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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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New Yorker article on Sam Altman dropped. Aaron Swartz apparently called him a sociopath. The article itself also had wat looked like an animated AI generated image of Altman so here is the archive.is link (if you can get the latter to load, I was having troubles).
"New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI."
Man, this one is a weird read. On one hand I think they're entirely too credulous of the "AI Future" narrative at the heart of all of this. Especially in the opening they don't highlight how the industry is increasingly facing criticism and questions about the bubble, and only pay lip service to how ridiculous all the existential risk AI safety talk sounds (should be is). And they don't spend any ink discussing the actual problems with this technology that those concerns and that narrative help sweep under the rug. For all that they criticize and question Saltman himself this is still, imo, standard industry critihype and I'm deeply frustrated to see this still get the platform it does.
But at the same time, I do think that it's easy to lose sight of the rich variety of greedy assholes and sheltered narcissists that thrive at this level of wealth and power. Like, I wholly believe that Altman is less of a freak than some of his contemporaries while still being an absolute goddamn snake, and I hope that this is part of a sea change in how these people get talked about on a broader level, though I kinda doubt it.
Yeah, I intentionally only mentioned the start of the article and the Swartz bit because I didn't want to lead with what I thought of it all, and was curious what others thought. (And I had not finished it yet because it is a bit long).
I was struck with the notion how many of them are all true AGI believers (which as you said the author took at face value) or rich greedy assholes (like you said), and how we, the people of the sneer, are right that you simply can't work with these people. Like I feel more validated in the idea that EA is not the right way.
Another detail I noticed, nobody mentioned deepseek, again.
I hadn't even thought about the deepseek angle. For all that everyone loved fear mongering about them for a while there and for all that their apparent desire for actual efficiency improvements was a welcome development in the hyper scaling discussion they don't seem to get referenced much anymore.