&quot; Is this still talking about Brockman and Sutskever? I just can&#x27;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&#x27;t need to find out. The people he disagreed with still had votes so any claim of a &#x27;shadow board&#x27; 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 &quot;Altman claims he was unaware of the call&quot; 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&#x27;t know of the call because I am not those two people.The claim of sexual abuse says via Karen Hao &quot;Annie suggested that memories of abuse were recovered during flashbacks in adulthood.&quot; 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.

Paul answers that here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041363640499200353?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;2041363640499200353?s=20</a>

&gt; in 2014, [Graham] had recruited Altman to be his successor as president.&gt; [Graham&#x27;s] judgment was based not on Altman’s track record, which was modest, but on his will to prevail, which Graham considered almost ungovernable.One thing I don&#x27;t understand is why Paul Graham offered YC to Altman if he knew how slippery he was..

For those that don’t know or remember:“Tonight isn’t just about the people in front of the camera. In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world. People from every background. But they all have one thing in common: They’re all terrified of Ronan Farrow.”

hey I loved that Ricky Gervais joke about you at the globes

Appreciate this. I thought deeply about that and took a lot of time, when we had little of it to go around, iterating and shaping it. (Including talking to computer scientists to make sure I sounded as not-dopey as possible on the technical side!)

The last couple sentences tie things up really nicely.

Paying for 1 is doing more than paying for 0.It&#x27;s not your responsibility to fund for every single one, just find the one you like the most and subscribe to that one.

As someone on a budget, how can I pay for good journalism when it so spread out across various (expensive) outlets?

Hi Ronan. TCatK is a phenomenal book, not only in exposing the wrongdoing of powerful people, but also in presenting the meta-issue of how hard it was to get the word out, and you handled it all with nuance. You&#x27;re about as close as I have to a personal hero.Long time HN lurker, made an account just to say that :)

Great article.Thank you for fielding questions.
And please don&#x27;t stop, your work is great.

The article is paywalled, where can we read it?

Please ask The New Yorker to extend some of their very generous subscription sale prices to Canada, I would subscribe to print if even a single sale applied to us, but all the sales are always USA only.

Exactly. In fact I&#x27;d say that everything that is said about Altman is a misdirection from that one point.People want to focus on scape goats rather than systemic problems

As bad as altman might be he’s just another sociopathic Tech BroI’m far more concerned with the 25 million dollar personal bribe OpenAI president Greg Brockman
gave Donald Trump for his reelection -the fact that a tech company can influence the outcome of an election directly is evilFar more evil than Altmans shenanigans

How do you feel about the title of your article? I assume an editor chose it.Clearly he&#x27;s straight up evil; between tanking the global economy, constantly lying, and raping his 3 year old sister, it feels really disingenuous to me to frame this as an open question.

Ask him about the “hermetic order”(that is either emergent, convergent or by design?)one discovers in interiority studies of GPT.

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

1. No.2. You cannot &quot;control&quot; superintelligent AI.

He is cooked. Only a matter of time before the whole thing blows up. 
Once a scammer, always a scammer.

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

They were both pretty smart in certain ways. Altman&#x27;s very good at being manipulative and raising money though seems so so on the tech. Bankman Fried was smart at crypto and the like but ethically challenged on the don&#x27;t steal your customer&#x27;s money part.

Seeing Sam Altman slowly degrade into the realization that he is in fact not as smart as others in this space has been fascinating to watch. He used to speak with enthusiasm and confidence and now he’s like a scared little boy who got in way too deep.The last person that this happened to was Sam Bankman Fried as investors and regular folk finally realized he was full of complete shit and could only talk the game for so long until the truth emerged.

I suspect that they are perfectly capable of clicking an archive link or better yet logging in as they are already a subscriber. Maybe, like me, they enjoy reading the physical magazine.

This is above your comment: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2026.04.06-100412&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2026&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2026.04.06-100412&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.c...</a>

Excellent work. I’ll have to wait until we get the print version delivered to finish as I’m not signed into the new Yorker on my phone.I’ve always been a huge fan of Ronan Farrow’s journalism and willingness to speak truth to power. I think he’s pulling at exactly the right thread here, and it’s very important to counteract Altman’s reputation laundering given that we run a very real risk of him weaseling his way into the taxpayer’s wallet under the current administration.

This whole situation goes to show that yesterday&#x27;s conspiracy theorists are today&#x27;s realists. What&#x27;s happening to USA&#x27;s leadership and as a country and what&#x27;s happening with with their top companies is really scary for the rest of us. If this trend continues we&#x27;re all definitely gonna end up in a kleptocracy.

Looks like Betteridge&#x27;s law of headlines applies here too.

Betteridge&#x27;s law of headlines is an adage that states: &quot;Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word &quot;NO.&quot;

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&#x27;d change the title to something less baity, and indeed the article is so substantive that it deserves a considerably better one. But I&#x27;m not going to change it in this case, since the story has connections to YC - about that see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a>.)

Amazing that this article and an actual comment from Ronan Farrow is this far down the list while...Scientists Figured Out How Eels Reproduce (2022) has 6 times the points.

Uncrappified link: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3cs78i&#x2F;whats_the_best_long_con_you_ever_pulled&#x2F;cszjqg2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3cs78i&#x2F;whats_the...</a>&gt;

Altman even replied to that post funnily enough

Ask Condé Nast if he can be trusted..<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;s&#x2F;VWJVBNzc2u" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;s&#x2F;VWJVBNzc2u</a>

Why is it that criticism of people&#x27;s insatiable greed for wealth and power often gets dismissed with this thought-terminating cliche about utopias?Desire to live in a society that&#x27;s less greedy, that rewards compassion and punishes sociopathy is completely valid. We should be pursuing that earnestly because survival of our species depends on it. The people in charge are so drunk on wealth and power that they would rather drive our entire species off a cliff than sacrifice even 10% of their effectively bottomless wealth.But instead of criticizing our current philosophy that&#x27;s actively being taken too far and threatens to destroy us, you criticize people who express their frustration with this state of affairs.

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

Complete hearsay, but I struck up a convo with someone who had spent a few hours drinking around a campfire with him and a few others at burning man, prior to GPT3&#x27;s popularity. Apparently he was utterly convinced in his pivotal role to shepherd in a new era with AI, to the point where it got really messianic and culty. He didnt recall much else other than just being really weirded out by the dude.

Not just the greed. The whole AI is so dangerous that we must be the ones to build it to save humanity, and then gaslighting yourself and everyone around you into believing that your language model is AGI. This is some weird detached from reality cult behavior.

Of course he cannot be trusted. Anyone whose motivation is based on greed is by nature untrustworthy.

Watch Altman&#x27;s reaction in Tucker Carlson interview to the question about (alleged) murder of OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji.The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.

One of the decidedly eerier parts of this story as you keep reading are all the gaps between what people are saying about Altman, and what they clearly want to say about Altman but can&#x27;t.

You mention many proxies of Musk who post negative content about Altman.In your investigation were you able to determine if Altman has similar proxies?How common would you say that this is? Do these kinds of people generally have teams of people who sling mud for them?Can you speculate on how that manifests on a site like Hackernews?

&gt; where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours longFor anyone unfamiliar with this process, the New Yorker documentary is well worth the watch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;81770824" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;81770824</a>

Calling your own article all those things is a major turn-off.

This might be the major dilemma in the tech industry today, where the natural tendencies of literalism and optimism among technologists has turned into a form of defensive credulity. The real world rigor of The New Yorker’s editorial standards and concerns about defamation necessitate this circumscribed style that rewards close reading and skepticism, but those aren’t in favor in the tech industry currently.

&gt; ... where every word is chosen carefully...In light of that...&gt; &quot;Texts from this period show Altman coördinating closely with Nadella&quot;Why did you make the odd choice of a diaresis on this word?

With this in mind, I think you would be the perfect investigative journalist to track down the archives of The National Enquirer.This was our &quot;hometown&quot; gossip paper in South Florida, and you should have seen the pictures and stuff that they did print. And this was after threats of celebrity lawsuits in the mid-1970&#x27;s had curtailed any tendency to exaggerate.Back when almost nobody outside of New York had heard of Trump, he started coming down to play golf and made quite an impression among the well-established Florida real-estate operators. They could see right through him like any other fake millionaire from New York, which were a dime a dozen. There was just a general consensus among many visitors that what happens in South Florida stays in South Florida. Epstein grew up in this environment.You would see pictures of him with unidentified non-Stormy dates, and some insinuation in the gossip column but you knew they were holding back from anything that could not be truly verified.By the time of his presidential run, it looks like he had become well acquainted with David Pecker who owned the Enquirer. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised when he sold the publishing company that there are archives somewhere that contain all the supporting stuff that was unverified at the time. When Trump &amp; Epstein were much younger running buddies for so long.

There is something disturbing about the idea that 8 hours must be spent by editors deliberating about each sentence in a piece like this. It&#x27;s almost like you&#x27;re reinforcing the idea of just how powerful this power-seeking human has become.We&#x27;re all here worried about calling the guy liar liar pants on fire, but maybe none of that matters to him as long as he comes away looking even more powerful? That&#x27;s what he&#x27;s so successful optimizing for.How neo-medieval peasant of me to feel this awe - great piece. Insane world we live in.

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.

Gobsmacking details about Altmans&#x27; time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone&#x27;s wondering.Fantastic reporting.

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

&gt; He&#x27;s doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.)What? OpenAI was a non-profit until Sam made it for-profit.

Disclaimer: I have no association with any AI company and have never met Altman or any of the other top AI scientists.The real question is: can anyone be trusted if the fever dreams of super-intelligence come true? Go ahead and replace Sam Altman with someone else - will it make a difference? Any other CEO is going to be under the same overwhelming pressure to make a profit somehow. I think the OpenAI story is messier because it was founded for supposedly altruistic reasons, and then changed.Methinks many of Altman&#x27;s detractors protesteth too much. He&#x27;s doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) Nothing of substance in this article seemed to make him exceptionally &quot;sociopathic&quot; compared to any other tech CEO. It goes with the territory.What depressed me most is that trillions of dollars are being raised for building what will undoubtedly be used as a weapon. My guess is the ROI on that money is going to be extremely bad for the most part (AI will make some people insanely rich, but it is hard to see how the big investors will get a return.) Could you imagine if the world shared the same vision for energy infrastructure (so we could also stop fighting wars over control of fossil fuels and spewing CO2?) A man can dream...

You can see the vote history here[1]. It&#x27;s always hard to know exactly why something gets buried. I was a little sad to see the story down-ranked when I saw that you were here in the comments.But the discussion is generally pretty low quality with these sort of posts. People react without having read the story, or with whatever was on their mind already, or are insubstantive, or simply low effort. I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;ll lose k-factor not having a bigger post here.Sometimes if you talk to the mods, they&#x27;ll let you know their perspective. I generally find they&#x27;re correct that people are much better at contributing&#x2F;disseminating new knowledge to the world on more technical topics here.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.social-protocols.org&#x2F;stats?id=47659135" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.social-protocols.org&#x2F;stats?id=47659135</a>

This was an excellent piece with many new pieces of information in it. Thanks to you and your coauthor for getting it released.

&gt; OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teamsA paper with &quot;ideas to keep people first&quot; was (coincidentally?) published today:<pre><code> • Worker perspectives
 • AI-first entrepreneurs
 • Right to AI
 • Accelerate grid expansion
 • Accelerate scientific discovery and scale the benefits. 

 • Modernize the tax base
 • Public Wealth Fund
 • Efficiency dividends
 • Adaptive safety nets that work for everyone
 • Portable benefits

 • Pathways into human-centered work
</code></pre>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;industrial-policy-for-the-intelligence-age&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;industrial-policy-for-the-intellige...</a>

There is dwindling space for sincere independent accountability reporting on big tech like this to a) be created, since it&#x27;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.

It set off the flamewar detector. I&#x27;ve turned that off now.I only saw this thread by chance and almost didn&#x27;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.

Seems this got buried from the front page very quickly

I&#x27;m not sure whether you meant this about moderator interventions or not, but our actual practice is the opposite:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a>As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN moderation from the beginning. See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=by%3Adang%20pg%20chair&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a>.

HN generally downvotes and&#x2F;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&#x27;s biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.

It off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. I&#x27;ve turned that off now - this is obviously a serious article.

Why is the story so downranked? Folks at HackerNews have something to do with it ?

Truly a unique individual on every level.

I hadn&#x27;t heard of him before. The wiki article is worth a look<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ronan_Farrow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ronan_Farrow</a>It&#x27;s got to be one of the most unusual biographies of a living person that I&#x27;ve ever come across. Nearly every sentence is a head-turner. If you made it up no one would believe you

A new Ronan Farrow piece is a rare gift (and Marantz is no slouch). Can&#x27;t wait to read this in the physical magazine when it arrives!

&gt; Lehane—whose reported motto, after Mike Tyson, is “Everyone has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth”lol do you think these guys have ever been hit? Let alone in the face. They’d probably be less eager to mouth off as much as they do if so.

That&#x27;s not a third category, that&#x27;s just a sociopath as seen by themself.

&gt; I suspect there&#x27;s some other category, which isn&#x27;t really a sociopath and isn&#x27;t really a not-sociopath, which we don&#x27;t have a good definition for.There is -- I call it &quot;corpo sociopath.&quot; The corpo sociopath really comes out in the workplace, less so in personal life.

I think it’s learned sociopathy. People who start out knowing that a particular behavior is wrong, but over time are conditioned to feel like it’s fine, at least in certain situations (the corporate world being a prime example).

I suspect there&#x27;s some other category, which isn&#x27;t really a sociopath and isn&#x27;t really a not-sociopath, which we don&#x27;t have a good definition for.We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they&#x27;re in that third category we haven&#x27;t named, where they&#x27;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&#x27;re doing something for the betterment of mankind, it doesn&#x27;t really matter if you lie to some board members some year during the multi-decade pursuit.

Yeah the whole fearmongering is clearly just marketing at this point. Your LLM isn&#x27;t going to suddenly gain sentience and destroy humanity if it has 10x more parameters or trains on 10x more reddit threads.I&#x27;m not even sure we&#x27;re any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs. It&#x27;s getting more funding and research, but none of the research seems very innovative. And now it&#x27;s probably much more difficult to get funding for anything that&#x27;s not a transformer model.

I was with you right up until the final paragraph, but this made me do a double take:&gt; 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 &quot;importance&quot; (and its cousin &quot;danger&quot;) has no place in the realistic assessment of what OpenAI has accomplished. They haven&#x27;t built anything dangerous, there is no &quot;AI safety&quot; problem, and nothing they&#x27;ve done so far is truly &quot;important&quot;. They have built a chat bot which can do some neat tricks. Remains to be seen whether they&#x27;ll improve it enough to stay solvent.The whole &quot;super serious what-ifs&quot; game is just marketing.

It&#x27;s fairly obvious sociopathy is a prerequisite for top CEO jobs. Some just hide it better than others or have better PR people

aaron called him sociopath back in 2010&#x27;s

For those curious about how sama got to where he got and stayed on top for so long, I recommend you read the book: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don&#x27;t know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting.Some concepts from the book:&gt; Core trait: The defining characteristic is the absence of conscience, meaning they feel no guilt, shame, or remorse.&gt; Identification: Sociopaths can be charming and appear normal, but they often lie, cheat, and manipulate to get what they want.&gt; The Rule of Threes: One lie is a mistake, two is a concern, but three lies or broken promises is a pattern of a liar.&gt; Trust your instincts over a person&#x27;s social role (e.g., doctor, leader, parent)Check and check.OpenAI is too important to trust sama with. He needs to go. In fact, AI should be considered a public good, not a commodity pay-as-you-go intelligence service.

Na, it will be Dario instead of Sam, Id say? :-))

It’s also available via public libraries in USA via Libby if your local library system pays for a subscription, so it’s a way to support the magazine indirectly, since your local taxes pays for your library. The downside for weekly is you have to read it that week, no archive access.

I’m not going to pay for another newspaper subscription just to read one article

The information is more important than the wants of the writer, always.

I hope ronan farrow doesn&#x27;t mind his article being shared like this

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;hOYMn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;hOYMn</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a>

&quot;could&quot;, &quot;may&quot;, &quot;might&quot; - these words do so much heavy lifting in &quot;journalism&quot;. Almost always it&#x27;s an invitation to worry and be miserable.

If you are asking if a single human can be trusted with such a responsibility, the answer is, by default, no.

General LLM is what Apple is paying Google for.

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

I doubt Anthropic see this as their capacity problem. They like &quot;extra usage&quot;, and users who don&#x27;t, well its their capacity problem.

Well I just canceled my Claude Pro subscription because of the mysterious limits that I don&#x27;t experience with codex, even after paying for &quot;extra usage&quot;. If Anthropic can&#x27;t figure out their capacity problems they are in trouble.

I&#x27;m curious: did you give Gemini the entire text of Neuromancer or did you expect it to use search results for chapters 1 to 14?I would have just fed it the text of chapters 1 to 14 from a non drm copy.

&gt;&gt;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&#x27;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&#x27;m so glad that I have at least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would have easily hurt myself.It&#x27;s somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me every week, but it just doesn&#x27;t follow instructions and keeps repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now, like it&#x27;s some kind of giant joke that all these companies are playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;Pro&quot; setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real life person did that I&#x27;d stop being friends with them, but somehow I&#x27;m paying money for this. Maybe I&#x27;m the clown here.

The preference rankings keep fluctuating on every release for me. A year ago it was Gemini dominating coding tasks, then it was Claude, now it is the latest Codex again. With the next point release(s) the cycle will continue.

Am I the only one that feels like Claude is clearly winning code generation, and Gemini in general LLM?I just don’t feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning any of the AI battles.Therefore, I feel like “Sam Altman may control our future” is a far stretch.

&gt; there&#x27;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?

One thing that stands out when reading profiles like this is the number of positive and negative descriptions of the subject that agree.  For example, there seems to be little dispute that Altman will happily say something that he knows&#x2F;believes isn&#x27;t true, there&#x27;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.

&gt; The day that Altman was fired, he flew back to his twenty-seven-million-dollar mansion in San Francisco, which has panoramic views of the bay and once featured a cantilevered infinity pool, and set up what he called a “sort of government-in-exile.” Conway, the Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, and the famously aggressive crisis-communications manager Chris Lehane joined, sometimes for hours a day, by video and phone. Some members of Altman’s executive team camped out in the hallways of the house. Lawyers set up in a home office next to his bedroom. During bouts of insomnia, Altman would wander by them in his pajamas. When we spoke with Altman recently, he described the aftermath of his firing as “just this weird fugue.”These sociopaths are so good at giving away nothing. He managed to engender sympathy instead of saying &quot;I&#x27;m not gonna talk about anything that happened then&quot;.Also very weird how many of these people are so deeply-linked that they&#x27;ll drop everything they&#x27;re doing just to get this guy back in power? Terrifying cabal.

Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things.1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim.2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer.3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6&#x27;1 140lbsI was working for a company called NationBuilder and I had the opportunity to go on a work trip. Outside of a talk he had just given I was waiting for my ride and I looked over like...damn thats the speaker. I wanted to say Hi; he damn near flagged down the police. I apologized and just decided to move on.Note: It was in Reno, and no I don&#x27;t want to go into details; the others are not hard to find because I happened upon them via blog posts so i&#x27;m sure if someone with the accumen of RF wants to know, he will find.I have heard similar stores from several people in the years since. I AM NOT CALLING THIS PERSON RACIST. I am saying; he is observably scared of black people and that is not someone I want making descions about how the world moves foward.

Can you give more details?It wouldn&#x27;t particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I&#x27;m curious what the specific incident you observed was.

I really hope @ronanfarrow addresses this. Thanks for sharing

Career ladders have a tendency to hoist up those among us with the worst personality traits.

The longer I live, the more secrets coming out I see, the less surprised I am with every next one.

&gt; Altman is absolutely terrified of BlackCan you share more about how this manifested?

well, just based off that group photo of the openclaw developer and the staff at openai, i wouldnt be surprised if there was some truth to this

&gt; I know this crowd may not careWhat?

Frankly this is why all these big tech companies need to be broken down to pieces.

Hi @ronanfarrow — I have only had one interaction with Sam Altman in person, and I was advised to keep it to myself. I know this crowd may not care, but Altman is absolutely terrified of Black people — not in any contextual sense, but in a visceral, instinctive way. For someone who, as you put it, &quot;controls our future,&quot; this should matter.FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts hiring and other decisions at OpenAI.

He&#x27;s a liar and untrustworthy. Based on their public statements, that&#x27;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.

This anecdote is so absurd it sounds like satire. This is the guy with the $23M mansion?&gt; Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied.

&gt;&quot;Sam Altman may control our future&quot;TLDR but just the heading is already ugly. No single person no matter how nice they&#x27;re should be able to control our future. Power corrupts, what fucking trust. We are supposed to be democratic society (well looking at what is going on around this is becoming laughable)

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

Ugh. It’s a typo. “No one person SHOULD control our future”.

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

No one person control our future. Stop there.

It&#x27;s because they&#x27;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&#x27;m going to write a silly comment here:
For a moment I thought you wrote &quot;... LLMs. Yeah, they&#x27;re transformative, but I don&#x27;t know that they&#x27;re going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon.&quot;I liked that mental image a lot! (I try to maintain being uncertain whether Deckard was a replicant)

Deus Ex is an outlier, AI is a core part of that plot

I think you can look at Star Trek as a fairly grounded example of where current LLMs could go: the ship&#x27;s computer is not autonomous in any way but it does accept fairly vague instructions and you can apparently vibe-code the holodeck.

I find that more realistic then, because it appears that&#x27;s the trajectory we are going on with regards to AI, as a tool not a panacea.

Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.)A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the worldwide crapsack economic system. They don&#x27;t abolish corporations, although they might take them over.Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the world into a post-scarcity society, it probably wouldn&#x27;t be filed under &quot;cyberpunk&quot; either...

It is a pretty core part of Cyberpunk the &quot;franchise&quot; though, both tabletop and more recent video game.I think as well if you look closer, many cyberpunk worlds imply AI through robots, computers with personality etc.

AI is one of the core parts of cyberpunk, through androids &#x2F; humanoid robots. Blade Runner is completely built on the protagonist having to interact with rogue artificial intelligence.

Hyperion has a pretty well-developed view of AGI.

I assume it just becomes one of those things as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi

AIs are in plenty of cyberpunk stories, but your comment did make me think that they are often rather stereotypically “alien entity characters” and not a kind of corporate technology &#x2F; weapon that is controlled by a specific organization.Which is a shame, as it seems to me that the overwhelming risk of AI is from the latter scenario, and not as a rogue individual entity.

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.

Well I&#x27;d hope they&#x27;re transformative, they&#x27;re using transformers after all. We just need to pay attention to them, that&#x27;s all they need.

It&#x27;s really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they&#x27;re transformative, but I don&#x27;t know that we&#x27;re going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much &quot;A.G.I&quot; mentioned in the article.

I&#x27;m not sure how much of that converts to revenue. If it&#x27;s free plan users, that&#x27;s just cost. You can say what you want about &quot;creating a training data moat&quot; but that doesn&#x27;t seem like it&#x27;s prevented the other labs from putting out excellent models.

Around the same revenue due to Anthropics strong enterprise strategy

They’re all in the negative excluding subsidies, hard core coders are more valuable than high schoolers cheating on homework.

OpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.

OpenAI is like #3 or #4 of the AI companies right now in terms of power, and last place in the court of public opinion.I’d be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good graces of the public and having access to all of our computers indirectly with Claude Code.

Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?