> Which is interesting now that I think of it, nobody EVER calls New York just "York".
I don't know, kind of makes sense to me why that would be the case. Something tells me there are more places that start with "York" as opposed to "Jersey", so there are more chances to cause confusion in the former case.
I'm more interested in why it never caught on regionally. There would rarely ever be any confusion, nobody in the states would think you were talking about York England. But it still never caught on for whatever reason.
When feasible, spoken English favours double syllable combinations. Three is too many, one is too few for disambiguation in a lossy environment. Hence Jersey, LA, San Fran, Philly, but not York. It’s not a hard rule, of course.
Or if you're upstate and going to one of the boroughs, you'll generally refer to it by name. "I'm going to Brooklyn / Queens / the Bronx", not "I'm going to the city" or "I'm going to New York City".
They were in the same YC batch standing next to each in a photo, so someone looked at the photo and chose to juxtapose their work and fates on the day Aaron Swartz died. If this is what you mean by "singling out", I don't see what's hard to understand.
PG liked him, because Altman decided to go to great lengths to get PG to like him.
While Drew, Chesky and the Collison brothers were busy building billion dollar companies, Altman took the “shortcut” and made a concerted effort to cozy up to the most powerful man in the room — and it payed dividends. Altman did the same thing in the early OpenAI days by doing flaterring video series interviews with Elon Musk, Vinod Khosla and others [0]. Incidentally, The YC interview with Elon Musk was done the year Musk made a donation to OpenAI (2016),
I still remember PG’s essay where he gave Altman the ultimate character reference (2008) [1]:
>When we predict good outcomes for startups, the qualities that come up in the supporting arguments are toughness, adaptability, determination. Which means to the extent we're correct, those are the qualities you need to win…Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them.
(In retrospect, praising Altman for being the “king of cannibals” has a nice touch of gallows humor to it. Hilariously, even recently pg has a seemingly unintentional tendency to give Altman compliments that appear to be character warnings masquerading as compliments.)
In 2009, pg included Altman in the top 5 in a list of the most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.[2] If this was an observation made from afar, you could easily say it was “prescient”. But objectively at the time, no one could find any verifiable evidence in the real world to justify such an assessment. It wasn’t prescient because pg had became directly responsibly for Altman’s future success, in a case of self-fulfilling prophesy. Altman was often referenced in the acknowledgments of pg’s essays for reading early drafts and is probably referenced more than any other founder in the essays. Altman’s entire streetcred came from pg and also, once he made Altman head of YC, YC. From afar, it looks like a victory for office poltics, a skill incidentally that sociopaths are known to excel at.
Wouldn't you agree though that from YC Head to being the driving force of OpenAI was largely due to his own merit.
In fact, he started spending less time at YC and more time at OpenAI. At that time, OpenAI had no clear path to becoming the unicorn it is today, and YC was definitely better from a career standpoint. Instead, he went all-in on OpenAI, and the results are there for everyone to see.
Yes, definitely. But becoming the head of YC was also due to his own merit. His merit was persuading the right people. After all, the essay where pg is giving his highest praise is an essay about fundraising.
Will you not agree that him becoming "the driving force of OpenAI" involved some highly publicized back-to-back persuasion drama as well? First he got Ilya and gdb to side with him against Elon, then he got OpenAI employees to side with him against Ilya and the board (a board that accused him of deceiving them). PG reiterated after that drama that Altman's special talent was becoming powerful.
This observation does not necessarily mean someone is a bad CEO, since the job of the CEO is to do good by your investors or future investors. And it's possible to do that without any morals whatsoever. But I think the recent drama did more to drive the competition than some of his investors would have liked.
Edit:
>At that time, OpenAI had no clear path to becoming the unicorn it is today, and YC was definitely better from a career standpoint.
This is very incorrect in my view. The presence of Elon Musk as investor and figurehead and Ilya, Karpathy, and Wojciech as domain experts, not to mention investments from YC members themselves (and the PayPal mafia) made OpenAI a very attractive investment early on.
I suspect (and this is rank speculation from a great distance) that a lot of SV tech leadership (of different kinds) has perceptions that were formed by the era of the Napster saga and haven't been revised since. PG seems committed to the idea that brash young wheeler-dealers can cut corners to win big and nothing really bad will happen as a result; as of recently Brewster Kahle seemed to be convinced that the final triumph of free media was just one more big push away.
Yeah, if I were to describe it more generally, I would say they self-select for techno-optimists. As investors, YC often espouses judging startup’s potential by considering how successful the startup could be if everything goes right, and then working backwards from there to see if it could be possible. I’m not sure if pg has a historic reference that he has a commitment to, since he was a startup founder himself he just may be projecting his personality to the startup founders he’s assessing, but I do think he’s more concerned with “whether the startup has accomplished something impressive despite the odds” and less about how they accomplished it.
They filter for red flags that would indicate a potential for failure for the startup. So if a “lack of morals” has no bearing on a startup’s success, then they don’t bother creating a filter that eliminates that. Nerds often prefer building things instead of dealing with people and often take things at face value instead of suspecting intrigue, and that sometimes makes them susceptible to manipulation. PG has admitted that he himself is bad at noticing certain personality or character flaws and that’s why Jessica was the adult in the room. But Jessica was probably observing the founders to see if there was good co-founder dynamic and other aspects that would affect startup success rather than trying to decipher their moral character. After all, there is no hippocratic oath in the tech sector.
Re lack of morals: if I’m not mistaken YC explicitly asks for instances where the founders have succeeded to "break the rules of the system" or similar. So you could even argue if anything they prefer founders that tend to bend the rules of required.
On the other hand, pg seems to have strong moral views on certain political topics.
The OpenAI drama isn't the only reality distortions that Altman has been accused of engaging in. PG himself has said Altman "is extremely good at becoming powerful" [0]. A former Reddit CEO in the past detailed the lengths he was willing to go to get his way[1], in reply to a post called, "What is the longest con you ever pulled", no less. One could say allegedly, but Altman did comment on the former CEO's accusation at the time, and one could also say in his defense that he was being sarcastic in his comment, but it is curious that regardless of whether you take Altman's comment seriously or sarcastically[2] -- in both cases it comes off as a brag that doesn't bother denying the accusation.
I don't know who's right in this case, but parents siding with the more successful and stable siblings doesn't seem too surprising. And if I'm not mistaken, Altman and his sister were both minors at the time, so I don't understand the people who are invested in taking sides. But it does make sense to point out that the parents also have a conflict of interest if something like this happened to two minors under the same roof -- who after all ends up taking the blame (fairly or unfairly) if the minors cannot be blamed?
Yes, I think they had to push this reveal forward because their investors were getting antsy with the lack of visible progress to justify continuing rising valuations. There is no other reason a confident company making continuous rapid progress would feel the need to reveal a product that 99% of companies worldwide couldn't use at the time of the reveal.
That being said, if OpenAI is burning cash at lightspeed and doesn't have to publicly reveal the revenue they receive from certain government entities, it wouldn't come as a surprise if they let the government play with it early on in exchange for some much needed cash to set on fire.
EDIT: The fact that multiple sites seem to be publishing GPT-5 stories similar to this one leads one to conclude that the o3 benchmark story was meant to counter the negativity from this and other similar articles that are just coming out.
With adblockers disabled, I was seeing ads midstream ages ago. Ads that I don't see with an adblocker. Anecdotally, my subjective experience when adblockers are disabled seems to get exponentially worse whereas my adblocker experience seems to degrade at a much slower rate (e.g. manually skipping author recited ads on a podcast). Currently the TV is the weakest link, and people should be publishing layman's guides to pihole, or as others elsewhere have mentioned, refer them to a adblocking DNS redirect from an adblocker company. Midstream ads are especially obnoxious with music streams and I hope the majority's intolerance tips them over the edge.
I'm sure someone will try to frame it as a Catch 22: "If we knew for sure they would choose suicide if they didn't get the help they requested, we would prioritize them over non-suicidal applicants. But the only way we would know if they would actually choose suicide is if they actually committed to voluntary euthanasia".
