It says something that he still believes he has "missionaries" after betraying all the core principles that OpenAI was founded on. What exactly is their mission now other than generating big $?
> It says something that he still believes he has "missionaries" after betraying all the core principles that OpenAI was founded on.
What I find the most troubling in this reaction is how hostile it is to the actual talent. It accuses everyone and anyone who is even considering to join Meta in particular but any competitor in general as being a mercenary. It's using the poisoning the well fallacy to shield OpenAI from any competition. And why? Because he believes he is in a personal mission? This emits "some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" energy. Not cool.
It's absoluely ridiculous that investors are driven (and are expected to be driven) by maximisation of return of investment, and that alone, but when labour/employees exhibit that same behaviour, they are labeld "mercenaries" or "transacitonal".
He was very happy when money caused them all to back him despite the fact that he obviously isn't a safe person to have in a position of power. But if they realize they have better money options than turning OpenAI into a collusion against its original foundation and mostly for his benefit, well then they are mercenaries..
These examples of double standards for labor vs capital are literally everywhere.
Capital is supposed to be mobile. Economic theory is based on the idea that capital should flow to its best use (e.g., investors should withdraw it from companies that aren't generating sufficient returns and provide it to those who are) including being able to flow across international borders. Labor is restricted from flowing across international boundaries by law and even job hopping within a country is frowned upon by society.
We have lower rates of taxation on capital (capital gains and dividends) than on labor income because we want to encourage investment. We're told that economic growth depends on it. But doesn't economic growth also depend on people working and shouldn't we encourage that as well?
There's an entire industry dedicated to tracking investment yields for capital and we encourage the free flow of this information "so that people can make informed investing decisions". Yet talking about salaries with co-workers is taboo for some reason.
Those lower rates of taxation on capital don't even incentivize investment, because investment is inelastic. What else are you going to do with the money, swim in it?
It's just about rich people wanting a bigger share of the pie and having enough money to buy the policies they prefer.
Similarly, we have laws that guarantee our right to talk with our coworkers about our income, but the penalties have been completely gutted. And the penalty for companies illegally colluding on salary by all telling a third party what they are paying people and then using that data to decide how much to pay is ... nada.
We need to figure out how to have people who work for a living fund political campaigns (either directly with money or by donating our time), because this alternative of a badly-compressed jpeg of an economy sucks.
Couldn’t his claim apply equally to investors and employees? In both categories, people who are there to do stuff for mercenary reasons are likely to be (in his view) missing some of the drive and cohesion of a group of “true believers” working for the same purpose?
The contrast between SpaceX and the defense primes comes to mind… between Warren Buffett and a crypto pumper-and-dumper… between a steady career at (or dividend from) IBM and a Silicon Valley startup dice-roll (or the people who throw money into said startups knowing they’re probably going to lose it)
He claims to be advancing progress. He believes that progress comes from technology plus good governance.
Yet our government is descending into authoritarianism and AI is fueling rising data center energy demands exacerbating the climate crisis. And that is to say nothing of the role that AI is playing in building more effective tools for population control and mass surveillance. All these things are happening because the governance of our future is handled by the ultra-wealthy pursuing their narrow visions at the expense of everyone else.
Thus we have no reason to expect good “governance” at the hands of this wealthy elite and we only see evidence to the opposite. Altman’s skill lies in getting people to believe that serving these narrow interests is the pursuit of a higher purpose. That is the story of OpenAI.
> Also the only way multiculturalism can work is through a totalitarian state which is why surveillance and censorship is so big in the UK. Also the reason why Singapore works.
Singapore, if anything, is evidence against your claim about the UK. Singapore has multiple cultures, but it does not promote multi-culturalism as it is generally understood in the UK. Their language policy is:
1. Everyone has to speak reasonably good English.
2. Languages other English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil are discouraged.
The language policy is more like the treatment of Welsh in the 19th century, or Sri Lanka's attempt to impose a single national language from the 60s to the 80s (but more flexible as it retains more than one language). A more extreme (because it goes far beyond language) and authoritarian example would be contemporary China's suppression of minority cultures. I do not think anyone would call any of those multiculturalism.
The reason for surveillance and censorship in the UK is very different. It is a general feeling in the ruling class that the hoi polloi cannot be trusted and centralised decision making is preferable to local or individual decision making. The current Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill is a great example - the central point is that the authorities will make more decisions for people and organisations and decide what they an do to a greater extent than at the moment.
> Also the only way multiculturalism can work is through a totalitarian state which is why surveillance and censorship is so big in the UK.
That seems like a wild claim to make without any supporting evidence. Even Switzerland can be used to disprove it, so I'm not sure where you're coming from that assuredly.
The UK isn't totalitarian in the same sense that even Singapore is, let alone actually totalitarian states like Eritrea, North Korea, China, etc.
Switzerland has one of the highest percentage of foreigners in Europe, four official languages, a decentralized political system, very frequent direct democratic votes and consensus governance (no mayors, governors and prime ministers, just councils all the way down).
Switzerland set up in such a way that it absorbs and integrates many different cultures into a decentralized, democratic system. One of the primary historical causes for this is our belligerent past. I'd like to think that this was our only way out of constantly hitting each other over our heads.
The UK would need to have a well-funded and well-equipped police force to be a proper police state, and the rate of shoplifting, burglary etc that goes on suggests otherwise.
Lol, I'm sure Sam Altman's ideals haven't changed but you're a fool if you think OpenAI is aiming for anything loftier than a huge pile of money for investors.
They haven't released much closed source, open weights in comparison to their competitors, but they made their Codex agent Open Source while Claude Code is still closed source.
And with the others as well, the secret sauce of training is still secret. Their competitors' "open source" in Gemma, Llama, etc is closed source. It's like Mattermost Team Edition where the binary is shipped under the MIT license. OpenAI should be held to a higher standard based on their name and original structure and pitch and they've fallen short, but I think to say they completely threw it out is an exaggeration. They hit the same roadblocks of copyright and other sorts of scrutiny that others did.
A company's mission is not an individual's mission. I personally would never hire an engineer whose main pursuit is money or promotions. These are the laziest engineers that exist and are always a liability.
Everyone is the chairman of the board of their lives, with a fiduciary duty to their shareholder, namely themselves. You can decide to hire only employees who either believe in mission over pay or who are willing to mouth the words, but you will absolutely miss out on good employees.
I remember defending a hiring candidate who had said he got into his specialty because it paid better than others. We hired him and he was great, worth his pay. No one else on the hiring team could defend a bias against someone looking out for themselves.
And I would never work for someone with such a paranoid suspicion of the motives of their employees, who doesn’t want to take any responsibility in their employees’ professional growth, and who doesn’t want to pay them what they’re worth.
