I work at OAI, but I'm speaking for myself here

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are. This is so true. And not confined to HN.

> I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public. To most people I'd think this is mainly for entertainment purposes ie 'palace intrique' and the actual facts don't even matter. > The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context. That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are). > What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident. What conclusions exactly? Again do most people really care about this (reading the story) and does i…

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are. Some topics (and some areas where one could be an expert in) are much more prone to this phenomenon than others. Just to give a specific example that suddenly comes to my mind: Grothendieck-style Algebraic Geometry is rather not prone to people confidently posting wrong stuff about on HN. Generally (to abstract from this example [pun intended]): I guess topics that - take an enormous amount of time to learn, - where "confidently bullshitting" will not work because you have to learn some "language" of the topic very deeply - where even a person with some intermediate knowledge of the topic can immediately detect whether you use the "'grammar' of the 'technical language'" very wrongly are much more rarely prone to this …

This is a strangely defensive comment for a post that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to say anything particularly damning. The fact that you're rushing to defend your CEO sort of proves the point being made, clearly you have to make people believe they're a part of something bigger, not just pay them a lot. The only obvious critique is that clearly Sam Altman doesn't believe this himself . He is legendarily mercenary and self serving in his actions to the point where, at least for me, it's impressive. He also has, demonstrably here, created a culture where his employees do believe they are part of a more important mission and that clearly is different than just paying them a lot (which of course, he also does). I do think some skepticism should be had around that view the employees have, but I also suspect that was the case for actual missionaries (who of course always served som…

The other side of it: some statements made internally can be really bad but employees brush over them because they inherently trust the speaker to some degree, they have additional material that better aligns with what they want to hear so they latch on the rest, and current leaders' actions look fine enough to them so they see the bad parts as just communication mishaps. Until the tide turns.

Your comment comes across dangerously close to sounding like someone that has drunk the kool-aid and defends the indefensible. Yes, you can get the wrong impression from hearing just a snippet of a conversation, but sometimes you can hear what was needed whether it was out of context or not. Sam is not a great human being to be placed on a pedestal that never needs anything he says questioned. He's just a SV CEO trying to keep people thinking his company is the coolest thing. Once you stop questioning everything, you're in danger of having the kool-aid take over. How many times have we seen other SV CEOs with a "stay tuned" tweet that they just hope nobody questions later? >if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different If you haven't drunk the kool-aid, you might feel differently as well. SAMA doesn't need your assistance white knighting …

> Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168 Sneaky wording but seems like no, Sam only talked about "open weights" model so far, so most likely not "open source" by any existing definition of the word, but rather a custom "open-but-legal-dept-makes-us-call-it-proprietary" license. Slightly ironic given the whole "most HN posters are confidently wrong" part right before ;) Although I do agree with you overall, many stories are sensationalized, parts-of-stories always lack a lot of context and large parts of HN users comments about stuff they maybe don't actually know so much about, but put in a way to make it seem so.

Okay, but I've also heard insiders at companies I've worked completely overlook obvious problems and cultural/management shortcomings issues. "Oh, we don't have a low-trust environment, it's just growing pains. Don't worry about what the CEO just said..." Like, seriously, I've seen first-hand how comments like this can be more revealing out of context than in context, because the context is all internal politics and spin.