Comment by ronanfarrow

Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much about that.

I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors.

If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love to hear about it.

If you were in charge of the deciding what should be done with Sam Altman, what would you choose?

Who is “us”? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex for its math capabilities but when it comes to general frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills library.

Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems

I also find Codex much more generous in terms of what you get with a Pro ($20/mo) subscription. I use it pretty much non-stop and I have yet to hit a limit. Weekly reset is much better as well.

I prefer GLM 5.1 and MiniMax 2.7. With a better harness like Forge Code, I have better results for way less money than by using GPT and Opus.

Usage limits are more generous and GPT 5.4 is a good model, but yes, UI/UX lags behind Claude Code. Currently I'm especially missing /rewind with code restoration and proper support for plugin marketplaces

GPT/claude/gemini is pretty interchangeable at this point.

Does this work for people? To me having a "better product" would be completely irrelevant if the use cases are evil.

i find myself being more productive with codex/copilot on coding tasks, but claude does seem to be better at planning

Here’s a reality check.

There are two types of vaccine be coders. Those who review the code generated and those who don’t.

Either because they don’t understand code at all, or because they don’t have time and don’t care.

Code quality is only one factor. Naive vibe coders, who don’t code otherwise, rate performance based on output alone.

Shill talk

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Here is the actual link, not a link to some weird third-party site that can't be trusted.

https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532

But by page 5, those stories have around 50-60 karma, while claude page five is still 500+

(i found your comment surprising based on my daily hn reading recollection - i mostly read top N daily and feel i only occassionally see codex stories).

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It wasn't getting "brigaded down" - it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. I turned that off as soon as I saw it.

Fair request, here you go: https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041203911697068112

Thanks for the response! Cheers just fully reread the piece and appreciate your reporting.

It's super neat to see you here on HN taking questions, kudos :)

Correct, because there truly isn’t a great way to answer with certainty - there was evidence in the 80s of suggestive techniques being used by poorly trained psychologists, and there are many people who remember and then find corroboration.

There’s a lot more who remember and may not have corroboration more than with themselves and among their close friends or healthcare provider. Part of CSA is usually there is very little a kid can do about evidence, as the power discrepancy is far too much. Often with rich abusers, the exact same process occurs. Perps pick victims who are vulnerable or controllable, and constantly seek power and domination. Nothing to do with the boardroooms or batch of ceo billionaires running the economy right now certainly.

What's the evidence that Annie is rich?

> recovering" memories as a therapy

Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy that leaned heavily on suggestion or was associated often with fairly coercive interrogations during the 80s CSA panic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria

> Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't conflate them.

Agree, though I think the mechanism can be a bit more towards the idea of a “recovery” of traumatic memory, even if the term as understood carries false connotations.

The concept you’re missing is dissociation, and dissociative disorders. In the 40s it was called just “hysteria”, and for many cases up to the late 90s an extreme form was called multiple personality disorder, now DID (dissociative identity disorder). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder

Not everyone who goes through traumatic events will respond to it via dissociation of identity, and indeed not all people are equally capable of developing a dissociative disorder, 2 people may go through very similar events (say survive a war as siblings or even twins) and one might dissociate the traumatic experience and one might not. Dissociation doesn’t work quite like you might imagine from a term like “multiple personalities” - that happens in some extreme cases, but think of identity dissociation as an adaptive response to events or situations that are paradoxical (esp to a child’s mind), extreme or traumatic, and can’t be escaped or use of other mechanisms cant be called upon.

Dissociation is on a sort of spectrum, where at one side you have common experiences like zoning out when on a common commute, and on another you have separated self-parts/alter egos to handle wildly different situations.

It’s a mechanism I frankly wasn’t aware of and I’m not sure that I would be able to fully beleive or empathize with, but for my getting a diagnosis of a dissociative disorder changed my life, and made a thousand things about me that I could never figure out make sense. The “model” as it put it at the time responded to experiment, and by recognizing that I was dealing with pretty constant, heavy dissociation and different self states with memory deficiencies helped me figure out how to work through a ton of really intractable problems for me. I’m finally after decades of ineffective therapy able to really understand how I work.

Idk how to talk about it without sounding like I’m trying to sell the idea. But yeah it was a mind blowing thing to me. Over the last 20 years especially a ton of truly respectable research has been done and the increase in efficacy of treatments on dissociation, and trauma generally is one of the unsung advancements for humanity in the last decade. I think the number is that around 3-6% of people meet the clinical criteria for a dissociative disorder - OSDD, DID, DPDR, or dissociative amnesia. 5x more people than have schizophrenia, 5x more than have red hair.

My favorite public clinical resource I point to people is the CTAD Clinic YouTube - https://youtube.com/@thectadclinic?si=5AyR5H8K8Cf2sn3C

Pretty easy to understand explainers from a clinician in the UK.

For a more clinical and study approach this one is the currently best put together research IMO: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97810030573...

The TLDR is dissociation is an important mechanism that most people don’t know about but has had a wave of research and study and is much more common than one might expect. The sad part is how often dissociative disorders correlate w abuse.

Only anti-trust action against big tech to break their ad monopoly (to make journalism profitable again) and breaking up media conglomerates (to reduce concentration of power in the journalism industry) can save journalism from becoming just a mouthpiece for the powerful. These things can only happen through politics. We need a political solution to save journalism.

Got it! Any recommendations on who to subscribe to? Any personal links for you?

In developer communities often you can support individual developers or groups through a monthly subscription / donation on their github page or similar.

Treating quality investigative reporting like the scarce resource that it is, as one of the most well-known can you shed any light on why Reuters would delegate resources to commission investigative reporters to unmask Banksy (in a world where all-things-Epstein represents an unending source of investigative opportunities in the public interest)?

I'm a mod here and wanted to let you know 2 things: (1) I've marked your account with a beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page). It might help you keep track of this rather large thread.*

(2) I'm sorry the post was downranked off the frontpage for a while this afternoon. A software penalty kicks in when the discussion seems overheated ("flamewar detector") but I turned this off as soon as I became aware of it. We make a point of moderating HN less when a story is YC-related (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) but as this goes against standard internet axioms, people often assume the opposite.

(* And yes, any reader who wants this is welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com to ask - I haven't turned it on for everyone because I'm worried it would slow the site down. Also, it's a bit buggy and not only have I not had time to fix it, I've forgotten what the bugs are.)

Not a question but just wanted to make sure you saw this:

https://theonion.com/anyone-else-have-those-weird-dreams-whe...

It’s good to have you! We try to keep it civil :)

Yeah, every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good... Until they find themselves working somewhere else, then suddenly they have a lot to say about the unacceptable things going on there.

From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice folks who are primarily concerned with money and status. That's not a condemnation, but I reject all the "do no evil" fanfare as conveniently self serving.

I find it bizarre even the public image of Anthropic is seen as ethical after the Department of War debacle, in which they themselves admitted they had basically no qualms with their tech being used for war and slaughter at all except two very very thin lines, namely mass surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weaponry with their current models.

It only showed they were marginally more ethical than OpenAI and XAI which isn't saying much.

Maybe people inside the company think Anthropic behaves ethically, which says something scary about either their ethical standards or their general awareness, considering how much documented unethical behavior we've seen from Anthropic leadership.[1]

[1] "Unless Its Governance Changes, Anthropic Is Untrustworthy" https://anthropic.ml/

If you know even the basics of ethics then such claims are clearly nonsense. There is no stable context independent ethical behaviour. This is a great example of the dangers of motivated reasoning.

I have multiple friends at Anthropic. I can second this. One thing I notice about Anthropic culture is that it is unusually kind.

So much so that I worry they won't be Machiavellian enough to survive. Hope I am wrong.

>the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere

Anthropic is emphatically not safe. None of the AI labs with customers (i.e., excluding a few small nonprofits whose revenue comes from donations) are anything like safe -- because of extinction risk. The famous positive regard that Anthropic employees have for their organization's mission means almost nothing because there have been hundreds of quite destructive cults and political parties whose members believed that theirs is the most ethical and benign organization ever.

The best thing you can say about Anthropic is that if you have to support some AI lab by becoming a customer, investor or employee, it is slightly less dangerous for the world to support Anthropic than OpenAI although IMHO (and I admit I am in a minority on this among extinction-risk activists) it is slightly less dangerous to support Google Deep Mind or Mistral than Anthropic.

All four organizations I mentioned should be shut down tomorrow with their assets returned to shareholders.

The current crop of services provided by the leading AI labs are IMHO positive on net in their effect of people and society, but the leading AI labs are spending a large fraction of the 100s of billions of dollars they've received from investors on creating more powerful models, and they might succeed in their goal of creating models that are much more powerful than the ones they have now, which is when most of the danger would manifest.

The leaders of all of the leading AI labs have the ambition of completely transforming society and the world through AI.

I think cynicism is deserved just from observing Dario's remarks.

Im curious — how do ethical and safety conscious manifest themselves there? Is it more cultural or process driven? Do you have any examples?

> the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere

I wonder what Anthropic tries to achieve by spreading such blatant lies with their bot accounts. I'm definitely not buying anything from a company so morally corrupt to smear the competition while claiming to be somehow "ethical". And I'm not talking just about this thread, it's a recurring pattern on Reddit.

Are your friends also credited in Silicon Valley (2014)?

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I think you might be surprised that more and more Software Engineers are souring on Anthropic (the company) and the decisions the company has made recently. Not the whole drama with the US Government, but them locking down the usage of plans to their own tooling.

That really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, as ultimately one might have a favorite tool, then suddenly they are forced to use another tool.

The New Yorker has given plenty of coverage about Anthropic in their past issues earlier this year.

"how easy it is, for those of us who play no part in public affairs, to sneer at the compromises required of those who do" - robert harris

Not making any value judgements, but I can see how one might value their interpretability research higher than what the ceo says in a time where the corrupt, criminal executive branch is muscling in to everything from what's written on currency, to journalistic sources. I generally blame fascists before i blame those unable or unwilling to resist them. though obviously, ideally, we'd all lock arms and, together through friendship, crush authoritarians and fascists.

Fuck that. The whataboutism term is used to much to sideline an marginalize different view points. I really hate this use of it. We are too engaged in being right about everything.

This is PG's response about Sam leaving YC. It says nothing about the original motivation of offering him the position at YC.

"I'm a sophomore and I'm coming!"

I am appreciative of your work on this piece. I'd love to see one that goes deeper into Dario Amodei. Perhaps even a series of profiles on the central figures of this AI era.

Is this something you've thought about?

Hey, just want to say thanks for the piece and for all the hard work and effort you did to get this out there. I've published a bit here and there, and the actual writing is only ~50% of the work load (for me at least). So thanks for going through all the effort and pain to get it out, really appreciate all the work you do for me and the rest of Joe Public.

If you want another story to run, I'd really love to see an investigation into how these different companies are convincing governements that the only path forward to win global dominance is through achieving 'agi' first and how much that contributes to the reckless acceleration of ai software and infrastructure development

Also a good expose on accelerationists and e/accs and who among the elites fall in this group is direly needed as well

I think the comment was out of legitimate interest rather than weighing one against the other

Huh? It's a genuine question. The article is great and the writer did a fantastic job.

Please try to give people the benefit of the doubt though I know it's hard in today's society.

I love how the investigators got taken for a ride too. I heard them on NPR talking about how Altman was genuinely grappling with his "desire to please everyone" and etc etc after having just described him as someone who tells people what he thinks they want to hear..

Incredible.

I want to add something about the idea of persuasion. Not that I think you are not doing the word justice or that you are for or against using the tactic.

Here is the etymological definition of the word:

persuasion(n.) late 14c., persuasioun, "action of inducing (someone) to believe (something) by appeals to reason (not by authority, force, or fear); an argument to persuade, inducement," from Old French persuasion (14c.) and directly from Latin persuasionem (nominative persuasio) "a convincing, persuading," noun of action from past-participle stem of persuadere "persuade, convince," from per "thoroughly, strongly" (see per) + suadere "to urge, persuade," from PIE root *swād- "sweet, pleasant" (see sweet (adj.)).

Meaning "state of being convinced" is from 1530s; that of "religious belief, creed" is from 1620s. Colloquial or humorous sense of "kind, sort, nationality" is by 1864.

IMHO if you aim to convince people of something you are on the side of trying to control people's freedom to chose. That in itself is a form of being unethical to the idea of truth.

If you can't let people come to their own conclusions, you got problems and you shouldn't be in a position of power.

In my experience the people who spend the most time convincing are people with narcissistic personality disorders. I stay far away from those people because I know they dont really value truth and justice like I do.

FWIW, this comment should be immortalized, somehow. I am replying, so that I can find this in the future. This describes, to an eerie degree of detail, some of my own interactions with people in the industry, as well as interactions that my friends have had.

The industry seems to attract people who can only be described as smooth opportunists, always a shy step away from becoming confidence artists. People with big dreams of material success, but with next to no ability or talent, and with a tragic lack of self knowledge (and often a lack of domain knowledge). Pure entitlement and greed, and a desire to use other people as a bridge to the stars[0].

I will say this, however: they do have a keen sense of what the incentives are. They will keep doing this, for as long as society keeps rewarding them, and refuses to punish them. And unhooking those incentives is not difficult: do not let them externalize blame, do not let small dishonesties pass, do not let them internalize praise that belongs to someone else, and, most importantly, do not look the other way, when they decide to cannibalize the career of someone else, in order to nourish their own.

Silicon Valley, since at least the Web-2.0 days, has been about nerds making frat-bros rich, in exchange for a livable wage (salaries tend to be only slightly in excess of cost-of-living, unless you are willing to live either far away from your workplace, or in a small moldy-smelling box of a studio). This is a bad deal. Silicon Valley idolizes Steve Jobs (even when he was alive), but gives little thought to Steve Wozniak (upon whose work, Apple and the PC industry were built). When I was in college, both Jobs and Dennis Ritchie died within a short time of each other. Silicon Valley mourned Jobs, but only a few of us nerds mourned Ritchie.

Silicon Valley chose to name the most innovative car company in the country "Tesla", but it attracts and cultivates legions of future Edisons and Morgans[1]. And that is perhaps the perfect allegory for Silicon Valley: a car company named after someone like Tesla, but owned and operated by someone like Elon Musk[2].

[0]: Maybe this is an ancient human affliction. Did the pharaohs not do the same in their day?

[1]: Funny parallel, that since 2009, SV has been trying to rent out compute and storage, instead of just selling it outright.

[2]: Another pretender, seduced more by the warm glow of gold, than the cool blue crackling lightning of a Tesla Coil.

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>I think sometimes you have to look at the patterns rather than at the single claim. If a large amount of people, that are completely unrelated, tell you very similar experiences they had with Altman, you can take that as a good indicator of his general character.

Yes, but that doesn't work if you look for patterns selectively. There are large amount of people who will tell you vastly different experiences that they had with Altman. If you pick the right grouping, within it, you can find universal praise or condemnation. The article itself acknowledges that.

>The article also mentions many moments where apparently Altman straight out lied.

Does it? It has people saying he lied, and a few things he disputes that he said. If the lies were clearly apparent, I think his position would not be tenable. Which points in the article do they show statements that it clear that he has said them, that they were false, and that he knew they were false when he said them?

The points you list are not clearly apparent lies. At most they are allegations of lies. They might just be different interpretations of the same events. I have seen instances in my own life where someone has said "You said X" the other person says "No I didn't", The first then pulls up the minutes, and says "See you said X", the other responds with "That's not what that says". You see rage bait posts about terms and conditions that take that form all the time. Someone misreads a legal term as meaning something different to what it means in a legal sense and then refuses to acknowledge the commonly accepted definition.

Please respond to this, because I really am interested in the answer, but I did read the article and I didn't see what you appear to have seen.

I have made no claim to the merits of Sam Altman, I just don't like the idea of condemning someone on hearsay and insinuations. There are videos on YouTube claiming he's had people killed. At some point you have to point at something that everyone can agree on is an actual thing that happened and that it actually matters. At most what I have seen is people being able to provide one of those two points on any particular allegation.

I don't feel this should be that contentious. If it were clear there would be demands from all around saying "You did this bad thing, you must resign". Do you think that everyone dealing with OpenAI acknowledges some dark truth and is complicit?

What kind of situation would I choose to use the word presents in that context without being aware of that fact?

I am also aware that sincere people present that way.

I don't believe there is any rational way to consider the appearance of innocence as evidence of guilt.

When people are described as sociopathic it’s not about any particular lie, but the relationship that the person has with the truth, which is that they will lie when it suits them and tell the truth when it suits them and they don’t seem to distinguish morally between them. And more than that, they treat people the same way, and will use them while it suits them and then dispose of them when they are inconvenient.

I cannot find a single action of anyone that cannot be construed as an attempt to get them power/money/influence. I can believe that a persons intentions are good, but I can't make everyone in the world do that, and that is what you are asking.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him"

To play your game, he got married, had a child, and joined an AI research organisation at a time when everybody thought the big advances were much further away than they turned out to be.

You could still construe those actions as evil if you choose to see them as evil.

I'm not going to claim that Sam Altman is not a sociopath, I lack the information and knowledge of psychology to make that determination. On the other hand I have not detected those attributes in anyone who has claimed he is a sociopath.

It seems odd that people seem to take offense at the notion that arbitrary people do not reach a conclusion that requires specialised expert knowledge and a decent amount of irrefutable evidence.

Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.

Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course, I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" - I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers they have :-)

In "that's, like, your opinion", "like" is an interjection, you can take it out and not change the meaning: "That's your opinion".

In "investors were like, you need to grow", you're semi-quoting someone, and can't take it out: "investors were you need to grow".

Pretty sure the correction is wrong, not merely a stylistic choice.

Sure, there are a couple of buttons I can press to stop the video. Why do I have to? Find me one person who likes auto playing videos. The page was created with a deliberate annoying choice that I have to go out of my way to override.