30 Comments
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HowardNYC's avatar

Q: how many AI obsessed tech bros to change a light bulb?

A: 8,468;

27 to tour the world, proclaiming how the lightbulb symbolizes an incandescence of pure thought, a realm of revised reality, where we can all aspire to be gods;

34 to convince naive investors to provide $20,000,000 in venture capital; then a year later convince foolish investors to provide yet another $300,000,000 because the first round of fund raising has been burned through;

8,407 technical experts to frantically code up something that will never quite work properly;

David Hope's avatar

This is a brilliant reply. I shall laugh the rest of the morning!

HowardNYC's avatar

{ takes a bow }

Graham Lovelace's avatar

All aided and abetted by 200 government leaders praising the light bulb’s ability to deliver double digit economic growth and millions of high-income jobs for each light bulb storage warehouse.

HowardNYC's avatar

heh

your prose will be plagiarized

check your vemno… you should expected payment upon Jun 31, 2026

har har

Scott Mowbray's avatar

They funny thing is, the New Yorker piece added not much to what was completely obvious if you just watched Altman’s maneuvers and his interviews. He is a blatantly slippery, hypocritical, possibly sociopathic liar—and it’s all there in public. I kept expecting a huge reveal, but here was none: just more of the same, more of the same.

MediocreLocal's avatar

He’s an inhuman sociopath with zero connection to humanity.

LS's avatar

Wild

ENDEAVOR MADNESS's avatar

Can I say "Bubble" already ???

ChatGPT is my like my least favorite AI

Thank You Ronan Farrow : ) !!!

Lee's avatar

“Safety-adjacent” ? WTF?

That’s AI grift-lord speak for “Hold my beer - watch this!”

Peter Thompson Cl's avatar

He seems to get along well with his sister,

Jeff Mayhew's avatar

The similarities between Adam Neumann/WeWork and Sam Altman/OpenAI are striking, which makes Masayoshi Son a savant at finding delusional founders and handing them piles of cash to light on fire.

Lia P's avatar

This is the trend in tech though. Privileged sociopathic men with a technical degree who dropped out of school (cause they are too smart to learn from anyone else) are getting millions from privileged sociopathic men who buy into their bullshit. The result - inefficiently allocated investment with thousands of worthy projects languishing while a few bros are getting rich at everyone else’s expense.

If we don’t insist on rigor and due diligence for investing our savings and pension funds, this cycle will continue.

Anonymous Skimmer's avatar

Make government-funded R&D grants (NIH, etc.) and corporate incubators (Xerox PARC, etc.) great again. Savings and pension funds typically get in once the die has long since been cast, and the winners already selected.

Chris Conti's avatar

Altman seems too smart for his own good which typically translates to someone who puts his own interests over the mission. From the rift with Musk over OpenAI’s non-profit structure, to his ouster by the board, to his alignment with Trump, to his contract with the DoD on the heals of Anthropic’s ouster, Altman may yet turn out to be AI’s greatest grifter.

Dario Archer's avatar

sammy was creepy to me within the first 2 minutes of his debut…what followed confirmed it.

Me's avatar

AI has gained traction with all the wrong people BECAUSE it is easily manipulated to perform as the ultimate affront to reality / truth.

Anonymous Skimmer's avatar

| “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

Reminds me of the biopic on Stephen Glass. Or the articles about Adam Wheeler at Harvard.

Fred Malherbe's avatar

"Why it matters: Altman told us… that AI superintelligence is so close, so mind-bending, so disruptive that America needs a new social contract—on the scale of the Progressive Era in the early 1900s, and the New Deal during the Great Depression."

This is the social contract America needs, the only way we will get technology under human control, now and into the future. All that's required is CONSCIOUSNESS. Metanoia.

https://systemshaywire.substack.com/p/the-threefold-social-platform-truly

Azria Raventhorn's avatar

Thought this was gonna be about the *other* allegations agaisnt Altman

Lee's avatar

That OpenAI board member was describing Altman and Trump

What terrible times we live in

TJ's avatar
Apr 9Edited

They're twin by to go public, and they're freaking out. They just bought the Silicon Valley podcast darling Technology Business Programming Network to try and control the narrative.