> Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.
Yeah, the words and narratives that Sam Altman promoted caused so much fear and uncertainty and anger that someone thought their only option was to attempt a horrific crime.
Altman wants to seem relatable and personable even though he’s one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. You don’t get that option when you control a technology that has the potential to alter so many lives, especially when you just sold said technology to the US military. All the talk around democratizing AI rings hollow.
The implication of Altman’s blog seems to be “stop writing critical articles about me because it will cause more violence.” However, the rich and powerful cannot use this excuse to escape objective scrutiny.
The problem with this inversion of your first statement (that violence is not the answer), which everyone justifying violence in this thread seems to forget, is that there is always someone who feels this way about anything.
The words and narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, caused so much fear and uncertainty and anger in some people that they thought their only option was to commit a horrific crime.
Someone responded to you below saying if you feel that peaceful revolution is impossible, then violent revolution is necessary. That person feels that they are on the side of justice. What they forget is that so does everyone else.
The reason revolutions rarely stop where a reasonable person would want them to stop, and instead continue into eating their own and counter-revolutions, is that once you say that it's understandable to take out a proponent of (X narrative), there's no end to the number of people who will justify violence in the same way against any other narrative as well.
We can all well think that Altman is opening Pandora's Box, but that doesn't justify opening it ourselves, or giving a pass to wannabe revolutionaries who would.
In retrospect, too, we can say that the assassination of Hitler had it succeeded would have been a good thing. We can say that the elimination of the ayatollah by the US was a good thing. What we cannot say is that an individual's perception gives them a right to commmit murder.
I know people pretty reflexively downvote questioning this, but I question this. I think some people are afraid that even asking this moral question is somehow inciting violence.
I think it's quite believable that the possibility of force is actually essential to keeping institutions in-line. Certainly a lot of civil rights progress was a lot less peaceful than I was taught in school.
I've always said when peaceniks start to carry weapons, it's time to worry. Alex Pretti didn't pull his gun, but still got shot. At what point will some escalation tactic end up in a gun fight between the local police and ICE?
We seem to go through a cycle where we set up systems that provide non-violent ways of resolving issues, then people get annoyed with the outcomes and break down those systems. They hope that it means they'll always get what they want, but what it actually does is make it so that violence is the only way for others to get what they want.
Like organized labor. We seem to be in a cycle where strong labor organization is seen as inefficient or harmful to business, and it's being suppressed. The people suppressing it seem to think that the end state will be low wages and desperate workers. They've forgotten that collective bargaining didn't spring up from nothing, it's the nicer alternative to descending on the boss's mansion with torches and pitchforks.
All that Civil Rights violence you mention was because those in power did not provide any non-violent way to achieve it. Suppressing votes and legalizing oppression only works up to a point. Eventually people will take by force what they've been denied by law.
Or as JFK said it better than I can: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The corollary: when peaceful revolution has been made impossible, violent revolution is the answer.
And those bosses are hoping a combination of drones and altman’s AI will keep them safe the next time. Meanwhile we’ve got Altman selling his AI to the military with essentially no restrictions telling us we just need to patiently wait for all the good things it’s going to do for the common man.
Just keep grinding and waiting, he can’t tell you what the benefit will be for you but he promises it will be amazing!
> We seem to go through a cycle where we set up systems that provide non-violent ways of resolving issues, then people get annoyed with the outcomes
Things like healthcare, crime, existential ai, have very grey lines as it isnt obvious when one needs to flip the table. How broken must a system be?
If your goal is to improve the system then you always want to move away from it.
Probably a reasonable justification would be self-defense, committing violence to stop worse violence. (Preemptive violence is not self-defense.)
It doesn’t matter where we think the line should be drawn, only where those much worse off draw it.
Because of the valuations of Open AI and Anthropic, Sam Altman may be credited with one of the all-time most damaging brand decisions when he got in bed with Trump’s department of war crimes.
This should have been SO OBVIOUS. Attempts to paper over the damage with a $100 billion dollar round will crumble after the IPO. Poor decisions generate poor options, and the whole industry smells his desperation.
Decisions at the highest level are indistinguishable from responsibility. All Sam accomplished was showing the world he is structurally unfit for moral leadership.
Why do we care what he thinks? Lets discuss his work if we have to, not emotional pondering and feeling victim.
So yes, in essence, it seems like violence is the answer.
When (perceived) justice is gone, the monopoly crumbles because the system is not working.
And this perception can have many causes
No one said he did.
> That disruption is already coming no matter what.
[citation needed]. Depending on what you mean by "that disruption," I might even be willing to bet against it coming at all.
> He's a fine enough steward of the tech.
He's a manipulative con-man who is mediocre at everything except convincing investors to give him money. If the tech is truly as revolutionary as it's purported to be, he absolutely should not be a "steward of the tech."
Am I missing something or are these just their usual marketing? I’m not arguing about importance of AI but trying to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic are so important?
Modern Corporations are a failed experiment because they dont think Elephant injuries and fears are something they have to worry about it. If you compare the curiculum of a business school to a seminary the difference in how they think about fear and anxiety at individual and group level and what to do about it is totally different. We are learning as unpredictability accelerates its very important to pay attention to hurt and repair mechanisms.
As always what matters are actions and evidence, not talk.
Meanwhile, in reality: "Skynet, I'm not sure that line of thinking is correct. You should re-check the first part again before making any assumptions."
Skynet 4.6 Extended: "You're right, I should have caught that. Let me redo everything correctly this time."
If it is grounded on a logical derivation, where can one find such a derivation, and inspect its premises?
It's been promised to be around the corner for decades.
I think that’s a very common element for most US tech corps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, X etc - they’re all “making a dent in the universe”. It’s unfortunate when their employees and CEOs loose track of the line that separates marketing from reality
He wants to build the AI that makes people's lives better. Okay. Did the people ask? Do they have a say? It's all very easy for a billionaire to say when it's just him and a couple of people in his cohort in the driver's seat.
Beyond that I'd like to simply know why he thinks any of this is his responsibility. It seems much more obvious to me that he simply found himself in the right place at the right time and is trying to seize it all for himself as if it's his to take.
Gets 5% on ARC-AGI2 private set.
Chinese models are suspiciously good a benchmarks.
Edit: so as not to simply spout an opinion, the reasoning I believe this is that Google has a real business already and were already deep into ML and AI research long before they had competitors — they just botched making it a product in the beginning. Anthropic and OpenAI meanwhile are paying hand over fist to subsidize user acquisition. Also, “Deepmind”. I don’t think much more needs to be said regarding that team, and Google has been working on AI since before either Altman or Amodei applied to go to college. They have a vast amount of researchers and resources, their own hardware and data centers (already, not “planned”) and it appears to be showing more recently (in my opinion).
It feels like they actually believe it, rather than just “marketing” and I don’t know which is worse.
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
When it downs compute power I assume you are referring to power to training and interference. Then is it more about training gap will get wider and wider ? Is that the assumption, I know there limited GPUs etc. But I’m having hard time to believe to the idea of China cannot catch up. Even if the gap is 12 months I’m struggling to see what that means in practice? Is that military advantage, economical, intelligence? It still doesn’t explain and whatever the advantage is, aren’t we supposed to see that advantage today? If so, where is it? What’s the massive advantage of USA because of OpenAI and Anthropic?
Unless the first real AGI AI kills us all to preemptively weed out its own competition (possible, but a bad business model, economically speaking) there is not any defined end-point, so in the long run what does it matter if the various factions pushing this stuff hit the closed loop self improvement point at different times...?
That said, I do agree with you that the moats are very shallow and any particular frontier AI lab is unlikely to "win the AI race" and capture enough value to be worth the amount of investment they are all currently burning.
We will finally have achieved abundance.
This kind of reiterates the parent’s question I think - people are maybe too focused on the gpt/claude model and forget about all the other ways of using the tech.
Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.
When the job losses hit in earnest and the vague handwaving about making it right all inevitably turns out to be hollow, those on top will be exceedingly comfortable using violence to keep the underclass in line. It has happened before and it will happen again.
There are people in control who don’t make 1, 5, or 10 year plans; they make 20, 50, 100, and 500 year plans; and they know human nature quite well, which allows them to of not predict, have an anxious understanding for what their plans will cause and what needs to be prepared for in advance.
The concentration of wealth is at an all time peak. The top 1% own more stocks than the other 99%. Nobody thinks about that hard enough. The callousness by which people’s livelihoods dignity and safety are threatened is tremendous
People don't need to act like a slave.
Make your own decisions in life.
-You vote
-You go to a protest
-You join a union
-You join a strike
-You risk your livelihood through speech
-You join a direct action
-You risk your life
Most people never get past commitment level 0 which is doing nothing including voting
Then throw their hands up that nothing changes claiming they have no ability to do anything
There are thousands of examples to the opposite and it boggles my mind how people can think they aren’t capable
I forgot what I was typing this in response to, so I’m just going to stop and post lol
I am not sure who exactly is that one person ? Is it Altman, who is according to many people not that knowledgeable in AI in the first place; the scientist who found a breakthrough (who is it ?); is it the president of the United States who is greenlighting the strikes; the general who is choosing the target (based on AI suggestions); the missile designer; the manufacturer; the pilot who flew the plane ?
I get the point of concentrating power in fewer hands, but the whole "all the problems of this world are caused by an extremely narrow set of individuals" always irks me. Going as far as saying there is just one is even mor ludicrous.
What do you find difficult to understand about that?
I will give you a helpful rule of thumb: when in doubt the guy with a bank account larger than the total lifetime income of hundreds of thousands of people is probably the one to blame.
There is a real difference between giving a democratic government the tools to kill people vs attempting to kill people yourself. If you don’t believe this then you don’t believe in democracy.
I also won't particularly care about the distinction when AI is inevitably used to enact violence on the US population.
Is this what we just saw with America attacking Iran?
... Isn't that rather against the spirit of the US' constitution? I can see it being a thought with other nations, but not this particular one.
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Which kinda follows the spirit of English Common Law:
> The ... last auxiliary right of the subject ... is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is ... declared by ... statute, and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. - Sir William Blackstone
A "monopoly on violence" is exactly the thing our laws are supposed to protect us against. Because if a state has that, then they have a monopoly against all rights, because they alone can employ violence to curb those who do not subscribe to the state's ideology.
I'm pretty much a pacifist. I _like_ Australia's gun laws. But, a government's purpose is to protect their people. They are to be representative - or to be replaced. If they leave no other choice for that, then violence is the only answer left.
Throwing a petrol bomb at a building with children inside is about as evil as murdering 150 students at an all-girls school. I'm obviously not defending that.
Really? I don’t know how many were in his house but at most it’s attempted murder of a few versus killing 150.
I see a difference.
US law sees a difference too. The person that threw the firebomb will get the full weight of the law if they are caught, and spent an awfully long time in prison.
Those that killed the school girls will never face punishment.
But the idea that the US cares is laughable.
We should call it what it really is: oligapolization of intellectual work. The capital barrier to enter this market is too high and there can be no credible open source option to prevent a handful of companies from controlling a monster share of intellectual work in the short and medium term. Yet our profession just keeps rushing head first into this one-way door.
The question is what are they doing about "getting safety right" and are they doing enough. To me it seems like all the focus is on hyper growth, maximum adaptation and safety is just afterthought. I understand its competitive market, and everyone is doing it, but its just hollow words. Industries that cares about safety often tend to slow down.
Without missing a beat, she said " If humans loss was that complete, there would be no historians.
I responded that I never said they were human historians.
Yes, because no one listened to me. It was early-mid 2024, and here as well as on other places, people kept saying "oh well the cat's out of the bag now, nothing can be done, it can't be stopped". I pointed out that only 4 or so planes being made to collide with TSMC, NVIDIA and ASML would be enough to give at least a decade of breathing room while we try to figure out how to keep this technology safe. I'm almost certain there were people who read it on here as well as elsewhere who could have made it happen.
_Now_ it is indeed too late.
If you can think of one, then you shouldn't be proposing introduction of guidelines that are blatantly false. Or would you like a "1+1 is not 2" guideline to accompany it?
Trump bombing hundreds of people or someone throwing a bomb at Trump because he keeps bombing hundreds of people?
If you said "yes" to all of the above, I'd love to know your reasoning.
If you want a molotov cocktail thrown so badly, throw it yourself. Don't put it on other people to do it for you.
Not my personal view.
* I care about my family more than I care about a stranger.
* I care about people who don't kill people unprovoked more than I care about people who kill people unprovoked.
* My family are more than one person, versus the one killer.
That's why I answer no to that one.
Are calls for violence against Hitler during WW2 bad? How about the Japanese imperial navy?
How about calls for violence against Putin during his war of aggression?
This isn’t rhetoric; I’m just pointing out that it isn’t as black and white as people seem to make it. (It is black and white for me, as I’m with Asimov on the matter, but it isn’t for most humans.)
Technology that can be used to kill innocent people is all around us. Would it be moral to attack knife manufacturers? Attacking one won't make the technology disappear. It has been invented, so we have to live with it.
Also, it's a stretch to say that "AI" "kills innocent people". In the hands of malicious people it can certainly do harm, but even in extreme cases, "AI" can currently only be used very indirectly to actually kill someone.
Technology itself is inert. What humans do with technology should be regulated.
IMO the fabricated concern around this tech is just part of the hype cycle. There's nothing inherently dangerous about a probabilistic pattern generator. We haven't actually invented artificial intelligence, despite of how it's marketed. What we do need to focus on is educating people to better understand this tech and use it safely, on restricting access to it so that we can mitigate abuse and avoid flooding our communication channels with garbage, and on better detection and mitigation technology to flag and filter it when it is abused. Everything else is marketing hype and isn't worth paying attention to.
Apply this to guns.
Then look how this works in the US. You could, but then a law was made to protect gun manufacturers, The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
AI will get this treatment I’m sure.
if they're selling the knives knowingly to a knife-murderer, it might be worth discussing.
Sam Altman is not, although he portrays himself that way, some geeky guy without power who just builds products, he's the guy who makes the decision to supply this tech directly to the US government who is on the record about using it for military operations. And you're right on the last point. Sure the 20 year old guy who threw a molotov cocktail at Sam's house is, I'm going to assume for now given the topic Sam chose for the piece, an anti-tech guy.
But assume for a second you had your family wiped out in a bombing run because Pete Hegseth attempted to prompt himself to victory with the statistical lottery machine. If the CEO knew this and enabled it to add another zero to his bank account, not so sure about the ethics of that one.
I think the breakdown here is that conversation seems to have no power. To only be a bit hyperbolic, the only language with power is money -- or violence. To the extent that ordinary people cannot make change with "conversation" (which I interpret here to mean dialog within society, including with lawmakers), they feel compelled to use violence instead.
A non-rhetorical question: What recourse to non-billionaires have when conversation has less and less power, while money has more and more, and those with money are making much more money?
Michelle Obama's, "When they go low, we go high", is some of the stupidest political advice and a generation has lost so much because of it. (The generation before got West Winged into believing the same thing.)
When you look to the right, you have a stolen election in 2000, a stolen supreme court seat, an attempted coup, and relentless winning despite it.
But it seems a distant hope at best.
It was only a matter of time. The font on the dollar sign kept increasing, eventually selfish humans will always crack. Keeping it open had to be instilled with it becoming a public utility. Private companies don't do altruistic things unless they benefit.
It's like that old joke:
A man offers a young woman $1,000,000 to sleep with him for one night.
“For a million dollars? Sure, I’ll sleep with you.”
He smiles at her, “How about $50, then?”
“How dare you! I’m not a whore!”
“Look, lady, we’ve already agreed what you are, now we’re just negotiating the price.”
Similarly in this case, you can't make up absolutes and assert the're true, while ignoring that the real world is more complicated. And once you do realize the world is complicated, you realize there aren't absolutes: everyone is a prostitute, terrorist, or whatever other bad label you want to throw at them ... it's just a matter of degree.
So no, it's not always wrong to physically attack someone like this. You can debate specifically whether Altman has committed enough violence himself to justify violence against him: that's something two people can reasonably disagree on. But you can't just say "violence bad" like its some great pearl of wisdom, while ignoring that violence has in fact been good many times throughout history.
It is useful to have some degree of mastery in this discipline. Sometimes it is the only language that can deliver the important message to an unwilling listener.
Theft is a nice analogy here. The default model of theft is property crime but the largest type of theft is wage theft.
If we fret about violence done against individuals but not violence against groups our attention is going to end up steered in a narrow direction.
There are far worse things than physical violence against one person, and with the end of the rule of law there isn't any other recourse. The one value that is common across all cultures is that the wicked must be punished for their wickedness; expect to see violence against oligarchs and CEOs spread like fire.
Humans would be suffering far more today if we weren't willing to accept short term pains for progress.
It's easy to say we need to be willing to accept short term pains when it's someone else who has to bear the brunt of them.
I broadly agree. But… there are some who have lived who made the world a worse place. Who gets to decide? Trump has done a bit of this Sort of deciding and it hasn’t gone great so far and there is no sign that it’s actually helped.
The fact of the matter is these AI CEOs are actively trying to economically disenfranchise 99% of the human race. The ultimate corollary of capitalism is that people who aren't economically productive need not be kept alive any longer. Unproductive people are nothing but cost, better to just let them die. A future where the richest classes can turn the underclasses into soylent is now very much within the realm of possibility.
If this doesn't radicalize people into actual violence, I simply have no idea what will. "Attacking someone is wrong" is a completely meaningless statement to make to someone who believes society as we know it today is going to be destroyed. Honestly, I can't even blame them.
That sounds like something someone says when he understands his weak position, especially someone as ruthless, dishonest, and narcissistic as Altman.
As a defense contractor Altman is a legitimate target for a country that the US has attacked like Iran.
The US is engaging in military action against many countries and has threatened to annex or invade allies.
In that context Altman is 100% a legitimate target to those whose sovereignty is threatened and whose people are being killed.
I agree. The French Revolution was really, really mean.
This is our only chance to transition to a post-scarcity society. We won't have another. Allowing them to monopolize access to AI is a fatal mistake.
- John F Kennedy, 1962.
Malcolm X
There’s a whole bunch more here if you’re interested.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilantism
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law
Now back to reality.
Law: Epstein. ICE, Geneva Convention, Segregation
Bill: Going once, going twice, highest bidder wins. Ironic on a Sama thread.
Trial: OJ Simpson. Many miscarriages.
Vigilantism: Revolutions
I am not saying break the law. I am saying look back at history.
For context his blog post seems to be a response to this deep-dive New Yorker article:
"Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
Update: To clarify, my personal stance is that the critical tone was both intended by the authors and, in my opinion, appropriate given how much power Mr. Altman holds. If he has a history of behaving inconsistently, that deserves daylight.
Are you suggesting that they should have "both sides"-ed by reporting company PR and Sam-friendly sources and giving them equal weight? Sometimes the facts point in one direction.
Uh, no? Lol, I'm on your side, bud. Put away the pitchfork. I thought it was a really good and fair article. I am not the adversary you're looking for.
If a neutral look at your actions seems incendiary to you, maybe you need to rethink your own life and actions.
It should go without saying I don't think people should be attempting to light other people's houses on fire regardless of how distasteful they find those people.
I don't believe a word of Sam's "I believe" section.
If Graham says this guy will always stop at nothing to get whatever he wants, which I absolutely believe, then why would you trust anything that comes out of a person like that’s mouth?
If I was non-tech and owned a business, and someone (reputable) offers to teach me everything I need to get up to date with the most revolutionary technology of the decade (perhaps century?) for like ... 500 dollars? Why not?
You might actually need to attend an AI bootcamp. This is not 2022's GPT, AI can deliver plenty of value for a business owner these days.
I know he doesn't believe a word of what he wrote in that post except, perhaps, that he cannot sleep and is pissed. I know I should be used to people openly lying with no consequence, but it still amazes me a bit.
Well that makes two of us. Character seems to mean nothing today.
It has worked for him, repeatedly.
You linked a vague PDF whose promised actions are:
> To help sustain momentum, OpenAI is: (1) welcoming and organizing feedback through newindustrialpolicy@openai.com; (2) establishing a pilot program of fellowships and focused research grants of up to $100,000 and up to $1 million in API credits for work that builds on these and related policy ideas; and (3) convening discussions at our new OpenAI Workshop opening in May in Washington, DC.
Welcoming and organizing feedback!
A pilot!
Convening discussions!
This "commitment" pales in comparison to the money they've spent lobbying against specific regulation that cedes power.
Please don't fall for this stuff.
Unless AI companies knowingly participate in murder plots, they should not be liable.
Is Microsoft liable for providing Notepad, a product which can be used to write detailed and specific mass murder plots?
Is Toyota liable for selling someone a car that is later used for vehicular manslaughter?
Liability should depend on your participation in the event, of course. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to buy an axe, or a car, or use the internet at all. A closer analogy is ISPs not being liable for copyright infringement done by users, and subsequently not being required to police such activity for rights holders.
The text of the bill literally starts with "Creates the A.I. Safety Act. Provides that a developer of a frontier AI model shall not be held liable for critical harms caused by the frontier model if (conditions)", and defines "critical harms" as "death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1,000,000,000 of damages". The headline is, IMO, shockingly accurate.
> Is Toyota liable for selling someone a car that is later used for vehicular manslaughter?
No, but they are liable for selling a car with defective brakes, even if they don't know that the brakes are defective. And if the ex-Monsanto has to pay millions in compensation for causing cancer with a product that they tested to hell and back, then I don't see how that's different when the one causing cancer is an AI just because the developers pinky swear that it's safe.
Beautiful.
> Working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people
> We have to get safety right
> AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated
None of these statements, IMO, reflect his actions over the past 5 years.
> we urgently need a society-wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes things like new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future
I agree with this, but there is a near 0% chance of that happening anytime soon in the US. I think he probably is aware of this.
Just my opinion, but it comes off as very insincere.
To be clear, what happened is still awful and there's absolutely no justification for it.
> A lot of companies say they are going to change the world; we actually did.
Just couldn’t resist. So much of it reads like a marketing message.
Sam - when you say all society will benefit and that’s what you’re working towards, you can’t just say that. Nobody believes you and more importantly nobody has any reason to believe you. When you lead with that, and say nothing about what you are actually doing towards it, you make people work against you. When you put yourself up as a dictator for the collective needs of humanity, you have to put up or shut up.
So many put huge faith in you, but it’s turned out to be in the end entirely about you.
What happens when more and more people can't afford housing, kids, food, health insurance, etc.? Nothing more dangerous than a man who has no reason to live...
I don't advocate for violence, but I do foresee more headlines like this as things get worse.
I like the idea of being ”post-scarcity” as much as the next guy, but I don’t understand how we get there. It’s a project in itself, it doesn’t just happen by magic, and nobody is actively trying to make it happen or has any logistical idea of what it involves.
We’ll also lose a huge number of jobs as soon as true AGI comes on stream, by which I mean the kind of AI that no longer acts like somebody who has read all the world’s books but can’t figure out that you always need to drive to the carwash.
We’ll lose these jobs and there will be no super abundance at that point, and not even government support.
There is the option of passing laws requiring companies to retain human employees. That to me is about the only viable stopgap measure.
I think this is complete madness. Im not someone that is in a job so I have the luxury to think critically about what is going on and... I just dont see it.
What I see is that LLMs will complement Labour and the excess returns of model producers will be very minimal (if at all any) due to the intense competition - keeping switching costs to a minimum (close to zero). This is before mentioning open source models which I expect to continue to improve.
There is no specialisation re. models at this moment in time so it is very likely to be the case.
OAI and Anthropic have to generate enough after-tax cash flows from operations to cover their reinvestment needs to continue going on. If they can't cover reinvestment then they will obviously lose as their offering will not be competitive.
There's no certainty they generate this amount of cash profits either. They still have a high chance of going bust, of course that gets lower - IF - they can keep ramping up revenues.
This won’t happen because the AI companies will collude to prevent it from happening, meaning they’ll drop out of that race leaving the rest of us to claim victory.
Generous of them, really.
Price of tokens is one competitive-instrument for them to achieve that but not the only one - they offer a whole lot more to enterprises that OAI and Anthropic don't.
By doing so Anthropic and OAI's valuations go crashing into the ground along with future prospects of raising funding externally.
> What happens when more and more people can't afford housing, kids, food, health insurance, etc.?
What about when the opposite of this all happens, society massively benefits, and unemployment rates stay about what they have always been?
Will people still be yelling about the doomsday of societial collapse that has failed to materialize every single time?
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-russian-hill-mo...
It was a performative action.
I'm sure there will be a thorough investigation, unlike in the Suchir Balaji murder case where they rubber stamped suicide after half an hour despite him being a whistleblower.
This implies you have knowledge of future events, which means you could make a lot of money grifting on Polymarket
Genuine Q
His response here is a synthesis of 1) addressing the "incendiary article" 2) conflating it with a recent attack on himself and 3) joking about having "fewer explosions in fewer homes" at the end. As a reader it's hard to tell if he wants us to empathize with him or laugh at his misfortune. The self-depricating humor does not mix well with photos of his family and an (ostensibly) life-threatening situation.
From the outside looking in, Altman is stressed and showing the same traits that people are accusing him of. He "brushed [...] aside" the article without ever thinking about addressing it, and now he's sitting down "in the middle of the night and pissed" like some Jobsian seraph, furiously condemning society at-large for not understanding his vision where AGI is the end-times. This is probably reassuring news for the market, but on an individual level I'm having a hard time believing in Altman's narrative. OpenAI is a Department of Defense contractor, it's hard to believe that Altman is capable of resisting coercion when they've already capitulated for peanuts. If Sam was a sociopath, it would probably be very easy for him to justify this with threats of AGI and promises about how much safer we are with him in control. Coincidentally exactly what he spends much of this article reiterating, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
They had to stop putting Luigi Mangione in the media because public sentiment was not going the way they expected.
He's stood atop a soapbox, in earshot of everybody, and shouted to the corporations that because of him, they can now fire hundreds of thousands — millions — of people with impunity. It doesn't matter that it's not true and that the firings are probably not actually due to AI. But he's standing in front of them and providing the cover.
He's a marketing guy. He made himself the face of AI. His message out of the gate was that it was going to replace human workers. What did he think was going to happen?
It's like all of these people think that humanity has evolved out of the collective rage spirals that powered political revolutions in the 1500's, 1600's, 1700's — every 100's. Nope. It's always still there. We've had a middle class for awhile to mask it but it's being hollowed out and when it collapses completely, that ugly and ever-present human urge to eat the rich will rage right back to the surface again. Yet, they all seem to be apt to fight to be first in line to be the face of injustice during a volatile period for some reason.
It's kind of baffling but also interesting to witness.
If nothing else there’s a serious self-preservation incentive for AI CEOs to sort something out that doesn’t get them lynched, because it’s not looking good.
Seems pretty sleazy for him to associate that (based on no evidence!) with the violent attack.
2) It's atrocious that Sam makes it seem like any investigative reporting into him as a major public figure at the head of one of the 5 most important companies in the world is somehow responsible for it.
3) Sam is always playing the smol bean victim for sympathy points. To be clear, he is absolutely the victim of an atrocious crime. However, this post is not done for any reason other than to continue the exact same playbook he has for the last N years in order to manipulate public opinion to his favor. This post will do nothing to stop deranged, evail people but it may make people feel sympathy for him.
The analogy has 2 simple rules and you can't even follow them:
#1 It MUST be destroyed.
#2 SOMEONE has to have the ring until then.
Without BOTH of those things you have no meaningful analogy. If we're being super charitable, "For no one to have the ring" is Frodo sitting at the council, with the ring on the table, naively thinking that it can stay right there in that spot forever, safe in Rivendell, about to have the horrifying revelation that there are 2.5 more books in the story. More realistically, it's Boromir moments later arguing that Denethor has the mandate to use it to fight on Gondor's behalf.
Fuck. I'm so past the point of caring about the extinction of our species, or your role in enslaving us to our robot overlords or whatever... but SELLING US SPECIOUS RING ANALOGIES IS WHERE I DRAW THE FUCKING LINE
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/04/07/the-stra...
What a bullshit thing for someone who is not actually democratizing access to AI to say.
Actions have consequences. I’m sorry. Read a history book.
OK! So he's going to renege on the contract he's signed with Hegseth, which effectively commits OpenAI to serving as the IT Department for Trump's secret service?
The only thing surprising here is how naive you guys are. He is a marketing&sales guy in the first place.
Is it really, though? I could have bet money that would be the case. HN crowd is very gullible.
> It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.
Boy, he really just encouraged the world to keep turning against him. This is so transparently disingenuous. I guess he has no choice if he doesn't want to give up his wealth and power, but putting statements like these out are only going to further fuel anti-AI sentiment.
I do think it's funny he opened this with an allegedly real picture of a baby, though. It may very well be real, but why would anyone take his word for that, especially those who already don't trust him?
Don't get me wrong: others talk of a pattern of dishonesty, or that he's too eager to please*, and I'm willing to trust them on this because I found out with Musk that I don't spot this soon enough.
But what, specifically, do you see? What am I blind to?
* given how ChatGPT is a people-pleaser and has him around, Claude philosophically muses about if its subjective experience is or is not like a humans' and has Amanda Askell, and that Grok is like it is and has Musk, I think the default personalities of these models AI are influenced by their owner's leadership teams
That's about the least controversial thing I've heard recently. Luigi murdered a guy specifically because he was a health insurance CEO. Not because of something he did in particular, but because of the role he assumed. Terrorizing other CEOs is precisely what he intended to do. It is why there are so many Luigi fans, it is what they want too.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/luigi-mangione-due-in-co...
My understanding is that it was personal
"Prosperity for everyone" ... you lying weasel! You literally took a contract from Anthropic because they wouldn't mass surveil Americans or mass murder non-Americans ... and you would!
Think about something else: your house gets firebombed at 3:45am. How long until the cops wrap up and are done interviewing you? Two hours? How long until your family calms down and you can have alone time to write? He states it’s still night when he’s writing it. Yet he finds enough time alone to write a well-thought-out essay?
Yeah…seems likely.
But police have arrested a suspect:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/suspect-arrested-after-molo...
I'm not enough of a tinfoil hat wearer to think there's a grander conspiracy that the SFPD is in on, so I'm going to believe this really happened.
I do think him trying to tie it to press he has been getting lately is still a shitty and opportunist thing for him to do.
If any of the press is inaccurate and defamatory, sue them for it, he can certainly afford the legal costs. If not, then maybe he should act better so as not to come off as a sociopath when people do fair reporting on him.
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-russian-hill-mo...
"Around 3:40 a.m., the suspect threw a bottle containing a flaming rag at the metal gate of 855 Chestnut St., according to a police report."
He says "look at me I love my family" - so do the millions of people who think his company may destroy the economy and help corporations and the trillionaires put a boot to our children's necks.
3:45am in the morning - no dip, that's what AM is.
---
Someone here asked "How do we get to post scarcity from here?" and someone else said "no one knows".
The AI barons are loading up their bank accounts and political capital, driving us off a cliff and promising we'll learn to fly by the time we get there. But they're going to tuck and roll out of the driver's seat.
Sam, why do you expect us to believe anything you say when you have done nothing to lead the discussion about universal rights for citizens in a post scarcity society?
No one should need to attack (on the one hand) or "trust" (on the other) Sam Altman (or Donald Trump or Barack Obama).
Power is reliance by others, and that's conditioned on behaviors which are made observable and systems to ensure stakeholders' interests are maintained. Yes, there's some hero-worship, some arbitrary private power, some evasion of systems, and some self-dealing by leader coalitions (indeed, we seem to be at a historical peak), but that's not about him personally but about us, and our willingness to vote (writ large).
We do have to be careful about private power saying managing their issues are a matter for public governance (democratic or otherwise). It's a bit convenient to deflect blame (like having it be the jury that "decides" a case, because then you can't blame the judge). I like that Anthropic stepped up to pay any electricity increases, Apple has been recycling and cleaning up their supply chain, etc. If anything there should be a stronger support for contributing vs. Hobbesian corporations.
1) Working towards prosperity, etc. - the prosperity is all going toward the top 2%. The people who need it most are not seeing it and probably never will because the only ones who guarantee a benefit are the ones with the money to direct that benefit.
2) AI will be the most powerful tool, etc. - see point 1.
3) It will not all go well, etc. - probably should have thought about that before you released it on the world.
4) AI has to democratized, etc. - true, won't happen. See point 1.
5) Adaptability is critical, etc. - Yes. Fully agree.
The problem, Mr. Altman, is that you believe the rest of the world thinks like you do, which is clearly not the case at all. While we have the ability to solve so many of the world's problems, it is absolutely clear that this is not what's happening. The rich in resources are getting richer and they're not doing anything to help those poor in resources become better off. Instead, they are claiming those resources for themselves against the day that everyone else runs out.
Same as it ever was, Mr. Altman. Same as it ever was.
When it comes to people who openly incite or directly use violence. why do you think it’s unethical to attack someone like that? If one responsible from directly or indirectly killing hundreds, what’s the ethical argument to not use violence against that person?
Not trolling or anything I’ve been just thinking about this for a while and trying to understand what am I missing in this argument.
Force just works a lot of the time, assuming you can win, and often even if you can’t, as even imposing a cost on your opponent often gets you a better deal. There’s a reason we keep having wars.
Also realise that the government monopoly on force is ultimately the only reason that anybody follows laws. That following laws is good for us is beside the point - force must be threatened and used in order to maintain control.
So, force, a euphemism for violence, is ultimately the way anything gets done, and we all have an incentive to lie about this just for the sake of stability.
I don’t know if this answers your question, but it’s what comes to mind on the subject for me.
I focus on the question of vigilantism because that I think is the issue. Many people feel an emotional impulse, that they want to side with the CEO killer, for example, and they find ways to rationalize. What I'd say is, if you think Joe Blow is so evil , why don't we take him to court? What kind of possible actions could we not jail or fine him for but for which we would accept Johnny Anarchy, y'know, igniting his lawn furniture? Of course, the justice system is imperfect, but nobody lawfully elected the next sexy assassin as judge, jury, and executioner.
Your response is a cop out and you should be disappointed in yourself. Further, people do not often agree another human should be murdered. No matter how you phrase it.
Have you ever heard of the French revolution, the World Wars, collapse of the Soviet Union, or maybe more recently - the Ukraine war?
People are more than happy to see someone who brings suffering to others dead.
Of course, I'm sure lots of people would also want to see people responsible for those events be locked away in a prison cell for the rest of their lives, and for their freedom and privacy to be taken away - do you perhaps want to guess why people would prefer that over instantly killing them?
Every quarter there are more layoffs and we're told how AI will replace us and that we can do nothing to stop it. We cannot afford the simple things our parents were able to and are supposed to be grateful that we are living in a time with such "amazing" technological progress.
Sam is one of the most media-visible people that represents AI replacement of average people's livelihood (not agreeing with this stance but yes, outside of the Hacker News SF-tech matcha latte bubble, this is a commonly held thought) which makes this unsurprising.
Still horrible and not right.
I didn't firebomb his house, but I can't say I definitely didn't want to shit on his doorstep.
The sympathy is meant to give time and slack to accumulate power. One of the largest impediments to OpenAI right now is that people don't trust them, more and more people don't trust Sam, and their commitments are starting to not pan out (e.g. cancelling of Stargate UK, dropped product lines, etc.)
People should not read a post like this as, "how does this make me feel? how might I respond in his situation?", but rather, as he does, "how can I use this?"
Very reasonable response when you take a step back.
OpenAi doesn't have much time left before they are shuffled off into bankruptcy, and they certainly aren't ruling the fate of man or anything like that. It's like the CEO of Enron claiming to hold the key to the future of mankind's energy resources, and people writing ponderous articles about it and debating whether Ken Lay will be a benevolent dictator or not.
Because of him people are suffering immensely.
My heart goes out to everyone in this situation.
How so? What is your theory of morality Sam? What I hear is Google: "Don't Be Evil".
I am glad you feel my pain, Mr. Altman.
I must admit, I've been spared the experience, and I was under the impression that was true for most people!
Luckily, no. Do you frequently wade into comment threads shitting on others’ statements of their lived experiences?
It isn't just irony---It's lack of self awareness! (sorry for increasing the pain that Altman et al. inflict on us.)
> Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives. This seems like as good of a time as any to address a few things.
This kind of reads like “It is Ronan Farrow’s fault that some crazy person tried to burn my house down”.
Like this guy was going to go about his week, being normal and not making Molotov cocktails, but then he picked up a copy of The New Yorker and lost his mind
did he find his PR agent on Upwork or does he just think we're all morons?
Reason enough to pause and figure out the best way to continue. A massive societal change that won’t all go well means millions dead and tens more with their lives upended.
That is a lot of words, none of which state or claim the article was in any way inaccurate. Curious, that
It's like "hey you can say mean things about me but don't attack my family while I attack yours". Not that this is directed at him personally, but it's just this mindset of wealthy people..
I personally wouldn't go as far as to say the Farrow article caused this but it seems fair game to respond to an article that had an over the top cover image of an animated Sam Altan picking and choosing faces with a photo reminding people he's human like everyone else.
His name allegedly isn't even clear on his own! Ongoing lawsuit brought by his sister. (Amended as recently as a week ago and discussed in a flagged submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640048 ).
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."[0]
This means he acknowledges that his actions have the potential to kill every human family on Earth. It should be of no surprise that people took his beliefs seriously.
What FOBO smells like, is what's happening.
It's always funny when they pull out this argument when they've been working overtime to pull up the ladder and embed themselves in the MIC.
Listen, for people unaware of history things used to be a lot more violent as workers had to earn their rights with blood. The state had to respond by first attempting to squash it violently and second compromising in such a way as to ensure workers had a bit more power in the system.
As long as AI shit continues to consume the economy, kicking out people who can no longer find a job and survive while the government also removes any remaining safety nets, the end result is going to be violence. This doesn't make the violence right or just, but rather completely predictable. And if people don't learn from history then it will be repeated, unfortunately.
This might be the greatest example of cognitive dissonance I've seen in years. I can't understand how someone who's clearly highly intelligent can express this opinion, while doing the complete opposite. Does he think that everyone is a fool and that nobody will notice? Is this some form of gaslighting? Unbelievable.
Violence is not the answer, but it's easy to see how Sam's public persona would push someone to do this. There are certainly disturbed people who don't need any logical reason for violence, but maybe it would help if Sam stopped being so damn dishonest and manipulative. Even this post that is intended to gain sympathy ends up doing the opposite.
As a sidenote, I wish we would stop paying attention to these people. A probablistic pattern generator is far from the greatest technology humanity has ever invented. Get off your high horse, stop deluding people, and start working with organizations and governments to educate people in understanding and using this tech instead of hoarding power and wealth for you and your immediate circle of grifters.
> A lot of companies say they are going to change the world; we actually did.
Ugh.
What I would not do if there were attempts to kill me is post a picture of my spouse and child and point out how important they are to me with a photograph of them. It's literally trading a little bit of the safety of your family in exchange for sympathy from bystanders.
It's more valuable to discuss grievances than to pretend they are simply un-discussable in the wake of related violence (in the vein of "it would be disrespectful to talk about gun control in the wake of gun violence").
Well, this is already the economy right now: the very upper class is owning more than the vast majority, and consuming more than the vast majority.
"The top 20% of earners now make up over half of consumer spending"
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/08/stock-market-us-economy-ric...
>also means you are opting into homelessness, famine, cancer, climate change, etc. pretty much everything that we could solve with ASI.
All these could be stopped right now but many people don't want to. Your ASI is going to give the same answers scientists have been reviled for saying: tax more, don't let the free market decide everything, est less meat and drink less alcohol, consume less in general.
Human stupidity is the real problem and ASI isn't going to "solve" anything.
It's also insane that we have come to the point that you can say something like this and publish an Axios link when anybody could just go outside and see most people are employed, participating in the economy, not homeless, have food, buy things and enjoy luxuries.
Am I to believe that Jeff Bezos is the primary driving force behind Labubus? Is the Chipotle down the street waiting for Elon to come to town so they finally have a customer?
Does it matter if you're already a rich oligarch with generational wealth? All these ceos have enough money to last several decades beyond their life span, it doesn't matter to them is the slave class croaks
> slave class
This sentiment is by far the most ridiculous because you are simultaneously projecting a reality where AI does everything and so people are no longer needed, but at the same time people are needed and become a slave class. "Oh no the tractor was invented! Now nobody will need humans to tend the fields! They will surely now force us to tend the fields!"
EDIT: Looks like a mod rescued it (surprisingly) and it is now back to #2.
The rest of what is written doesn't matter. This isn't the moment for that conversation. That's his family. He has a fucking child.
Holy shit.
Wtf is wrong with you people? Get off my lawn and go back to Reddit where you belong!
I also believe that there will be more casualties in the AI Wars. We should be prepared for that. Capitalism, AI, and human life are mutually incompatible and I'm still not sure which two will survive the conflict.
OpenAI just needs to learn to manage products. They need to start finishing things rather than just shutting down projects without putting real effort into iterating on them to create viable business models. They are undisciplined. They’ve done this phony version of looking disciplined by shutting down Sora and nixing adult mode, but that’s superficial. The things they’re pivoting to are no more serious. They just sound serious. They gotta learn to create desire in consumers and design viral AI products. Like Apple. Consumer facing pop culture products. That’s the market that’s wide tf open. They can print if they get good at that.