Sam Altman

I think that is a terrible idea because it does nothing to address the real problem - economic growth being largely captured by ultra rich people. Sure everyone who is invested in stock market will be richer, but people who need most help are not buying stocks. Taxation is hard, so far Sam Altman's capital tax is least worst option I've heard: https://moores.samaltman.com/ . It does have it's deficiencies... It's wealth redistribution, it might slow down or even completely stunt economic growth, and given current political climate and corruption and is highly unlikely to be implemented. At the same time humanitarian value alone it would bring is so astronomical that I believe we must try it. It would also greatly expand middle class which should boost the economy long term.

This does imply some innovation is needed in how taxation happens. That is also something Sam Altman agreed with in his piece. This is an easy and simple problem to solve and all the leadership at that level has agreed on the spirit of the query as far as I've seen in their commentaries. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it yet, it's really good: https://moores.samaltman.com/ I think once tens of millions of jobs are going away and everyone needs to retrain into the types of work that are still available, we'll pretty seamlessly be able to transition into a UBI model where everyone affected becomes a college student or learns a trade or craft again, with UBI making it a graceful and exciting Great Reset without anyone falling by the wayside. Because at that point, the real economic efficiency gains still exist except at a marginal cost of effectively 0. This means that with automation you can just print what you need and everyone's standard of living skyrockets. This is because commodities are plentiful on a big planet like this one and others. I think the "BS jobs" concept is missing the mark a little. Those aren't BS jobs. They're just the jobs that have been most visibly automated the fastest. They may still retain, say, 25% of the useful and necessary functions that those roles require. But because of how culture and legislation lag behind technology in rate of adoption, people still feel the need to put up with appearances of working a specific amount of…

In 2015, about a year before ever founding OpenAI, Sam Altman wrote: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could." https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

It seems Sam Altman has the same suspicion, based upon his response: > There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921

The absolute gall of this guy to laugh off a question about x-risks. Meanwhile, also Sam Altman, in 2015: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could. Also, most of these other big threats are already widely feared." [1] [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

We need to stop using AI as an umbrella term. It’s worth remembering that LLMs can’t play chess and that the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks. Generative AI - which the world now believes is AI, is not the same as predictive / analytical AI. It’s fairly easy to demonstrate this by getting ChatGPT to generate a new relatively complex spreadsheet then asking it to analyze and make changes to the same spreadsheet. The problem we have now is uninformed people believing AI is the answer to everything… if not today then in the near future. Which makes it more of a religion than a technology. Which may be the whole goal … > Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions. — Sam Altman - https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people

"We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it." - Sam Altman, Jan 2025 'as we have traditionally understood it' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections#:~:text=We%20believe%20that%2C%…

The current trend started when people noticed that sam altman doesn't capitalize sentences, primarily in tweets. In longer form, I do think people should feel bad for writing like this. Like you said, capitalization has genuine utility and, without them, it makes the blog post a nightmare to read. Case in point: even Sam doesn't write blog posts like this https://blog.samaltman.com

> We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents "join the workforce" and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes. "Reflections" by Sam Altman, January 2025 - https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

Gotta put the optimism in context vs. previous Sam Altman writing. Here he says: > Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp. Six months ago[0] he said: > We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. This time: > we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways My summary: ChatGPT is already pretty great and we can make it cheaper and that will help humanity because...etc Which moves the goal posts quite a bit vs: we'll have AGI pretty soon. Could be he didn't reiterate we'd have AGI soon because he thought that was obvious/off-topic. Or it could be that he's feeling less bullish, too. [0]: <https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections>

This is similar in content and tone to Steve Jobs's incredible Stanford commencement speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc Also similar to the broad life advice found in Sam Altman's essay The days are long but the decades are short: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short Please share any related recommendations!

I personally love this chef's kiss of a flip flop sam did here: https://blog.samaltman.com/trump https://www.reddit.com/r/YAPms/comments/1i7ry5m/sam_altman_glazes_trum… Only a truly talented piece of shit can be as prolific as this. "He is irresponsible in the way dictators are." Chef's kiss. Edit: Kids, don't aspire to be like Altman. We as a community need to espouse more values than tech is gonna tech.

FTFA: ""We are now confident that we can spin bullshit at unprecedented levels, and get away with it," wrote frequent OpenAI critic Gary Marcus in response to Altman's post. "So we now aspire to aim beyond that, to hype in purest sense of that word. We love our products, but we are here for the glorious next rounds of funding. With infinite funding, we can control the universe."" Marcus wrote the above in response to Sam Altman's recent post that claimed "we are now confident we know how to build AGI": https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections.

Sam Altman's list is still my favourite: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short It echoes much of the things in this thread, but if you're ambitious and looking for advice, it's also got plenty of advice. I do agree that it's important to enjoy your youth. Don't plan too much for 20 years from now because everything will change a lot.

Don't forget... Sam Altman! (Also, Sam Altman: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." Feb 15, 2015, before he co-founded OpenAI. https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1)

> In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. - https://moores.samaltman.com/ (March 2021)

Your text-container width could be a little wider, but your main problem is that your colors are terrible. Day-mode background could be anything from off-white to financial-times color (ft.com). Text color should be a dark grey. If you want a nightmode, fire up Visual Studio Code and take notes. vitalik has a pretty decent day and nightmode. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html sam altman demonstrates how nice grey text is. https://blog.samaltman.com/

As a pleb, the article linked below is his biggest accomplishment that I know of, and I am not being sarcastic: https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity I do think it's cool that he is investing in fusion and life extension, and it seems "reasonable". Obviously, as a pleb, it's very hard for me to know what's reasonable. As a side note, the whole concept of going from pleb to someone is fascinating, though I do think it's myth most of the time (e.g. Musk, Bezos, Caesar, Alexander the Great, etc). edit: Just skimmed his bio again. Kind of fascinating how one person grinds code and begs to be promoted to senior / architect and another is directing billions. Sam, if you are here, drop some advice.

This AI is solely trained based on the blog of Sam Altman: https://blog.samaltman.com/ . Ask me anything about what Sam has said

I genuinely believe Worldcoin/World ID is terrible for optics and is not something Sam should have put his name on. That being said, here's my strongman argument: Sam is scared of the ramifications of AI, especially financially. He's experimenting with a lot of things, such as Basic Income (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/basic-income), rethinking capitalism (https://moores.samaltman.com/) and Worldcoin. He's also likely worried about what happens if you can't tell who is human and who isn't. We will certainly need a system at some point for verifying humanity. Worldcoin doesn't store iris information; it just stores a hash for verification. It's an attempt to make sure everyone gets one, and to keep things fair and more evenly distributed. (Will it work? I don't think so. But to call it an eyeball identity scam and dismiss Sam out of hand is wrong)

A 9,500 word article about what OpenAI and Sam Altman want without mentioning Worldcoin/UBI is quite a feat... especially since it seems to be a major part of the end state he's aiming for. See the description in Sam's blog post "Moore's Law for Everything"[1] (cf. "dividend") The dichotomy of aggressively pursuing "AGI" while simultaneously warning that it is an "extinction-level threat" is bait for regulators who might think centralized AI + a CBDC-delivered UBI is the right path forward. [1]: https://moores.samaltman.com

AI weapons are terrifying. We should probably ban them for use on us soil. But is it ethical to use something elsewhere that’s so terrifying we would never want it used on us? (Any ethicists would answer “no”). Then the question is will someone else build AI weapons? Obviously yes. Then we have to ask is it sensible to avoid building AI weapons if someone else is doing it. Probably not. It’s a delicate and difficult problem. One we should probably get to work on. The economic disruption of AI will in some ways be more catastrophic. We should probably get to work on that too. Some interesting solutions have been proposed. https://moores.samaltman.com/

Things will be shaken up, the way they were when the steam engine was invented. But there's no reason to believe we're headed for a dystopic future. The result of this development and the underlying trend is vastly increased wealth creation. That's a good thing. You'd have to be a luddite to think otherwise. Read e.g. https://moores.samaltman.com/, where Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) suggests a scheme for wealth taxation that gives everyone direct ownership of the AI-created wealth and the machinery to make it. I'm pretty confident that there would be strong democratic support for a scheme along these lines, given how few are able to participate in the highest echelons of the wealth creation in the kind of AI-driven society that will happen before AI becomes truly autonomous.

One of my favorite pieces I've read of his. Interestingly, he mentions Sam Altman in the footnotes, who quite recently wrote more on the topic: https://blog.samaltman.com/idea-generation

I agree! The best websites are those maintained by individuals without a profit motive. Here's a short list that I've started collecting: - Kevin Kelly: kk.org - Patrick Collison: patrickcollison.com - Patrick McKenzie: kalzumeus.com - David Perell: perell.com - Berthub.eu - Alexey Guzey: https://guzey.com/ - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ - https://dcgross.com/ - Paul Graham: paulgraham.com - https://nintil.com/ - Laura Deming: https://www.ldeming.com/ - Sam Altman: https://blog.samaltman.com/ - Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/

Although not mentioned in either the article, or the essay it links to [0], Sam Altman is also a big proponent of Universal Basic Income[1]. My understanding is that part of his rationale for UBI is that certain types of jobs will disappear, partially due to AI. [0] https://moores.samaltman.com/ [1] https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/basic-income/

I'm not entirely convinced narcissism is something that has to be fixed. There are some aspects to it that are of course destructive as you mentioned (not enjoying listening to other people, and taking things to personally). Fixing these things I think comes down to enjoying the people you spend time with, and a radical belief that things will work out no matter what happens. But there are other aspects of narcissism that really lend themselves well to success. Overconfidence/inflated egos are some of the only ways that you can take on really big challenges ahead of you. (See Sam Altman's blog post on this - https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful, and PG's tweet - https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1217724728644861953) I'd love to hear what other people think :)

While I personally find Asana clunky and slow (I've used many tools for project management: Notion and Jira are by far what I personally enjoy the most, followed by Airtable at a distant 3rd), Sam Altman's perspective on Asana are interesting to look at for a more positive outlook on the company: https://blog.samaltman.com/asana

meanwhile Sam Altman is writing essays about how China enjoys greater freedom than America. If you think I'm kidding: https://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove

I'm not sure if you're referencing his post or not, but Sam Altman has an excellent piece about this exact mindset. I meditate on this idea quite a bit. https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short