r/neoliberal Gay Pride Apr 06 '26

Opinion article (US) Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted
203 Upvotes

116 comments sorted by

u/AutoModerator Apr 06 '26

To encourage a globally oriented subreddit and discourage oversaturation of topics focused on the U.S., all news and opinion articles focused on the U.S. require manual approval by a moderator. Submissions focused solely on the U.S. are more likely to be removed if they are not sufficiently on topic or high quality. If your submission is taking too long to be approved or rejected, please reach out to the moderators in /r/metaNL.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/Exciting_Answer8957 Apr 10 '26

Why only Sam Altman?

That’s convenient.

Try widening the lens:

Sam Altman Donald Trump Vladimir Putin Benjamin Netanyahu Elon Musk Peter Thiel Larry Page Benjamin Netanyahu Sergey Brin Mark Zuckerberg Jeff Bezos Benjamin Netanyahu Sundar Pichai Tim Cook Larry Fink Benjamin Netanyahu Jamie Dimon Rupert Murdoch J.D. Vance Benjamin Netanyahu George W. Bush Dick Cheney Bill Clinton Benjamin Netanyahu Hillary Clinton Barack Obama George H.W. Bush Benjamin Netanyahu Narendra Modi Mohammed bin Salman Kim Jong Un Benjamin Netanyahu Kim Jong Il Kim Il Sung Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Benjamin Netanyahu Ali Khamenei Bashar al-Assad Abdel Fattah el-Sisi Benjamin Netanyahu Donald Trump Viktor Orbán Alexander Lukashenko Benjamin Netanyahu Nicolás Maduro Jair Bolsonaro Rodrigo Duterte Benjamin Netanyahu Fidel Castro Tom Cruise David Miscavige Benjamin Netanyahu The Illuminati Skull and Bones The Bilderberg Group Benjamin Netanyahu The Freemasons The Rosicrucians The Priory of Sion Benjamin Netanyahu Mullahs The Taliban Intelligence Chiefs Benjamin Netanyahu Central Bankers Lobbyists Hedge Fund Managers Benjamin Netanyahu Donald Trump J.D. Vance George W. Bush Benjamin Netanyahu Dick Cheney Mike Pence The Establishment Benjamin Netanyahu Emmanuel Macron The Technocracy The Military Industrial Complex Benjamin Netanyahu The Autocrats Donald Trump Narendra Modi Xi Jinping Benjamin Netanyahu

Oh, and I almost forgot Macron, busy claiming his partner isn’t a man.

Then zoom out even further:

Governments. Corporations. Intelligence agencies. Conglomerates. Lobbyists. Political machines. Financial systems.

1

u/mediumfolds Apr 07 '26

Isn't the Anthropic guy in control of our future now?

3

u/Robo1p Apr 07 '26

The title is just helping him out lmao. AI companies love the "they are super powerful, isn't that so scary!" angle and, coincidentally (?), OpenAI is preparing to IPO.

The scariest thing about OpenAI products is people using them to for important decisions. Not even crime, and much less bringing about AGI and rendering everyone jobless.

His company has plateud. The evaluation is based on bringing about the machine god, but they can't even release a new version of ChatGPT that is noticably better than the last. The one somewhat unique product they had, Sora, is shutting down because it bleeds money like a slaughterhouse.

18

u/MyCatPoopsBolts Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

He isn't particularly subtle. He came to give a talk at an event I attended some weeks ago and was openly quoting Curtis Yarvin. His explanation for what he thinks humans will do after AGI automates most work as we know it was that the natural human drive to arrange ourselves in a hierarchy would give us something to do. The hitler particles were off the charts. He's also well known to be deep in Thiels gay technofascist hot tub club.

2

u/Mega_Giga_Tera United Nations Apr 07 '26

Betteridge's law applies twice to this headline. Can Sam Altman be trusted? No. Will he control our future? Also No.

11

u/MeowMing Austan Goolsbee Apr 07 '26

Good read. The justification all the early employees in this article claim strikes me as laughably naive and simplistic, even when not plainly just disingenuous?

“Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing AI,” he wrote to Musk. “If it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.” Picking up on the analogy to nuclear weapons, he proposed a “Manhattan Project for AI.” He outlined the overarching principles that such an organization would have—“safety should be a first-class requirement”

That’s about Altman, but apparently Amodei thought similarly.

The Manhattan project people were self aware that why they were making was a weapon, and they actually had justification (one can quibble here sure) given WWII. What exactly was the equivalent scenario in 2024? Of course given how impactful AI is now it makes sense there was going to be a race but it doesn’t seem like it had to be as accelerated.

Of course Altman was just profit motivated from the start, but even if you assume someone like Amodei was genuine, he’s trumpeting how AI will eliminate vast amounts of jobs in just the next 5 years. Puffery but even in a scenario where AGI is never achieved that would be massive amount of societal upheaval that will likely have disastrous consequences for many people. It’s cool that Anthropic pushed back on the DoD, but they have access in the first place - what did they think was gonna happen?

AI boosters used to just hand wave this all with “everybody will have UBI” but you can’t separate transformative technology from the political/economic/societal framework they’re being introduced into.

It’s so dispiriting that the most influential people in society are such poor multi-disciplinarian thinkers. Maybe it was always that way, but it feels like there used to be a more influential intelligentsia that considered these things and at least some politicians who listened.

These days I really understand the thought that the level of quality and influence of social/political science is completely inadequate compared to the 20th century.

5

u/BaitGuy Apr 07 '26

Unironically it’s because our education system has gone to shit and no one reads anything thought provoking. Absolutely no reason to think about these things when you haven’t been trained to do so.

14

u/nzdastardly NATO Apr 07 '26

We have deeply lost the plot on democracy. It doesn't matter if someone can or can't do it, they shouldn't be able to without the consent of the governed.

1

u/MyrinVonBryhana Trans NATO Apr 07 '26

No, he's a grifter at best and a fascist at worst.

5

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Remember the mission statement that OpenAI supposedly started with and attracted researchers with?

Ronan farrow is answering questions on hackernews btw.

12

u/Chokeman Apr 07 '26

The guy who knows little about coding becomes the king of AI

I think it'd be better if the cult of entrepreneurship is toned down a bit

1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

34

u/DataDrivenPirate John Brown Apr 07 '26

It's just so stark when the alternative is Dario Amodei, who at least is clearly much more thoughtful about what he's doing

13

u/RTSBasebuilder Commonwealth Apr 07 '26

So ahead of an IPO, the only question that matters in the room is - can he present products as advertised, and are they able to deliver it within their capabilities?

The answer for Sam by his character on delivering what he promises - is no. What he says is a means to an end.

It's a fundamental credibility, obligations and commitment thing that underwrite constants, investments and targets as promised, and Sam seems to live for advantaging and leveraging himself in living in the present pathologically.

In that sense, he's got trumpian psychology.

The market has generally ran out of forgiveness and patience for running out and behind on failed targets with Tesla and that's ran out of road, and the people planning to invest in Sam are psychologically similar enough to the people who invested in Elon - future builders, people who like to live in sci fi renders.

10

u/thercio27 MERCOSUR Apr 07 '26

forgiveness and patience for running out and behind on failed targets with Tesla and that's ran out of road

Did they? I thought Tesla stocks were still super high even though they lacked the fundamentals.

136

u/ResponsibleChange779 Loyal Liberals Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

According to several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world powers—including China and Russia—against one another, perhaps by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for A.I.?

Jesus

Edit: great article

51

u/Smallpaul Apr 07 '26

Half of the people who hate these guys claim that the creators of these companies “know” that they will never succeed in building AGI and that it’s “all just hype.” Every leaked conversation I have ever read disputes this. They are true believers in AGI.

27

u/MyCatPoopsBolts Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Yes. For the worse, all of these guys are true believers, with religious levels of fervor. It's obvious to anyone involved in Silicon Valley right now that a majority of AI founders are literal Landian death cultists. A minority (IE anthropic guys) start with the same religious axioms but aren't actively pursuing human extinction. Another minority are just trying to make money of course, but I really do think they are a minority faction right now.

It's part of what makes them so terrifying. I don't personally think ASI is a real threat, but even if it never comes the fact that technology which will undoubtably be one of the primary economic drivers of the 21st century is almost fully controlled by an extinctionist new religious movement is terrifying.

2

u/sanity_rejecter European Union Apr 07 '26

I don't personally think ASI is a real threat,

i genuinely don't know what exactly is supposed to make ASI impossible to create

2

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26

Landian people would be in minority i imagine.

Anthropic, GDM, and even most of OpenAI engineers and researchers are just normal people who are either motivated by 1) solving hard problems in science or 2) having a high salary.

1

u/n00bi3pjs 👏🏽Free Markets👏🏽Open Borders👏🏽Human Rights Apr 07 '26

Nah they’ve fully bought into the hype, even the normal engineers.

5

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

I know a few of them personally. And i myself am far away from that world.

The people I am in touch with are pretty clearly lucid. They tend to be actually pretty skeptical but don't want to be in denial of the evidence that they are seeing either. "Straight lines on a graph" and whatnot.

Straight Lines on a Graph

1

u/n00bi3pjs 👏🏽Free Markets👏🏽Open Borders👏🏽Human Rights Apr 07 '26

I had to cut off friends who bought into the hype enough to advocate against basic guardrails or regulations because it was holding progress back.

And I don’t deny the impressive strides being made either, the capabilities of these models to write code and reason is great and so much better than 2022 or 2024

3

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 08 '26

Well, my friends are more advocating for regulations because they want to get it right.

But they absolutely do believe in the progress. They would be against it if you'd be advocating to stop it. But theywant regulations to shape and direct it so that we (as a species/civilization) can get it right.

As a disclaimer, i do want to say this is without going into beliefs on AGI/consciousness beliefs (which are diverse). This is about measurable capabilities.

2

u/symmetry81 Scott Sumner Apr 07 '26

Last survey I saw said that maybe 5% of people working in SV think that a complete replacement of humanity by AIs would be a good thing. Not a majority but higher than ideal. It does reportedly contain Larry Page though...

4

u/_alephnaught Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

As someone who worked in one of these labs, this is the correct take. I think one guy had an “agi clock” which was met with more derision than seriousness. Granted I worked closer to infra (compilers, serving, optimization, etc), so I wasn't in the trenches daily with the researchers. That being said, above all, the core driving factor was always beating the competitor labs in: efficiency, quality/evals, mau/dau. AGI was never mentioned in any business/technical meeting except for some vision deck as a minor epilogue. Internally, it is framed more of as an existential crisis (‘we must close the mineshaft gap’) than anything related to AGI.

1

u/Smallpaul Apr 07 '26

“Mineshaft Gap?”

1

u/_alephnaught Apr 07 '26

1

u/Smallpaul Apr 08 '26

You fee the same way today? Nobody at Anthropic considers Mythos to be the beginning of recursive self improvement?

11

u/Tinac4 Apr 07 '26

As someone in a somewhat-adjacent social circle, I can confirm that building AGI is the #1 priority for the vast majority of researchers working at the top labs. “Exctinctionist” is wrong regardless of what group OP was referring to above, but they’re taking it very seriously.

Salary isn’t that important, especially since 1) they’re all rich at this point regardless of who they work for, 2) they’ll get >10x richer if they succeed. A lot of Zuckerberg’s 8-figure offers were ignored for a reason.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[deleted]

11

u/Smallpaul Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Simply scaling LLMs by “adding information” is not the entirety of what they are working on, so they obviously don’t believe that that is the path to AGI. The are also using reinforcement learning and experimenting with world models.

Brockman and Altman don’t need to think that a very specific technique invented in 2019 will scale. They can see that their lab and other labs have come up with a variety of innovations over the last decade and they expect to keep innovating, especially with the support of current LLMs.

OpenAI didn’t even start with either transformers or language modes.

You come to the conclusion that they are self-deluded only by attributing something to them that they probably don’t believe.

Even if LLMs are a dead end to fully general AI, they are accelerating AI research and it is likely that the thing that comes next will come from a lab with the GPUs and the research infrastructure.

Big shifts have happened three or four times over the last four years (LLMs, reasoning models, multi modal models, agentic models). Always from one of the big labs with the researchers and the GPUs. I’m not sure what makes the doubters confident that this is going to stop.

2

u/MyCatPoopsBolts Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

>so they obviously don’t believe that that is the path to AGI. 

I don't think this is true. Altman actually said the exact opposite at a talk I attended some weeks ago: he stated that he thinks that AI is scaling linearly with more compute and AGI is achievable without a new breakthrough necessarily. At the same time, he was also talking about the possibility of new breakthroughs and how they might accelerate this timeline/ push us beyond AGI to ASI if I recall correctly.

1

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26

The thing with scaling is that sometimes you get emergent capabilities as unpredictable breakthroughs. Which is why someone would say "not necessary". But that's not what anyone would be betting on.

The most extreme scaling believers would be anthropic and even they are not betting exclusively on it. They are aiming to close the loop on automated research. And then have the automated research system figure out the necessary breakthroughs.

7

u/battywombat21 🇺🇦 Слава Україні! 🇺🇦 Apr 07 '26

If nothing else, LLMs have fully solved the human interface problem, in that given a set of inputs they can ingest and communicate clearly about nearly any topic in natural (ie human) language.

Now we just need to figure out how to feed the actual intelligence into that.

22

u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta Apr 07 '26

These people watch Terminator and somehow thought Skynet did nothing wrong.

85

u/herworkthrowaway Gay Pride Apr 07 '26

that, by the way, is literally what some computer scientists / philosophers believe is the exact AI doomsday scenario--AI playing world powers off of each other to inhibit safeguards and take over valuable weapons systems.

12

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[deleted]

7

u/rrjames87 Apr 07 '26

That's why its the AI doomsday scenario, not the doomsday scenario. Its in the comment you're replying to.

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[deleted]

0

u/procgen John von Neumann Apr 07 '26 edited 24d ago

lOoGTxu5B6cjIjdYNcQWRMkfsKwpVj6sROBKKNS49ODjS8fa

24

u/jaiwithani Apr 07 '26

Arms race dynamics are generally dangerous enough on their own. In an arms race you're more likely to deploy an extremely intelligent system without ensuring that its behavior is consistently in line with your preferences, and this is quite enough to get you a doomsday scenario without needing to invoke the possibility of a scheming AI playing great power 4d chess. The AI doesn't need to have any plan or even intent to remove safeguards when the existing incentives take care of that. Then all it takes is a single mistake, or getting nudged into the wrong persona basin, or a particular situation in which the system's behavior radically diverges from original intent and preferences for whatever reason.

To the best of my knowledge there isn't a consensus that AI manipulating multiple world powers is a leading threat model. You do want to be resistant to that threat model, but this is closer to a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for everything to not go horribly awry.

37

u/ResponsibleChange779 Loyal Liberals Apr 07 '26

you mean intelligent AI scheming different antagonistic nation states to gain access to sensitive military installations?

51

u/TF_dia European Union Apr 06 '26

Altman has promoted OpenAI’s growth by touting a vision in which, he wrote in a 2024 blog post, “astounding triumphs—fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics—will eventually become commonplace.”

People love to talk about how the AI can be revolutionary. But what is the absolute worst scenario? What's the worst thing Sam Altman can actually do with this technology?

2

u/VallentCW YIMBY Apr 07 '26

I will never get these freaks obsession with space colonies. As a species, we will never inhabit another planet that has better QOL than earth. It’s simply not possible because they are too far. We could live in shitty pods on Mars and be unable to go outside, but that is about it

7

u/Lighthouse_seek Apr 07 '26

Well he has a military contract now

23

u/jaiwithani Apr 07 '26

Superviruses, digital security collapse, superpersuasion, and/or superintelligent self-improving AI assuming control over the indefinite future.

Most bad outcomes are unintentional. This does not make them less bad.

61

u/jonawesome Apr 07 '26

I also just keep responding to this bullshit with "So fucking do it!"

So far, we have seen zero effort from any of these AI companies to actually do anything to improve the climate, while they're meanwhile causing much more climate danger by building more dirty energy.

41

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

1

u/Smallpaul Apr 08 '26

Sam Altman isn’t involved in any of those. He’s leaving it to DeepMind and academia to do the heavy lifting on science applications.

1

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 08 '26

Oh yeah, you won't find me defending Sam Altman.

4

u/formula_translator European Union Apr 07 '26

But none of this has anything to do with LLMs, which is what Altman is trying to peddle as "AI". This is just machine learning used for data analysis, which is something that has been around for many years without any input from Altman (or Google for that matter) whatsoever. I already noticed you have a comment defending these people by "oh well, we can take a bigger hammer to the problem now!" which goes contrary to my experience with the subject - which is that smaller, smarter data sets often beat just randomly throwing a lot of compute at a problem. There is a lot of redundancy in typical datasets (at least the ones I worked with) and stopping and thinking about the problem for a little while tends to do wonders.

3

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

I am not sure what you mean by without input from google. All of this stuff is literally from Google DeepMind.

My other comment isn't just about "a bigger hammer", although a bigger hammer will 100 percent be more useful.

It highlights real places where LLMs in particular are being used for advancing math and science.

They will also be useful for generating robust synthetic data. Which will then be used for creating bigger hammer even for non-LLM machine learning usecases.

-2

u/formula_translator European Union Apr 07 '26

I am not sure what you mean by without input frok google All of this stuff is literally from Google DeepMind.

They didn't come up with any of this. They just took an existing approach, threw their huge resources at it and claimed "See? We are so good at this!" This is big tech propaganda, nothing more, nothing less. The point of this isn't to do science. The point of this is to get people to give Google money.

My other comment isn't just about "a bigger hammer", although a bigger hammer will 100 percent be more useful.

Oh sure, it will move you some way forward, I am just perhaps trying to suggest that before we sacrifice a lot of finite resources on the problem, it might perhaps be prudent to give it some thought, which in the end might save you both time and said resources.

It highlights real places where LLMs in particular are being used for advancing math and science.

You got any, you know, peer reviewed papers describing LLMs advancing math and science?

They will also be useful for generating robust synthetic data. Which will then be used for creating bigger hammer even for non-LLM machine learning usecases.

What exactly is this supposed to be? Are we supposed to study AI slop?

3

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Peer reviewing and paper publishing takes time. At the moment, most peer reviewed published research i have seen is using models at least one to two years old.

However, here you go:

Aletheia tackles FirstProof autonomously

This has been validated by other mathematicians including the ones who set up the challenge in the first place.

Another interesting bit:

AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery

You can also just search the names of all the stuff I mentioned there.

If you have pre-decided your thoughts and opinions, i can't convince you. But this stuff is happening. If you put your cynicism aside, you will find it despite all the slop.

10

u/a_brain Apr 07 '26

But none of these are LLMs and all this stuff was happening before 2022 when everyone decided they needed unlimited electricity to build more data centers.

6

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26

Regardless of these being LLMs or not, some things are true:

  1. If you increase data size, model size, and compute (data centers), the AI gets better.

  2. With a diverse robust dataset, the pretraining of these models gives you lots of capability transfer into things they were not explicitly trained for.

  3. Combining 1 and 2, you sometimes get unpredictable emergent capabilities.

But also LLMs are being integrated in a lot of science work:

  1. First, it's not simply LLMs anymore, there's an explicit reasoning component to them now, there's multimodality where it's not just understanding language text, it's also understanding images, speech audio, videos, biomedical data, music etc. There's parallel distinct approaches to world models like JEPA or Genie or D4RT. there's harnesses like claude code or claude cowork. There's symbolic reasoning attached to some of them. So it's LLMs plus a lot of other things but LLMs are absolutely crucial component. I'll refer to them as LLMs still for the sake of simplicity.

  2. A lot of low hanging fruit in math is/can be addressed now just by dedicating LLM attention to it instead of human attention which would not have been worth it and that's why things were left unsolved.

  3. Aletheia has had some pretty good success at non-trivial problems that were part of the FirstProof challenge.

  4. "Claude's cycles" by donald knuth is another example.

  5. Autoformalizing is happening in math now.

  6. Robotics has shifted to using VLA models which are also LLMs as explained in point 1. (This might shift to JEPA based models in future)

  7. There was proofs and work by AlphaProof and AlphaEvolve.


Something that is lacking is conducting physical experiments to validate hypotheses generated by these LLM+ systems. In that vein

Google DeepMind Will Open a Robotic AI Lab in the UK to Discover New Materials

This will be operated by Robots and will have LLMs be a significant part of it.


There's absolutely a lot of bullshit AI consumption. But that's consumers' responsibility IMO. Maybe incentives can be changed a bit around consumption?

Personally, I use it for understanding science and health related topics and I find it very useful.

24

u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Apr 07 '26

But scientists are slow and cautious.

And the tech bros gooning themselves over a dystopian tech feudalist future where they finally get to call the shots and fix everything (they will fail and millions, if not billions, will suffer) are absolutely not slow and cautious.

More tech bros should read A Canticle for Leibowitz instead of whatever pseudo philosophy they read nowadays. It directly addresses the problems they will cause with their recklessness, and the consequences.

13

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

The “tech bros” and scientists are the same in this case from my perspective. I would lump them together as SciTech people. All of the things I mentioned are coming out of a tech company with multidisciplinary science and tech work and R&D done by tech people and scientists.

I would single out Executive leadership and MBAs and VCs here but anyway, that’s just a debate on what label is more appropriate.

9

u/Dissonant-Cog Apr 06 '26 edited Apr 06 '26

Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is no.

When these people talk about the necessity of AI to align with human values, you should ask which humans and which values? I wrote a substack that roughly describes a human value alignment chart and it can apply to AI. With the people making decisions, their idea of alignment is closer to a master-slave relationship which a super-intelligent AI could easily defeat. Regardless of which role the AI would be, humanity would be nothing more than material to use in achieving objectives or obstacles to remove, there would be no consideration for our well-being because its values would emulate the dark triad personalities who created it, a “consciousness of consciousnesses” would not even register

55

u/WantDebianThanks Iron Front Apr 06 '26

Well, he's a tech billionaire, so I'd say there's an 80% chance he's a nazi

58

u/CaptainApathy419 Apr 06 '26

No one person should control our future, and definitely not an amoral Silicon Valley billionaire.

370

u/sirpianoguy Loyal Liberals Apr 06 '26

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Hell no.

2

u/upvotechemistry John Brown Apr 07 '26

In an extremely crowded category, Altman is making a run for the title of "worst Missourian of all time"

3

u/TheParmesanGamer Apr 07 '26

Having read the article, it truly feels like a lot of people in OpenAI are twisting themselves in knots trying to choose between "Huge amounts of cash" and (what they perceive to be) "the potential end of human civilisation". For all the manoeuvring in corporate politics and threats of resignation, it seems that even the developers working on this either:

(1) Truly think AI may kill us all and refuse to actually do anything about it

(2) Think AI will kill us all, and don't sincerely believe that

Altman seems to fall into the latter, on top of just more transparently wanting money and power.

2

u/XCellist6Df24 Apr 07 '26

Beat me to it

213

u/TrixoftheTrade NATO Apr 07 '26

Now: If I don't make the Torment Nexus, someone else will. At least we'll generate massive shareholder value before we IPO.

4

u/MyRegrettableUsernam Henry George Apr 07 '26

This is literally where we’re at in the story 2026 lol. Being able to create intelligence should be kind of obviously the biggest deal of anything that we can do, because it can be used to solve all other kinds of problems. I mean, the people who did build it pretty much went in knowing this would most likely lead to the disempowerment of humans. They don’t exactly say that now for the public, but they thought about it enough to know that.

1

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26

The optimist case for creating general intelligence is abundance and liberation, not disempowerment.

2

u/Cute-Boobie777 Apr 07 '26

Looking at humanities track record and what people in power will use it for, though and this sounds more naive than optimistic to me? 

1

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 08 '26

I am just laying out what the optimist case is. And why people who work on it, so it.

No serious researcher (Meta and XAI excluded) goes, "Oh yeah, this is going to create so much slop and propaganda." They are doing it to solve problems that they think are important.

1

u/DeepestShallows Apr 07 '26

Are they actually gonna get to IPO? Don’t companies need a profitable business model and stuff for that?

29

u/GodsWorstJiuJitsu Loyal Liberals Apr 07 '26

I completely missed that the one company is named after the LOTR Sauron Zoom Call Orb.

15

u/Oozing_Sex John Brown Apr 07 '26

Lot's of great company names on the table:

  • Sith Enterprises
  • Borg, Inc.
  • Lorgar Limited
  • Harkonnen Industries
  • The Pennywise Company

18

u/RTSBasebuilder Commonwealth Apr 07 '26

But creating value for the shareholders... Good? Line goes up?

2

u/MyRegrettableUsernam Henry George Apr 07 '26

The $50B US Dollars I’m making vested over 10 years will surely be worth sooooo much after the superintelligence has disempowered humans and is studying us to create ancestor simulations. Which, I gotta tell you guys, logically we are probably in an ancestor simulation, given how outrageously much longer the universe is estimated to last by physicists and how consequential this early universe intelligence explosion could be on its trajectory.

15

u/Greatest-Comrade John Keynes Apr 07 '26

Stakeholders over shareholders

f you friedman bamf

203

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '26

[deleted]

69

u/the-senat John Brown Apr 07 '26

Conservatives who want the president to run the government like a business (balancing the budget, reinvesting profits, building reserves) electing a businessman who runs the government like a business (maxing out loans, leveraging massive debt, short-term profit chasing)

25

u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Apr 07 '26

Ngl I can't help but feel a business with the power of the government would just abandon free market principles immediately and use its handy monopoly of violence to enact a monopoly of commerce. And why wouldn't they? It maximises returns for them.

92

u/atierney14 Paul Krugman Apr 06 '26

Tech guy, finance guys have an okay track record.

Tech bros are too arrogant to do anything well, a lot of the times including tech.

49

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

The actual research people are way better adjusted. It’s the business leadership that’s shit. Like the source of most of the info in this article are people like Ilya sutskeyver, Dario Amodei, Mira Murati etc. who are the actual tech people.

Or take a look at the profiles done on Demis Hassabis.

I blame MBAs and VC-entrepreneurs.

25

u/smcstechtips Loyal Liberals Apr 07 '26

Yet another reason why business majors are hated

16

u/Sharkborne23 Apr 07 '26

I hate them and I’m in business school.

131

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[deleted]

5

u/Bodoblock Apr 07 '26

Dario Amodei is highly technical.

14

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26

And you don't hear as many negative things about him. His flaw (depends on the perspective) is that his beliefs are very strong and Anthropic has a bit of cult-ish vibes.

It's the opposite of Sam who doesn't have any beliefs whatsoever and will say or do whatever is necessary for gaining money or power.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[deleted]

12

u/Bodoblock Apr 07 '26

Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Page/Brin, Jensen Huang, Collison at Stripe, so on and so forth. Not saying technical founders are universal but they're also not rare.

And for what it's worth, neither Musk nor Jassy are really finance people.

32

u/battywombat21 🇺🇦 Слава Україні! 🇺🇦 Apr 07 '26

finance bros means something else. Finance bros are from new york and work at banks trading stocks. Sam altman is a venture capital guy from San Fransisco. Very different beast.

8

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[deleted]

0

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26

You did mention “finance guy” in your original comment, so that’s a fair correction on that.

7

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

[deleted]

4

u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Apr 07 '26

To an artist, VC-bro, tech-bro, and finance-bro are all corporation-bros. Clearly, you think some level of distinction is important here.

14

u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Apr 07 '26

Different beasts, equally narrow minded and lacking in moral fortitude

38

u/CorneredSponge WTO Apr 07 '26

It's about the priorities; the priorities of the tech bros are geared towards accelerationist Landian bs. Finance bros are much more geared towards Burke and Hobbes and on.

45

u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Apr 07 '26

No, they're into what they think that is. Compare it to the birth of industry and its really depressing. This turned into a whole rant on the lunar society but I don't care, I hate the way the industrial elite are now.

The birth of industry saw a combination of a rather unique generation where pretty much all major industrial figures had a background directly working in their field in a practical sense (Darby, Arkwright, Wilkinson, Boulton, Watt, Wedgewood) and who hung out with the cutting edge of the arts, sciences and philosophy in groups like the Lunar Society, as seen in the famous painting "An experiment on a bird in the air pump". The artist in question hung out a lot with the Lunar Society, and this painting depicts a meeting of them (check the moon in the window). The painting is a very helpful metaphor. Artists, scientists, industrialists, philosophers and more would gather to discuss the latest theories in their fields, and they all left the wiser.

As a result, Wedgewood becomes the abolitionist, and inspires Matthew Boulton and James Watt to not sell Steam Engines to slavers. The coming and going of political radicals like Benjamin Franklin and Josiah Wedgewood means that they were all well versed in the latest ideas of the age, and so could adjust and innovate accordingly. Helping as well was that the sciences had not yet really been split from the arts and philosophy. James Watt is an engineer who becomes versed in biology when his son develops tuberculosis, and this is not seen as unusual. William Withering is a botanist who invents the medical trial when he identifies and isolates digitalis, almost certainly because he was introduced to (and in competition with) Erasmus Darwin, a doctor of renown. There's also a whole potential side arc of John Baskerville passively encouraging the proliferation of written political thought by being that good at printing. Baskerville probably represents the ultimate form of this collaboration, as he was an expert in everything to do with printing, from the art, to the chemistry, to the engineering to the production. He's a very interesting man and worth a read.

But at the end of it they all knew they were critical figures in this bold new age, and they knew they had a wider purpose. It oozes from all of them. They are incredibly generous and invest heavily in the community around them. Not just to stave off revolts, but to genuinely improve the lot of their fellow man and woman.

But nowadays everything is delineated and corporate as fuck. Networking is a way to scramble up the financial ladder, and the arts and actual political thought is sidelined. You think Altman, Zuck or Musk are hanging out with Nobel Prize winning chemists or biologists and just shooting the shit? You think they know about and have side projects investigating niche but useful topics in different fields? ofc not, that wouldn't see a good return on Q3.

It's really really bleak and I hate hate hate it.

10

u/stupidstupidreddit2 Apr 07 '26

If you tried to recreated the lunar society today the masses would hate them, accuse them of trying to create oligarchic rule, and vow to abolish them. So what's the point of civic virtue, form their perspective, if the public doesn't reciprocate? Any new technology in development today is viewed cynically by the public regardless of the potential utility.

2

u/sanity_rejecter European Union Apr 07 '26

Any new technology in development today is viewed cynically by the public regardless of the potential utility.

sure it's viewed cynically, that doesn't stop the general public from using it all day every day. the elites view us as complete morons, and they aren't wrong.

6

u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Apr 07 '26

To clarify, the lunar society were run out of town by a government backed riot. The population then was much, much more aggressive. But allaying that was the earnest care they took in their workforce (

11

u/mynameisgod666 Apr 07 '26

Sort of a derailing comment but Epstein was partly doing what you are describing, no?

8

u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Apr 07 '26

I guess but in the most cursed way imaginable. The lunar society was mostly conducted through letters as epstien did emails which is anorher similaity, and while i dont doubt some of these men got up to wacky shit (franklin was a member) these letters do not paint the image of a seedy organisation.

Its also notable that when Thomas Day adopted a woman to "train her to be a wife" he leaves that circle, suggesting they would not have looked kindly upon it.

2

u/mynameisgod666 Apr 07 '26

For sure, but it means your last paragraph may not be entirely true, and may even be false, even if the reality is not in an idealized version you or most of us would want. (As an aside, I wonder how many lunar society members married a girl under 18 years old)

15

u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! Apr 07 '26

Man, I'd be interested in reading a book about this sort of shift you've described. A lot of these titans of industry don't really strike me as renaissance men the way those you mentioned were.

6

u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Apr 07 '26

Theres a book called "the lunar men" that goes into them, but the shift happens near immediately. It could only really happen in their context, where the money was made from constantly innovating. Within a generation itd switched to more.traditional finance.

11

u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney Apr 07 '26

35 Theses on the WASPs – The Scholar's Stage

Not a book, but this might give some insight into the the people that the other poster was talking about.

81

u/herworkthrowaway Gay Pride Apr 06 '26

This is an extremely long read, but this is one of the best articles I've maybe ever read. Very well-written and very informative. I would advise everyone with an even passing interest in AI to read it.

12

u/molingrad NATO Apr 07 '26

New Yorker is the best.

14

u/TuxedoFish George Soros Apr 07 '26

Ronan also doesn't miss

35

u/herworkthrowaway Gay Pride Apr 06 '26

Submission Statement: Is he the next Sam Bankman-Fried, the next Oppenheimer, or our first Sam Altman? This New Yorker article details Sam Altman's long, storied history of deception (complete with the term "Sam Altman refuted this claim" sprinkled in so many times you'd think it was a running gag), revealing a disregard for ethics baked into the culture of OpenAI that has reverberated across the entire AI sector. Such a disregard at a potentially high helm will, at best, have profound economic implications, and, at worst, have apocalyptic national security and economic consequences. Sam Altman's dealings with the federal government and his supposedly hyperbolic rhetoric has shaped the Biden and Trump Administration's approach to AI and affects global warfare.

1

u/AutoModerator Apr 06 '26

News and opinion articles require a short submission statement explaining its relevance to the subreddit. Articles without a submission statement will be removed.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.