That's probably why they are two of the most powerful men currently in existence.
When there is something genuinely acknowledged as being valuable - and a $900B company certainly qualifies - people are going to fight over it. Only natural, because in most cases the way to get power is to fight for things that will make you powerful. Just look at the history of Facebook or Twitter or Google Chauffeur/Waymo or Cisco or the U.S. presidency.
When you get wealth and power without fighting, it's usually because you managed to identify something that would eventually make you powerful without anyone else realizing that it's important, until you become too big to overthrow. This is the story of the Google founders or E-bay or Github or...I can't really think of others, it's a pretty rare path to success. Either that, or seem non-threatening and mild-mannered enough that nobody attacks you and then be the last one standing after all the combative types have destroyed each other, like how Sundar got to be CEO of Alphabet or Bran Stark won the Seven Kingdoms.
Google's executive leadership team in the late 2000s to early 2010s famously consisted of a number of very strong and ambitious personalities. Amit Singhal ran Search Eng; Marissa Mayer ran Search PM/UX; the two of them famously did not get along, to the point where they would actively undermine each others' decisions. Alan Eustace was over them and often responsible for mediating, but he was close to retirement (which he later did to set the world record for highest skydive [1]). Sundar started by running the Google Toolbar efforts and then Chrome. Andy Rubin was in charge of Android. Urs seemed content to run hardware and datacenter ops; he's one of the non-combative ones, and is still there now though he's semi-retired. Likewise with Susan Wojcicki and Ads. Milo Medin had been brought in from Excite@Home to lead Google Fiber. Sebastian Thrun and Anthony Levandowski had been brought in from acquisitions to form Google Chauffeur (now Waymo).
Over the 5 years between 2010-2015, the search PM/TLM org chain basically revolted and said "We can't get anything done when Marissa tells us to do it one way and Amit says no, we have to do it another way". Marissa was moved to run Geo and then eventually left to become CEO of Yahoo. Amit himself got canned over a few sexual harassment complaints. Alan Eustace retired, as everyone expected. Andy Rubin made some ill-faited acquisitions of Motorola and Boston Dynamics that lost him a lot of cred, and then the nail in his coffin was when the media discovered his sex dungeon [2][3]. GFiber failed to gain significant traction, so Milo wasn't really a viable successor candidate (arguably he wasn't really in the running, and was there just to run Google's ISP ambitions). Anthony Levandowski stole Google's trade secrets on self-driving cars and sold them to Uber; he was criminally convicted for this but was pardoned by President Trump and is now founding a religion [4]. Sebastion Thrun left to found Udacity.
Sundar, meanwhile, steadily delivered on Toolbar, and then Chrome, and then took over Android when Andy Rubin was ousted, and steadily improved Android as well. He was unremarkable on the product front, but had a reputation as a peacemaker among Google's more volatile execs, as well as a very good translator of Larry's brilliant ideas into terms that mere mortals could understand. When he became CEO, it wasn't because he was remarkable, but because he was unremarkable enough to manage a number of remarkable personalities that had the egos to go along with it.
This is probably true, given his history with YCombinator, ties to Thiel and Microsoft, leadership of OpenAI, and other investments in Reddit, AirBnB, Stripe, and others.
Power doesn't always look like what you think it does.
Agreed, we've seen the kind of world-power level shenanigans that Elon can pull. He's directly messing with governments, manipulating markets, and even influencing the course of armed conflicts by controlling StarLink. Altman can only dream of that kind of power. Which he well might be doing, but he strikes me more as the type to pursue conventional political power.
Unfortunately, even if they do it wont change anything. Unless the rich are punished by the "lowly" folk, nothing ever happens. Revolutions seem to part of the past though, life is _just_ comfortable enough to not actively do something about the upper classes wrongdoings.
I guess the good news is that humanities time is slowly ending anyway due to untackled climate issues. I wonder how Europe will handle the 200 million people having to flee their countries within the next few decades.
Things that could happen: some major outage or corporate self-destruction through aggressive LLM usage creates a valuation dip that puts Sam too many bajillion dollars away from the katrillions of revenue they need, kicking off dotcom-bust 2.0, Elons snowballing of debt and lies into bigger balls of debt and lies hits what nuclear reactor designers call a “negative void coefficient”, and — xAI CSAM class actions finally entering courts around the same time — his whole drug and suspicious foreign backer fuelled empire goes Chernobyl, leaving a radioactive pile no one will touch for decades. Nature reclaims the half-built data-centres and robo-factories as investigations into prolonged fraud patterns kick off.
Much more likely: the two of them and POTUS launch and AGI NFT with Federal Reserve backing, pump it to the sky on their social media platforms, and ensure their genetic propagation programs can afford all the bunkers and colony ships they could ever want. Whee.
"His" companies seem to do better when he's not around. SpaceX has been doing good things while he was distracted with the Cybertruck, then Twitter, then stealing an election, destroying the government agencies that had the audacity to investigate his companies, and now this lawsuit.
I thought it was well known in the industry that CEOs are liars as this is exploited in the standard method of leveling the stage at a tech conference: have the keynote speaker rehearse then make adjustments until he has lies coming out of both sides of his mouth.
> “There was something appealing about going to work at Microsoft with [OpenAI President Greg Brockman] on a pure AI research effort,” Altman testified.
How would Altman contribute to a pure AI research effort, he doesn't know anything about AI.
I found this claim by Altman to be very puzzling. He's not a researcher nor does he have any experience as the direct manager of research groups.
Satya Nadella's very public employment offer to Altman was obviously coordinated as one part of Altman and MSFT's strategy to force OpenAI's board to back down - and everyone knew this at the time. It was carefully timed to happen within hours of the vast majority of OpenAI's key personnel threatening to resign. The clear threat being that Microsoft would essentially rebuild OpenAI inside Microsoft with Altman recruiting the newly resigned employees, leaving OAI as a shell with products and patents but no key people.
This would certainly have nerfed the expected ~$150B valuation of the imminent OAI private placement, which was the only near-term path to liquidity for OAI's "paper multi-millionaire" employees. Over the prior 24 hours, Altman and Brockman had turned Altman's house into their 'war room' and had been working the phones non-stop convincing key employees that Altman remaining CEO and Microsoft's ongoing partnership were both essential to preserving the private placement. That's why so many key employees signed the resignation threat letter (and pressured other employees to sign).
And the MSFT threat couldn't be discounted as just bluster because MSFT was uniquely positioned due to having already secured long-term, non-exclusive access to OAI's products and IP. All they lacked was the people. While the OpenAI board was probably correct that removing Altman was part of their duty to preserve the non-profit's charter, they realized it too late and totally bungled the execution. For example, they should never have fired Altman but instead changed his role (which would have restricted his ability to coordinate with MSFT), appointed a credible new CEO the same day, and ensured that CEO was prepared to brief employees that the private placement was still on track without Altman.
If Musk's lawyers let Altman portray such obvious gun-to-the-head, hardball as him planning to "just take a research job at Microsoft", they're shockingly incompetent.
The only part of the entire article which backs that headline is this one sentence, on the line of questioning asking if Altman is aware that people like Sutskever believe him to be a liar,
> Finally, Altman admitted that he had heard that people say that he is a liar, but after that win, Molo’s questioning seemed to lose steam.
I'm not one to defend Altman. I wouldn't piss on him to put out a fire. But this headline is crap.
Amazing how these are two of the most powerful men currently in existence and they bicker like children.
This is what happens when you’ve spent most of your adult life being told you’re an unparalleled genius.
Expect it to get worse in the AI era because it comes with flattery as default.
I’d feel at ease if people like them didn’t have guns - luckily, they don’t have a briefcase with a red button.
That's probably why they are two of the most powerful men currently in existence.
When there is something genuinely acknowledged as being valuable - and a $900B company certainly qualifies - people are going to fight over it. Only natural, because in most cases the way to get power is to fight for things that will make you powerful. Just look at the history of Facebook or Twitter or Google Chauffeur/Waymo or Cisco or the U.S. presidency.
When you get wealth and power without fighting, it's usually because you managed to identify something that would eventually make you powerful without anyone else realizing that it's important, until you become too big to overthrow. This is the story of the Google founders or E-bay or Github or...I can't really think of others, it's a pretty rare path to success. Either that, or seem non-threatening and mild-mannered enough that nobody attacks you and then be the last one standing after all the combative types have destroyed each other, like how Sundar got to be CEO of Alphabet or Bran Stark won the Seven Kingdoms.
> Sundar got to be CEO of Alphabet
any background on the game of thrones played inside google for Sundar to get there?
Google's executive leadership team in the late 2000s to early 2010s famously consisted of a number of very strong and ambitious personalities. Amit Singhal ran Search Eng; Marissa Mayer ran Search PM/UX; the two of them famously did not get along, to the point where they would actively undermine each others' decisions. Alan Eustace was over them and often responsible for mediating, but he was close to retirement (which he later did to set the world record for highest skydive [1]). Sundar started by running the Google Toolbar efforts and then Chrome. Andy Rubin was in charge of Android. Urs seemed content to run hardware and datacenter ops; he's one of the non-combative ones, and is still there now though he's semi-retired. Likewise with Susan Wojcicki and Ads. Milo Medin had been brought in from Excite@Home to lead Google Fiber. Sebastian Thrun and Anthony Levandowski had been brought in from acquisitions to form Google Chauffeur (now Waymo).
Over the 5 years between 2010-2015, the search PM/TLM org chain basically revolted and said "We can't get anything done when Marissa tells us to do it one way and Amit says no, we have to do it another way". Marissa was moved to run Geo and then eventually left to become CEO of Yahoo. Amit himself got canned over a few sexual harassment complaints. Alan Eustace retired, as everyone expected. Andy Rubin made some ill-faited acquisitions of Motorola and Boston Dynamics that lost him a lot of cred, and then the nail in his coffin was when the media discovered his sex dungeon [2][3]. GFiber failed to gain significant traction, so Milo wasn't really a viable successor candidate (arguably he wasn't really in the running, and was there just to run Google's ISP ambitions). Anthony Levandowski stole Google's trade secrets on self-driving cars and sold them to Uber; he was criminally convicted for this but was pardoned by President Trump and is now founding a religion [4]. Sebastion Thrun left to found Udacity.
Sundar, meanwhile, steadily delivered on Toolbar, and then Chrome, and then took over Android when Andy Rubin was ousted, and steadily improved Android as well. He was unremarkable on the product front, but had a reputation as a peacemaker among Google's more volatile execs, as well as a very good translator of Larry's brilliant ideas into terms that mere mortals could understand. When he became CEO, it wasn't because he was remarkable, but because he was unremarkable enough to manage a number of remarkable personalities that had the egos to go along with it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace#Stratosphere_jump
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-paid-35million-former-ex...
[3] https://mashable.com/article/andy-rubin-sex-ring-court-docs
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...
This is the best possible take if you ask me. Sundar won because he was not wildly unstable like the other Google Execs were at that time.
Growing older is mandatory, growing up is not.
Especially if you possess obscene wealth and surround yourself with sycophants.
Your statement seems to imply altman is comparable in power to musk.
This is probably true, given his history with YCombinator, ties to Thiel and Microsoft, leadership of OpenAI, and other investments in Reddit, AirBnB, Stripe, and others.
Power doesn't always look like what you think it does.
I don't buy it, even a little. Seems like those comparisons where "some issue" should weigh against "opposing viewpoint" as if they should be equal.
Although money might not be a proxy, musk is #1 net worth, altman isn't top 1000.
Agreed, we've seen the kind of world-power level shenanigans that Elon can pull. He's directly messing with governments, manipulating markets, and even influencing the course of armed conflicts by controlling StarLink. Altman can only dream of that kind of power. Which he well might be doing, but he strikes me more as the type to pursue conventional political power.
International politics is familiar to anyone who has supervised a group of 2-4 year olds.
It's no surprise; immense power precludes maturity.
A good reminder to not treat rich retards as visionaries just because they happen to be rich.
I feel bad for the judge, jury, and court staff that have to be around these men.
Don’t insult men worldwide by calling these children “men”.
Is it possible for them both to lose? Because that's what I want and humanity needs.
Unfortunately, even if they do it wont change anything. Unless the rich are punished by the "lowly" folk, nothing ever happens. Revolutions seem to part of the past though, life is _just_ comfortable enough to not actively do something about the upper classes wrongdoings. I guess the good news is that humanities time is slowly ending anyway due to untackled climate issues. I wonder how Europe will handle the 200 million people having to flee their countries within the next few decades.
I know, but a girl can dream....
Things that could happen: some major outage or corporate self-destruction through aggressive LLM usage creates a valuation dip that puts Sam too many bajillion dollars away from the katrillions of revenue they need, kicking off dotcom-bust 2.0, Elons snowballing of debt and lies into bigger balls of debt and lies hits what nuclear reactor designers call a “negative void coefficient”, and — xAI CSAM class actions finally entering courts around the same time — his whole drug and suspicious foreign backer fuelled empire goes Chernobyl, leaving a radioactive pile no one will touch for decades. Nature reclaims the half-built data-centres and robo-factories as investigations into prolonged fraud patterns kick off.
Much more likely: the two of them and POTUS launch and AGI NFT with Federal Reserve backing, pump it to the sky on their social media platforms, and ensure their genetic propagation programs can afford all the bunkers and colony ships they could ever want. Whee.
No, both will win.
Altman: "See I'm prolific!"
So crazy how Musk has time to juggle at least 6 companies, and still prefers to be in a courtroom for this
You cant possibly think Musk actively contributes to his companies, lol.
"His" companies seem to do better when he's not around. SpaceX has been doing good things while he was distracted with the Cybertruck, then Twitter, then stealing an election, destroying the government agencies that had the audacity to investigate his companies, and now this lawsuit.
So I guess the more companies he has, the better they all do. What a life.
I thought it was well known in the industry that CEOs are liars as this is exploited in the standard method of leveling the stage at a tech conference: have the keynote speaker rehearse then make adjustments until he has lies coming out of both sides of his mouth.
These people are really delusional.
> “There was something appealing about going to work at Microsoft with [OpenAI President Greg Brockman] on a pure AI research effort,” Altman testified.
How would Altman contribute to a pure AI research effort, he doesn't know anything about AI.
I found this claim by Altman to be very puzzling. He's not a researcher nor does he have any experience as the direct manager of research groups.
Satya Nadella's very public employment offer to Altman was obviously coordinated as one part of Altman and MSFT's strategy to force OpenAI's board to back down - and everyone knew this at the time. It was carefully timed to happen within hours of the vast majority of OpenAI's key personnel threatening to resign. The clear threat being that Microsoft would essentially rebuild OpenAI inside Microsoft with Altman recruiting the newly resigned employees, leaving OAI as a shell with products and patents but no key people.
This would certainly have nerfed the expected ~$150B valuation of the imminent OAI private placement, which was the only near-term path to liquidity for OAI's "paper multi-millionaire" employees. Over the prior 24 hours, Altman and Brockman had turned Altman's house into their 'war room' and had been working the phones non-stop convincing key employees that Altman remaining CEO and Microsoft's ongoing partnership were both essential to preserving the private placement. That's why so many key employees signed the resignation threat letter (and pressured other employees to sign).
And the MSFT threat couldn't be discounted as just bluster because MSFT was uniquely positioned due to having already secured long-term, non-exclusive access to OAI's products and IP. All they lacked was the people. While the OpenAI board was probably correct that removing Altman was part of their duty to preserve the non-profit's charter, they realized it too late and totally bungled the execution. For example, they should never have fired Altman but instead changed his role (which would have restricted his ability to coordinate with MSFT), appointed a credible new CEO the same day, and ensured that CEO was prepared to brief employees that the private placement was still on track without Altman.
If Musk's lawyers let Altman portray such obvious gun-to-the-head, hardball as him planning to "just take a research job at Microsoft", they're shockingly incompetent.
Related:
A consistent pattern of lying': trial exposes what insiders think of Sam Altman
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103417
The only part of the entire article which backs that headline is this one sentence, on the line of questioning asking if Altman is aware that people like Sutskever believe him to be a liar,
> Finally, Altman admitted that he had heard that people say that he is a liar, but after that win, Molo’s questioning seemed to lose steam.
I'm not one to defend Altman. I wouldn't piss on him to put out a fire. But this headline is crap.
I think I'm agreement here. How is this a 'win'? Altman stated he heard people talking about him. What is this deposition, 6th grade lunch table?
Do you, sir, acknowledge that many call you a liar?
Yes.
You deny it see, but.. ah bugger.. I hadn't planned for this outcome..
How can you "lose steam" on an admission of one of your own arguments?
There's also
> his co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, testified he created a 52-page dossier documenting Altman’s “consistent pattern of lying.”
Oddly enough the article doesn't go into that any further, despite what would seem like extremely relevant information.
This was already widely reported on half a year ago: https://decrypt.co/347349/inside-deposition-showed-openai-ne...
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/814876/i...
[dead]
Prolific isn't the right word.
Pathological is.