It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

It's time to stop taking any CEO at their word.

Edit: scratch that, the time to stop taking any CEO at their word was 100 years ago.

The best time was 100 years ago. The second-best time is now.
- Hear hear!
We should never have taken them at their word.
- Not just CEOs… basically everyone.
We should be taking them with the rope...
- We should take CEOs with fava beans and a nice bottle of chianti.
The word is it's time to take the CEOs away
The easiest way to stop him is to walk up to him and whisper into his ear "end computer similation" and he will just disappear.

- Considering how fractured medical billing is these days, often the techs contracted by your in-network doctors office are actually out-of-network.
  Isn't medical billing fun?
- Yeah this might actually not be that far from reality. Computer vision already did a large amount of the lifting, with the massive pushes towards AI, AI will take the rest of us plebians healthcare.

He is a tech bro. Almost everything he is saying is a lie.

*parasite....
Nothing bro about this shit stain..
Almost everything tech bros say is to boost short term share prices. Any resemblance to the truth is coincidental.
*"Podcast-bro"

When that major drama unfolded with him getting booted then re-hired. It was super fucking obvious that it was all about the money, the data, and the salesmanship He is nothing but a fucking tech-bro. Part Theranos, part Musk, part SBF, part (whatever that pharma asshat was), and all fucking douchebag.

AI is fucking snake oil and an excuse to scrape every bit of data like it's collecting every skin cell dropping off of you.

I'd agree the first part but to say all Ai is snake oil is just untrue and out of touch. There are a lot of companies that throw "Ai" on literally anything and I can see how that is snake oil.
But real innovative Ai, everything to protein folding to robotics is here to stay, good or bad. It's already too valuable for governments to ignore. And Ai is improving at a rate that I think most are underestimating (faster than Moore's law).
- I think part of the difficulty with these discussions is that people mean all sorts of different things by "AI". Much of the current usage is that AI = LLMs, which changes the debate quite a lot
Martin Shkreli is the scumbag's name you're looking for.
From wikipedia: He was convicted of financial crimes for which he was sentenced to seven years in federal prison, being released on parole after roughly six and a half years in 2022, and was fined over 70 million dollars
- Thank you!

Yeah. It sucks I had to be downvoted into irrelevance way back when this clown was first becoming worshipped by the tech bros.

I don’t take pride in patting myself on the back, but I was fucking right all along about this douche.

- Both crypto and LLMs are new, disruptive tech. The chaos around them is expected.
  Which cryptoscam are you referring to? Theres hundreds daily lol
- How is LLM a cryptoscam?

I never took him at his word.

Seriously, what dipshit is going, “hmm well now he’s gone too far!”

Really? The guy behind the company called "Open" AI that has contributed the least to the open source AI communities, while constantly making grand claims and telling us we're not ready to see what he's got. We're supposed to stop taking that guys word?

Wow, thanks journalists, what would we do without you.

Should your disappointment here really be pointed at the journalists?
- Which group of people uncritically magnified his voice and others like it for years? Tech journalism builds the legacies of people like Musk, Bankman-Fried and Altman.
- Oh, don't worry we have enough to go around.
People talk a lot about the genericisation of brand names, but the branding of generic terms like this really annoys me.
I'll use the example I first noticed. A few years ago, the Conservative government was under criticism for the minimum wage being well under a living wage. In response, they brought in the National Living Wage, which was an increase to the minimum wage, but still under the actual living wage. However, because of the branding, it makes criticising it for not meeting the actual living wage more difficult, as you have to explain the difference between the two, and as the saying goes, "if you're explaining, you're losing".

not only does he burn through cash, he burns through resources making life worse now for everybody: AI rivals crypto in resource waisting while not contributing at all to any improvements. I fail to see "brighter future" for us through AI as it is energy-intensive, unsustainable endeavor for which we are woefully unprepared both materially (energy efficiency, semiconductor manufacturing/recycling, etc) and psychologically (ethics etc.). Yeah, grand on paper, terrible in reality

What is really annoying is that there are a lot of really good data modeling applications, they are just in research areas. Generative AI is absolutely a waste of resources, but a ton of money and energy is spent on that instead of on the applications that are actually bearing fruit.
- Generative AI is definitely useful - it's mighty putty. It fills in gaps and sticks things together wonderfully. It let's you easily do things near impossible before
  It's also best used sparingly
AI is worse than crypto. Most crypto projects use proof of stake which is way more resource efficient than mining. Also the mining that does happen usually happens where there is excess generation instead of azure datacenters
- some crypto learned to be efficient, others did not. We still do have crypto-mining botnets. Crypto remains to be useless to humanity and very profitable for few. Same with AI. Same with stock market. Instead of producing something of value we keep on burning through resources while selected few enjoy bonfire others have to fight to stay alive...

Was this not obvious at the very least when his own board kicked him to the curb due to an inability to trust him?

I’m honestly stunned. If you can’t trust rich capitalists, who can you trust‽

Politicians!

Name a CEO tech bro that isn't a raving douche.

Does Woz count? He's CEO of the Silicon Valley Comic Con (or he used to be anyway).
- Also just gonna go with an old guard and say maybe Tom, once he sold Myspace he fucked right off. I think he has a travel blog or some shit.
  Though I wouldn't consider him a tech bro.
It's hard to find a very of any variety that isn't a raving douche

the techbros that think that with sufficiently advanced AI we could solve climate change are so stupid. like, we might not have a perfect solution, but we have ideas on how to start to make things better (less car-centric cities, less meat and animal products, more investment in public transport and solar), and it gets absolutely ignored. why would it be different when an AI gives the solution? unless they want the "eat fat-free food and you will be thin" solution to climate change, in which we change absolutely nothing of our current situation but it is magically ecological

There was a (fiction) book I was called "all the birds in the sky". I really liked it. Highly recommend.
One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that's like "the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project". And I'm just screaming at the book "use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey".
There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they're difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.
$ GPT how do we solve climate change?
GPT: command not found
$ cd /home/chatgpt
cd: command not found

Oh I'm streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

Stop trying to make "streets ahead" happen!
- Your criticism is so fetch.
- Ohh i'm stroads ahead, i never heard of that term.

It's beyond time to stop believing and parroting that whatever would make your source the most money is literally true without verifying any of it.

I wonder what this clowns daily PR budget is?

Each one of these fake news stories are generally 15k a pop

Do you remember when crypto scammer Sam Bankman was running thousands daily for years...

Similar vibes here

News at 10! It was time to stop taking his word for everything. Quite a while back.

Applicable to everyone really, especially those that want to sell you something that sounds too good to be true.

People did that? Lol

He’s the musk in making

You shouldn't judge people on appearances.

... but, I mean, come OOON... he looks like a reanimated Madame Tussaud's sculpture. Like someone said, "Give me a Wish.com Mark Zuckerberg... but not so vivacious this time." And he's the CEO of an AI-related company.

The best time to stop taking Altman seriously was ten years ago.

The second best time is now.

I don't trust any of these types. If you haven't noticed by now morally decent people are never in charge of a any large organization. The type of personality suited to claw their way to the top usually lack any real moral compass that doesn't advance their pursuit of power.

Who is Sam Altman?

(This is a rethorical question)

He is the cousin of Sam Mainman, who is an actual human being.
- Don't forget the lesser known Sam Shiftman and Sam Ctrlman.
- And also the cousin of Sam Neuman. Another con artist, but this one relying on novel techniques.

I'll keep my open source generative models and will be happy to watch this bozo and his cultists and the artbros all eat shit all year-round.

The time was last year, but better late than sorry.

How do we not know that this isn't an AI generated Sam Altman?

Anyone have a non pay wall link?

This trick should come in handy pal
12ft.io/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/
- Ironically, your link is broken on Voyager because it doesn’t treat anything before the https as a link. It just leads straight to the normal pay walled site.
  You need to embed the link for it to actually work. And even then, it may not work on this comment because it’ll try to route to my home instance due to having a Lemmy.world link for my image.

but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking

The difference is that in this case it is not hype—it is reality. It’s not a myth, it is happening right now. We are chugging inevitably down the track to the most dramatic discovery in human history. And Altman’s views on solving the climate crisis, disease, nuclear fusion… they are all within reach. If anything we need to increase our speed to get us there ASAP.

AI skeptics dont live in the real world

I would like to be able to listen to someone who is at the top of their game since it's most likely them who know the most. If they are the CEO of a company about the thing, that would make sense. I've seen plenty of enthusiasts start their own company because they had a lot of knowledge on the subject. Who do i look for the best information about the tech of tomorrow if not the people who are making it?

Sam is actually a liar though.
Everyone in open source AI has been calling him a snake ever since llama1 came out. If you want a more authoritative source, look to the CEO of huggingface, oldschool AI researchers and such.
He is not the one making it.
Yann LeCun would probably be a better source. He does actual research (unlike Altman), and I've never seen him over-hype or fear monger (unlike Altman).
Now this is a sh.itjust.works comment if I ever saw one. Gold medal, keep it up.

Has people start making Sam Alternator's AI image doing incendiary stuff? Maybe we should start doing that.