Sam Altman Is Full Of Shit (Ed Zitron of Business Insider, writing in his own blog about the OpenAI CEO)
Altman has had a no good very bad week, in terms of PR, top employees quitting, and a disastrous chatbot demo that might result in a lawsuit from Scarlet Johansson, whose voice OpenAI apparently copied for their chatbot after Johansson told Altman NO.
And today he announced a giant licensing deal with News Corp, apparently making them ChatGPT's main news source, which might pry a few MAGAts away from thinking Elon Musk's Grok AI is the chatbot most likely to regurgitate RW drivel, but isn't likely to favorably impress the people who liked Altman claiming that he's a liberal. Real liberals wouldn't spend a quarter of a billion dollars on content from the news source that had to pay over three quarters of a billion dollars for fake news reports about the 2020 election.
Ed Zitron finally got irritated enough with Altman that he paused his expose on Facebook for this - and it's a great read:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-is-full-of-shit/
So, let's review. In the last week, OpenAI has repeatedly lied about a voice product, dissolved its AI safety team, and had two major players in the company resign — one of whom tried to oust Sam Altman late last year, and the other who clearly despises the direction of the company. And unlike Sam Altman, both Sutskever and Leike are actual computer scientists that build things versus specious hype men who people have been trying to fire for a decade. Seriously, staff went to the board to get him fired from his first company twice, Paul Graham personally flew into San Francisco to fire him from yCombinator, and he was so dramatically fired from OpenAI that he had to run crying to venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to make him CEO again and install the Avengers of Capitalism as the new board.
I'll cut to the chase: it's time to stop listening to anything that Sam Altman has to say. Sam Altman is full of shit, and his reign at OpenAI has been defined far more by its empty promises than any realized dreams. It's time to actively push back on Altman when he says that GPT-5 will be "similar to a virtual brain," or a "super smart person who knows absolutely everything about your life," or a "super-competent colleague," or that it'll "replace 95% of marketing tasks," or that it'll "evolve in uncomfortable ways" rather than get twisted by a group of people that know enough or give enough of a shit to make sure they're not causing said evolution.
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Every single thing that Sam Altman and OpenAI does is suspicious, and it has been for months, ever since Altman was fired and then rehired as CEO with — to this day — little or no explanation. Sam Altman has repeatedly said things that, if any founder with less power, presence, access and funding had said, they'd be laughed at, ignored, and treated like fantasists. Altman is the P.T. Barnum of tech, with just enough knowledge to be dangerous but far too little to actually say anything of note. He is not the technical mind behind OpenAI, he did not write its models, and looking up to him as some sort of technolojesus is bad for the tech industry and worse for the world. This is not a person that should be making decisions about the future of the tech industry, nor should he be allowed to spout fan fiction and automatically have it covered as gospel.
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This week should be a wakeup call to the media and anybody else who chooses to trust OpenAI or Sam Altman. OpenAI is built on a culture of deception, one that obfuscates the actual abilities of their technology, and every further successful obfuscation enriches an enterprise that lacks morality, clarity and respect for its users or the tech industry at large.
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Much more at the link.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Same thing could be said about Elon Musks’s companies. Effing billionaires.
