this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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The allegations from his sister aside (not discrediting them, I’m just not well informed on that atm), it’s been really strange seeing so many comments cheering for Sam Altman and dunking on the openAI board (handpicked by Altman himself btw) for this whole farce. We have no info on what’s happening inside, just 3rd party hearsay and speculation.
Not only that, the guy who allegedly led Altman’s ousting, Ilya Sutskever, signed the employee resignation letter asking to reinstate Altman as CEO.
And somehow Microsoft ends up the biggest winner out of this entire situation. I don’t consider myself conspiracy minded…but what the hell is going on here?
It's the same with Elon's cult. People probably really believe that Sam is a genius and the one who made ChatGPT (just like Elon's fanboys really believe that he's involved with Tesla's engineering), so they see him, alongside Elon, as a symbol of meritocracy and they get angry at the board for ousting someone just because they're "afraid" of a "genius".
I was certainly a fan of early Elon. A serious push to address one of the causes of climate change, opening up some patents to allow other companies build charging networks, a disruptive can-do attitude that spurred Old Automobile to actually start innovating in response.
There were doubts, but I think the turning point for me was when he attacked the divers working to get the Thai kids out of the cave, just because they thought his submarine ideas sucked.
He’d been doubling down on being an arsehole increasingly since then. I absolutely would have considered buying a Tesla in the old days, now? Absolutely not.
They innovated first. GM and BMW and so on put out electric cars in the 90's they just didn't market them well and the battery tech wasn't as good then meaning range was limited. Not to mention the lack of infrastructure for charging which I will admit that Tesla (not Elon) did push for and develop.
The Roadster was an ice breaker vehicle and I will fully admit that. Musk was involved but he wasn't the one who made those ~~fears~~ feats of battery engineering possible. He really does take credit for a lot of stuff just because he happened to be in the vicinity. I can understand being a Tesla fan. I can't really understand being an Elon Musk fan.
Yeah the Twitter nonsense has been such an absolute shitshow that it’s easy to forget he had in fact turned for the worse prior to it. I didn’t flag it at the time, consciously, but The Boring Company was another early signal. Rich guy is stuck in traffic, says: “screw this I’m digging tunnels, bitches!” And then they made and sold branded flamethrowers to raise seed money…? I mean WTF kind of college dorm antics are these?
He used to be so much more grounded, back in the days of talking about our carbon emissions as the dumbest experiment of all time, and how he started SpaceX to make our species interplanetary and better able to survive major disasters. I was all for that Elon. Then he had a kid with a musician and mashed his ass cheek into a keyboard to come up with a name. I think he’s deeply personally broken. I don’t know what hopes he had for his marriage and family or how badly that situation is fucked for him post-divorce but it seems like it could be pretty bad and fueling a lot of pain and malice not to mention likely substance abuse.
This is what I was thinking, my feed is now full of this guy. I knew him from Y combinator videos, smart guy and everything, but now terminally online stans will put him on their pedestal and simp for his AI genius - until of course all the shit he’s done reaches critical recognition, and the general sentiment will turn on him. Almost like we shouldn’t celebrate billionaire tech bros.
I doubt over 2/3 (around 600) of the employees under Musk would sign a letter demanding that the board resign over their firing of Musk, though. Seems most of the employees actually liked Altman.
When you point out that figure, it's also important to provide more context and take into account the fact that Satya Nadella promised to hire every single OpenAI employee and not just Sam Altman, and the high likelihood that the board will not resign. It's not hard to imagine that for many, going to Microsoft and working in a for-profit environment with potentially higher bonuses (as they'd be more encouraged to seek much higher profits than under OpenAI) is a significant career upgrade (good for them, but the point here is to not let the headlines make you think that there's some warm & fuzzy "we love Sam" moment happening).
The OpenAI salaries are pretty low (https://archive.ph/jPbYR ) compared to what Microsoft offers (https://archive.ph/nonSV ), and as I said all of that doesn't include the potential bonuses that would result from those teams aggressively pursuing profit at Microsoft.
Agreed. I do not know Sam, but I do know smart people who push the boundary of tech and they are all heads down deep into whatever and have little time for talk. Talk is cheap.
Who though? Any examples?
You can check many of the Sam dick riding contests in the comments in any Sam Altman related thread and how most are advancing the classic "she's just a gold digger who suddenly remembers he raped her only after he got rich" or "she looks unhinged, story likely made up" theses that are usually used to protect rapists and discredit rape victims, while trying to bury the rape story with massive downvotes every single time.
I have yet to see any of those in any thread in the last few days. Virtually all have been either negative or neutral to Altman.
Meh, it's kind of a perverse dream that all engineers have to go toe to toe with the suits and win. Like an ex admitting that you've been right the whole time and begging you to come back but you are already fucking three of her smoking hot physicist friends.