Sam Altman: Long con was "child's play for me"

[fleaflicker]

That comment is clearly sarcastic. And Reddit went from floundering to $10b+ public company.

[blibble]

at this point it's beyond clear that assigning even the most cynical motives you can imagine to anything Altman does is likely underplaying what's really going on

(in my opinion)

[sixQuarks]

All 3 of the original founders have quit, this guy has sus written all over him

[tim333]

In fairness he did pretty well for everyone at Reddit seems.

[neilv]

> [flagged] Sam Altman: Long con was "child's play for me" (reddit.com) 160 points by upwardbound 1 hour ago | ...| 40 comments

Incidentally, in the comments here, `upwardbound` had an interesting plausible take on this familiar link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41657334

[asdfasdf1]

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Sam Altman

[haunter]

OP you can link comments with context

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

They did and the query parameters were removed from the URL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41657014

[drchiu]

To play in SV, you have to study Game of Thrones, Art of War, etc.

[antupis]

Generally, these cloak-and-dagger companies just vanish especially industry where is fierce competition because cloak-and-dagger stuff takes just too much energy from the north start. I would not be surprised if 2025 GPT-5 still is not out and OpenAI just drops the whole model + number concept and just starts calling it to gpt.

[jajko]

Hate to break it to you, but this is how C suite looks like in every bigger company, you don't even need to go multinational or S&P 500.

Now I am not saying everybody is exactly same, there is variation, but within the shades of grey. Same as politics - think about all the hard battles they had to fight for decades, how could a decent honest person not only survive that but also come out on top of all others? At the end, with right kind of eyes you can find pretty simple logic everywhere.

[Y_Y]

Altman, Ctrlman, Deleteman

[whamlastxmas]

Must be smart enough to watch Rick and Morty

[JSDevOps]

I don't understand.

[lazylion2]

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

with context

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

There’s an explanation from the submitter in this comment section.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41657334

[teekert]

Hmm, yeah me neither, there are just comments? I hardly ever use reddit and often leave confused.

[sub7]

Altman is basically a younger Elon. He failed to build his own company Loopt, already has disturbing allegations against him from a family member who I absolutely believe, and lied under oath.

I expect grand promises, nothing delivered, and a personal enrichment agenda that harnesses a cult of idiots while ruthlessly silencing/bankrupting critics.

[eterm]

I don't know how much I believe this.

One thing that successful people are often good at is taking their good luck and portraying it as a genius master-stroke of planning that no-one could have foreseen.

Claiming to have actually engineered the string of leadership crises that engulfed Reddit is a bit far-fetched, and I suspect just bragging and taking credit for something that just happened.

Did they ultimately benefit from those crises? Clearly, they were opportunistic.

But actually engineering that as some kind of master-plan comes across to me as an attempt to puff up their ego.

It comes across as sociopathic regardless of how much is fact or fiction.

[supriyo-biswas]

> Claiming to have actually engineered the string of leadership crises that engulfed Reddit is a bit far-fetched.

I've personally observed such engineered crises and the stakes were considerably smaller in these cases; if you have a sufficiently Machiavellian set of people at hand, you'll observe the kind of coups and tug of wars that you see here.

[sixQuarks]

You might actually be right

[qwertox]

How odd. Since yesterday I've bin thinking about him, that he might become the greatest con man of the century. Something along the lines, that, once OpenAI has archived AGI, he will keep it to himself in the sense that it will only be able to do what he wants us to be able to do with it, and to shape it so that it benefits him and only him.

Then there's also the possibility that, if he starts to feel "not liked" by the population, that he'll go into full Elon Musk mode and use his power to become the greatest pal of Elon and Trump and use the tools to suppress what he doesn't like, as a retaliation for the lack of love. If you look at his interviews, he barely shows friendly emotions, as if he's got some empathy-problem.

It could become quite dangerous.

[meiraleal]

He wants to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. But all his endeavors have this feeling of him taking advantage of real hackers to steal the spotlight. Like, he is the smallest contributor for the success of ChatGPT but became the face of OpenAI globally.

Not coincidentally, since many people more important than him left OpenAI, they lost the lead in LLMs development and Claude/Anthropic seems to be growing way faster.

[AnimalMuppet]

> ... once OpenAI has archived AGI, he will keep it to himself in the sense that it will only be able to do what he wants us to be able to do with it, and to shape it so that it benefits him and only him.

Once? Let's first worry about "if" rather than "when".

But if it does... the thing about AGI is that it will decide for itself what it wants to do. It won't be controlled like that by Altman or anyone else.

[red-iron-pine]

> It could become quite dangerous.

once speculation has become this obvious it means it has already become dangerous.

[JSDevOps]

> archived AGI

Have they even defined what AGI is?

[tessierashpool9]

can someone provide context? who is sam responding to and why?

[err4nt]

If you click the link under his message that says 'parent', you can see the comment he is replying to. I don't think there's a way to see both at once very easily because of the number of replies the parent comment has.

[lazylion2]

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

[JSDevOps]

So from what I understand, what they're suggesting is that, nine years later, he's either done the exact same thing, is about to do it, or is in the process of doing it. It feels like a repeat of the past, almost like we're watching the same playbook unfold again.

[heavyheavy]

Don't look into the rabbit hole of what he allegedly did to his sister.

[upwardbound]

With 144 points, this story suddenly went from being ~#12 on the front page to now being #70, on page 3. If any journalists or regulators are reading this I recommend that possible astroturfing behavior (collusive downvoting (flagging)) be investigated, and I'm happy to cooperate with any investigation if contacted.

[buran77]

As it happens with every discussion touching on sufficiently sensitive skin ("offending" some people, countries, etc.). One can't imagine that an article trashing a former president of Y Combinator will survive well especially on HN where burying any discussion in the "flagged" category is absolutely trivial.

It doesn't mean the information in any of these articles is true or false, just that the mere existence of the discussion offends, so it's promptly pushed under the table through a voting system that is exceptionally ripe for abuse.

[meiraleal]

If you are really into it, write a blog post about the reddit thread (and the flagging of this thread?) and post here.

[upwardbound]

Nearly simultaneously, the comment in this thread which explains what Yishan was saying suddenly dropped from being the #1 comment to being below a bunch of other comments, which makes this whole thread harder to understand unless you scroll down. This is despite the comment having 17 points and high engagement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41657014

The fact that these two things which both benefit Sam happened simultaneously (the story dropping from the front page and the explanatory comment dropping from the top of the comments) is suggestive of collusive downvoting/flagging and once again I want to state that I have screenshots showing this playing out minute by minute and I am happy to collaborate with journalists or regulators.

[JSDevOps]

Ah, I see. So, what they're suggesting is that, nine years later, he's either done the exact same thing, is about to do it, or is in the process of doing it. It feels like a repeat of the past, almost like we're watching the same playbook unfold again.

[givinguflac]

Altman? Manipulative, dishonest and generally a bad person? Gasp shocked I say.

[upwardbound]

Thread context: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

HN removes the "?context=3" when submitting the link as a post, which is why I have to put it here in a comment.

Credit to dalant979 for surfacing this, which they did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652513

[upwardbound]

If I understand the history correctly, Yishan (the former Reddit CEO) is talking about himself when he talks about a CEO in this story, and so Yishan's post is a brag, with a thin denial tacked on at the end. That's why I believe that Sam (Yishan's friend) is also engaging in thinly-veiled bragging about these events. Here is Yishan's comment with his name spelled out for clarity instead of just saying "CEO":

    In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.

    Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager [named Yishan Wong] with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, [Yishan Wong] would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.

    Once this was done, [Yishan Wong] and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.

    JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.

-- yishanwong

My understanding of what Sam meant by "I could never have predicted the part where you resigned on the spot" was that he was conveying respect for Yishan essentially out-playing Sam at the end (the two of them are friends) by distancing himself (Yishan) from the situation and any potential liability in order to leave Sam "holding the bag" of possible liability.

[dang]

You can't post personal attacks to HN, regardless of which person you have a problem with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. No more of this, please.

Yes, it would be the same in the case of anybody else.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. We've had to warn you more than once before, and it looks like you've been continuing to break them.

[upwardbound]

Another post which is on the front page with fewer points and older / more stale time is "Writing Portable Rendering Code with Nvrhi" with 5 points from 3 hours ago.

To be clear, I do not believe that the HN moderators are doing anything wrong, but rather that Sam or his friends use a lot of accounts to flag anything bad about him, suppressing those posts.