Altman’s remarks in his tweet drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction.
“You’re welcome,” one user responded. “Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away.”
Others called him a “f***ing psychopath” and “scum.”
“Nothing says ‘you’re being replaced’ quite like a heartfelt thank you from the guy doing the replacing,” one user wrote.
It must be exhausting having to constantly lie all the time.
It’s only exhausting if you have to remember the lies. The media will never challenged him on them, though.
Honestly I think he believes his own bullshit
They should call it what it is, Offshoring and I remember what happened the last time they did that the quality was so bad most companies eventually and quietly brought the jobs back. AI will be the same thing once they can’t help but admit Scam Altman took them for a ride at everyone’s expense.
yup in the early to mid 10’s every company, startup, etc offshored to India and the drivel that came back was about on par with today’s AI/LLMs. just complete garbage that either needed heavy refactoring or just start over from scratch with competent devs. So seeing all this with AI today I can only think “I’ve seen this episode before”
Yes. Every one in awhile someone marvels at a particularly good AI answer.
Even back in the days when the scam was the first chess robot, those moments were a sign that the “secret backdoor to let a real human take control” was in effect.
But nobody reads history, so they’re just amazed.
That output is from this guy named Sandeep. His work situation is stupid now. But yes, he’s a great programmer. (Edit: Evidence that the scam is alive, today.)
And no, sharing company secrets with him wasn’t wise.
But if I had to choose between some company’s well being, and Sandeep’s, I’m rooting for Sandeep, anyway.
Go sell some trade secrets, Sandeep. You’ve earned it.
Edit: Links added for those unfamiliar with the trick.
How come so many billionaires are so incredibly immeasurably stupid? Seriously, this dude sounds like some random moron on the street. Musk does too. I’ve seen interviews with Musk where he rambles his answers aimlessly. I mean fuck you’d at least expect them to be a bit above average. But no. They’re angry online pseudointellectual level.
I don’t understand how people see this kind of thing and think, “this guy is dumb.”
For a decade the world has been seeing constant evidence that when you lie brazenly and repeatedly enough you become untouchable. All one needs to is completely discard the idea of shame. This guy isn’t an idiot- he just knows (probably rightly) that he has everything to gain and nothing to lose by pretending to be.
No one truly intelligent is seeking their own personal profit over everyone else. The simple fact is that these people are just lucky and have never had to ever consider the consequences of their actions. They aren’t happy, their lives don’t change between a few hundred million dollars and a billion dollars, they just chase a bigger number because the highest level their brains function at is like a monkey that wants all the fruit to itself.
I think about it this way: Neurodivergent are usually considered bad at communicating, except the worst communicators I’ve ever met have been neurotypical people. They live in a world built for them, where anyone not following the script must be broken so it not their fault. You look at these billionaires and they aren’t behaving like this because they’re smart, because there’s a plan, it’s because they refuse to admit they’re lucky and any failure was someone who just didn’t listen to the enough. It’s not their awful planning, it’s the employee who was unable to follow their bullshit.
These people are not intelligent, they just have enough money to be wrong a thousand times and only think about how smart they were that thousand and oneth time. They throw a million darts at the board and claim the single bullseye was all their raw skill.
My point is that they aren’t making mistakes. They’re not attempting A but doing B because they don’t know any better. What they are doing is intentional and very often successful.
That doesn’t make them intelligent, and you need to re-read my comment until you understand just how many failures these people experience that they can simply ignore. In many ways you could even argue that what they’re doing isn’t intentional, they’re just reacting in the moment and we can all see how the furthest they can really look ahead is about a couple days.
Look at Musk, there have literally been whole teams of people who made it their job to distract the stupid child so he couldn’t fuck up their company. Jeff Bezos is making terrible decisions and his creativity was “bookstore but online”, yet it looks like success the same way a toddler with a shotgun will get all the cookies they want.
“Intentional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. These are some of the dumbest, most over-confident people alive right now and they are nothing without their ability to ignore major financial failures.
And yet they’re seemingly untouchable while their opposition flails around and impotently shakes their fists. Great, they’re dumb and overconfident- they’re still seemingly doing exactly what they need to do in order to “win” and rub everyone else’s nose in it.
If decent people were half as interested in stopping these shitheads as they are in reassuring themselves of their intellectual superiority, the Altmans and Musks of the world might actually have something to fear.
I don’t get the use of “and yet” here. They untouchable because they exist in a system that supports them and has supported them since monarchies were a thing and probably before. They didn’t setup an intricate series of protections, we just willingly gave them a handful of grenades and now we have to, or feel we have to, dance around them whenever they have a temper tantrum so they don’t blow us all up. It’s the same mentality behind “too big to fail” where we could super easily actually let them fail or otherwise punish them but unfortunately we also elected similarly moronic and selfish people to be in charge and they want to pretend that they’ve been fooled or forced to cede to the rich.
Jeff Bezos is making terrible decisions and his creativity was “bookstore but online”, yet it looks like success the same way a toddler with a shotgun will get all the cookies they want.
Bezos did more than that. He started with “bookstore but online” because it forced Amazon to develop a low-cost, efficient logistics capability that could then be applied to a lot of things besides books.
And as Amazon was growing, Bezos mandated that the Amazon’s internal IT infrastructure was built out with APIs that would allow it to be monetized in the future. And that’s where AWS came from.
Again, I’m not saying he’s a good person. Far from it. It’s just that, from a corporate strategy point of view, he actually had strategies that he stuck to, and they paid off. And everyone makes mistakes in business. It’s how you recover from them and persevere that makes the difference.
Musk, on the other hand, is much more in the toddler-with-shotgun category.
Does that make Bezos special? The bar is so low that someone doing the bare minimum of what most regular people are actively for is somehow an intelligent thing. His big thing to make money was to undercut local bookstores, that’s what he really did, and even that wasn’t new.
His “income” is around $2,500 per second. He “makes” more than most people do in a lifetime in a matter of minutes(single digit minutes) and what you described is not anything that requires special intelligence to pull off. What made him special was a silver spoon and the willingness to hurt others for personal gain.
Even Steve Jobs’ main quality that made him a standout leader in so many ways was that he simply allowed the people to he was paying to do a job to do that job without being micro-managed, and he told people who tried to get him to chase short-term gains to fuck off. Again, not genius level stuff unless you’re comparing him against the truly stupid and evil, which is most rich people.
Yep, deep pockets, playing the odds, and a bit of luck is all it takes for most of them.
Bezos, on the other hand, actually had a strategy that he executed well. Maybe even a couple of them. Mind you, he’s still treats his employees like rented mules. Being smarter than the other socipaths doesn’t make him a good person.
One aspect of the Dark Triad is vast overestimation of ones own capabilities. People in power aren’t highly intelligent, they’re just sociopaths
Something that a friend pointed out to me as a possible factor is the religious backdrop of US Christianity. I’ve forgotten the specific phrase (it was something like “prosperity Christianity”), but basically the idea that good fortune (from hard work) is vindication of God in this life. It’s pretty deeply tied to the Protestant work ethic, which is pretty pervasive in US culture, even in ostensibly secular institutions.
The original idea was more or less “as well as having faith, you should also work very hard, because that’s part of your duty. Then you will be blessed and will have good fortune”. However, that has been increasingly distorted and subject to a logical fallacy that means people get it backwards. For instance, let’s say we took this doctrine to be an absolute fact: that if you diligently do good work, then you will be blessed, and have good fortune. I.e
if good work, then blessed
If blessed, then good fortune
∴ If good work, then good fortune
However, under this doctrine, people often commit the fallacy of “affirming the consequent”. For instance, if the only lamp in a room breaks, then the room will be dark. However, the room being dark doesn’t necessarily mean that the lamp is broken (it could be off, or be stolen, or covered). So what people do is they go “I am wealthy. People who are blessed have good fortune, and I have good fortune, so therefore I must be blessed”. This logic has been used to justify all sorts of awful, awful crimes against humanity. For instance, enslaved people must be bad people because they clearly do not have good fortune. But the person who owns those slaves surely must be blessed, because he has good fortune.
This way of thinking is so deeply embedded into US culture that even devout atheists end up absorbing a lot of this logic. This is only one small part of the puzzle as to why billionaires are so dumb, but applying this lens really helped me to understand the self-validation cycle that a lot of billionaires and powerful people get into.
The way I imagine this cycle going is that someone who is quite successful under capitalism (often due to advantages like inherited wealth) has a brief moment of self reflection where they wonder “am I actually doing well here? Do I have anything of value to add? I was given a lot of opportunities to succeed (e.g. inherited wealth), but have I effectively utilised those opportunities? How would I know if I had actually done well? Sure, I’ve grown my wealth a heckton, but maybe a different person with these same opportunities would have done far better than I did?”
With those questions comes a heckton of dread. And like, I actually really sympathise with that dread, because it’s a fairly universal feeling, I suspect. For instance, I dropped out of university due to a heckton of external extenuating circumstances. When I’m feeling bad about this, people who knew me during this period often reassure me that it was not my fault, and that it’s a testament to my strength that I held out as long as I did. Certainly, that’s what I’d like to believe, but the terrifying question that I’ll never be able to answer is “what if those external circumstances didn’t exist? What if I would’ve dropped out even if not for all that, and if I’m actually just not smart enough to study what I wanted?”. We can’t see alternative timelines.
What’s different about billionaires though is that they have so much money that they can ignore the uncomfortable dread, rather than sitting with it and doing some useful self reflection, before setting it aside. They push it out of mind and distract themselves by throwing themselves into work or hedonism, or both (I have never known a billionaire, but I have known some very wealthy CEO types, and they worked themselves to the bone, potentially to avoid feeling this imposter syndrome dread. I’m inclined to view their hyper working habits as being irrational in this way because a lot of the excess work they did seemed to be bullshit work (in the sense of David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” — that is, it was work done to make themselves feel useful)).
Another thing that I have that billionaires don’t is friends that I trust to guide me on my self reflection. I trust my friends when they tell me my university disaster wasn’t my fault because they have shown that they are more than willing to call me out when I make poor choices. Even in scenarios where I am clearly the victim of some fucked up thing, if I have made things worse for myself by making poor choices (something I’m prone to doing if I’m in a fatalistic depression spiral), they hold me accountable for my choices, in addition to sympathetically supporting me.
Instead, billionaires are surrounded by people who they can’t trust. Sycophants everywhere, who don’t care about who you are as a person, but what you can do for them. You’re less likely to have people calling you out for things, but you also won’t get much affirmation for the genuinely good things about your personality. Like, let’s imagine if Sam Altman had an aspect of his personality that was a really good quality that was distinctly him, and thus the kind of thing that would be productive to view as part of his self identity because it could help him focus on that as a direction of future growth. And let’s say he had a genuine, non-sycophantic friend who tried to highlight this to him — how would he be able to tell that this was a genuine compliment coming from a genuine friend, and not just another bullshit sycophant? You can’t, not really.
It’s tragic really. The ultra rich have basically gatekept themselves from genuine human connection. They burn out from being on guard all the time, and so they surround themselves with people in their own wealth class (people who are also extremely poorly adjusted). I find it quite sad, because this isolation seems to be an inevitable consequence of being mega-rich. This is why when I say things like “billionaires should not exist”, I’m not just speaking in favour of peons like us, but also out of compassion for the billionaires. I resent them like hell, but I also deeply pity them. I’d love to be financially comfortable enough to not worry about whether I’ll be having to be sleeping in my car next month, but I’d rather be in my position in theirs. If by some weird twist of fate, I suddenly became mega rich, I would do everything I possibly could to give away money until I was “merely” financially comfortable.
I got a bit off track with my ranting because I am procrastinating getting food, so I’ll bring it back to your question. Basically, billionaires get dumb because they are emotionally maladjusted and often deeply insecure. Wealth becomes a thing by which they measure their own self worth, but no amount of wealth can fill the vacuous chasm in their hearts caused by a deep isolation and lack of genuine fulfillment. Occasionally they do get slices of this fulfillment — see Mark Zuckerberg getting heavily into MMA.
But if they ever have moments of self reflection where they experience that normal and healthy self doubt, they are so socially isolated and maladjusted to actually reflect. Their wealth means they can afford to never be uncomfortable, and that applies here too. So to escape their dread, they build a narrative of how they deserve it. They’re not just lucky — they are actually very smart and good and they deserve their wealth. And the sycophants around them will tell them they’re absolutely right. Meanwhile, the people they respect as their peers (other billionaires) are also prone to spouting psuedointellectual bullshit whilst pretending to be smart, so this validates their own dumbassery.
The psuedointellectual stuff is another reason I pity them. I was a Gifted Kid™, and because I didn’t have friends in school, my intelligence was basically my entire identity. This meant I was so desperately scared of losing that that I would bullshit about what I knew or not. Nowadays, I’m a lot better at being open about when people ask me about something I either haven’t heard of, don’t understand, or can’t quite remember. I often say “I got a hell of a lot smarter when I let myself be more dumb”, because learning to be more vulnerable meant I had the opportunity to learn a heckton from loads of cool people (rather than being preoccupied with appearing smart).
Billionaires are dumb because they’re cosplaying smart people, and they’re so deep in the role that they forget they’re cosplaying. They’re also surrounded by other dumbasses spouting psuedointellectual bullshit, but they will never call them out on this, because they’re so pathetically insecure that they fear that this will out them as being an imposter — they don’t realise that their peers are also cosplaying. It’s an absurd echo chamber of the worst kind.
Sadly I can only upvote once to show appreciation for your well put together wall of text. Nice word masonry :)
Sadly I can only upvote once to show appreciation for your well put together wall of text. Nice word masonry :)
That’s okay, because a sincere comment of gratitude functions as a super-upvote anyway. It’s like Reddit Gold, but with more human connection, and less capitalism
the funny thing is that by all accounts replacing programmers with AI leads to hiring programmers back to fix AI mess.
But do they want to come back ?
For double the salary probably, the problem is there’s always a line of people looking for work.
That’s why unions are important and for people to not be scabs
“more will come”. never underestimate hungry star eyed folks. Look at Grammarly - they’ve been throwing people on the streets for the last three years showing zero loyalty to longterm employees and then replacing them with cheaper newbies over and over. And that after hoarding literally any NLP talent to make competition non-existent - so for NLP folks in Ukraine it means they have nowhere to go outside of military sector which is its own can of worms. Meanwhile Grammarly just keeps on pivoting to AI coding then hiring folks to clean the mess to pivot again.
No, they prefer their jobs at Costco and McDonalds
Good point, I’ll be up front about only replacing vibe code, not debugging it.
Let’s see how well this one ages, shall we?
About as well as Devin taking all of our jobs (which I think was supposed to happen a while ago). How’s that one doing?
Sam Altman hallucinates more than his AI
This feels a lot like a ragebait article.
What did Altman actually tweet that caused the backlash? I can’t seem to find it while skimming, only the responses to it.
-edit- Found it
It is a lot less rage inducing than the article makes it out to be.
I mean I can see how that draws ire. His contribution doesn’t really line up with his benefits. This project started as an open source, with a non profit running it. Now it’s one of the biggest private companies in the world and threatening to replace a lot of jobs. So if you look at the context, he’s already forgetting how much hard work he stole to make himself obscenely rich and powerful!
I mean every obscenely rich and powerful person stole a lot of work from other people…otherwiese they wouldn’t be obscenely rich. So, he’s hasn’t forgotten, he isn’t and never was aware of how much he stole.
His tweet said he’s “already forgetting how much hard work was done”…. by humans! Implying that the AI is doing all the hard work now.
Yes, total ragebait. Thanks for linking to the actual source xit.
I didn’t see the “says their time is over” part anywhere that he allegedly said. Guy’s still a piece of shit, but not seeing anything out of line he said in this specific instance.
It is somewhat clickbait, it links to this shitter post Conman made, but i guess you can kinda extrapolate his idea behind it.
These idiots want to replace technical workers when AI is more attuned to replacing a CEO at this point. We don’t need Sam anymore.
Right. There are consequences when engineers make mistakes.
/rant
These are weird times. I feel like any developer who’s tried letting AI write code should recognize that it hurts productivity when you have chase down bugs in badly written code nobody on your team understands. For anything important, that will need to be maintained, less time would be spent designing, writing, and maintaining the code yourself. There are even studies showing AI hurts productivity. Yet, many developers seem to have bought the hype, and managers and investors doubly so.
AFAIK, few of these startups that tout heavy AI usage ever ship anything. The large companies that are forcing AI usage are progressively degrading their products.
Seems like the owner class is just going to keep on deluding themselves, companies are going to keep laying off, everybody is going to keep shipping shit that doesn’t work, if they ship anything at all, and investors are going to keep dumping money into businesses producing no value. The entire system has never felt so fake. At least during the dot-com bubble corporations weren’t doing mass layoffs to excite investors.
I feel like the owner class has got so powerful now, society has regressed to the point where we’re back to being ruled by dumb, delusional, psychopathic royalty imposing their will onto the masses. (Yeah, it’s kind of been that way for a long time, but it seems to be quickly getting worse).
As a developer on a team of 20ish that use AI heavily, daily, I’d argue there are proper ways of using it as a tool that substantially increases productivity and quality while also reducing bugs and improving maintainability.
But I would also say that 75%+ of people I encounter aren’t leveraging it properly or even close to properly. Also too many people use ChatGPT and Copilot which are just bottom of the barrel garbage and then wonder why the output is also garbage.
But I agree that too many people and companies lean into AI too heavily and incorrectly and there will be a reckoning. I’m all for it.
everyone using ai says some variation of this
acting like they do proper code review on this ai gen code but we’ve had so many examples of how people well before ai carried massive tech debt and cut corners so I have zero faith
much less the numerous examples of slop laden bugs making it to live with major companies in the us
ai just amplifies and obfuscates the problem
You do you I guess. AI slop can suck a dick and we’ve fired people for less.
AI causes problems, AI can amplify problems, but AI can legitimately assist, too.
imagine instead of ai it was your compiler
we all know they can have weird quirks but imagine the fail rates were like we are experiencing with current ai
would people keep these tools in their work flow?
if big business wasn’t so hard on to cut labor the answer would be a hard no
I do try to give it a chance and use it every once and a while (most recently Claude Code; last year, Cursor), and it has been my experience that it personally decreases my productivity and quality. I found that even CoPilot’s autocomplete would introduce bugs if I decided to “trust” it and try to work too fast without meticulously reviewing every token generated. I have seen people I work with use AI to quickly create decent looking prototypes (i.e. bog standard, boring design), but I think this is still detrimental because they lose the full benefit of exploratory programming (and of course, the prototypes just have all kinds of faked data and functionality, glaring security problems, bad architecture). I’ve also experienced people submitting nonsense vibe-coded pull requests that would break tons of things they shouldn’t have even touched for the issue. I could see a less interested or overworked reviewer letting stuff like that through, which is why I think we’re seeing all these failures and bugs at these big tech companies. So for me, at least, I haven’t seen the benefit. Using CoPilot in VSCode actually caused me to go back to using nvim and lsp plugins :)
Agreed, Copilot auto complete is awful. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
I don’t know what these people are doing who seem to claim it’s wonderful. Every single time I have tried to use one, it’s been completely clueless about the problem and wastes my time producing slop. I almost want to keep my code closed source because of how awful it is at generating anything. Maybe they’re just doing very simple web design or something, I don’t know
I even have started to hate Google and felt like their search engine is becoming very bad. Yandex has been returning more results and Google feels censored and replaced by generative AI answers.
Copilot isn’t bad, but generally I agree.
It’s a tool that can be helpful, or you can just create problems for yourself down the road.
It’s a lot like building a house. After all the drywall is up, it’s hard to tell if the studs are 18 inches apart or five feet apart, but you’re gonna find out eventually.
Would love to know how you finagle Copilot to be useful, the code it generates and the things it suggests make me throw my hands up like 9/10.
Once in a blue moon I try to use it again, and it’s laughable. It’s like I told someone non-technical to do something super technical and… it’s just 100% discard or 50% rewrite. I guess it just feels like it isn’t saving me any time so…why?
For context I’ve only used it in VS Code or Visual Studio. If there is some other avenue or process that’s better, let me know.
I’m usually just very targeted in what I ask it to do. I keep it to things I know will be in the basic reference books or on stack overflow. It basically just saves me from having to look up and apply existing examples to my code.
It makes for a pretty good ORM.
Are you talking about copilot, that bar that is on the side of Microsoft edge or something else? Maybe GitHub Copilot?
Because that copilot bar on Microsoft edge is literally a pointless waste of electricity
Oh, I was talking about GitHub copilot that’s in visual studio.
I told Gemini to generate config files for an open source project with awful documentation. After a bunch of back and forth and nothing working right I had to supply the link to the current official docs and asked it to try again
It acknowledged it was using info from an older version of the program. And even still fucked it up
I really don’t know what people are getting from these LLMs
Until something stops working, and the IA tells you that you are right, then since you don’t know how to program you just see gibberish, then you need to call someone that know how to code and they will charge you an arm and a leg, it would be the same as when you take your car to the mechanic
When. Are. We. Building. The. Leisure. Society?
There is nothing reasonable left to do, we don’t need, or want, full employment when it just means bullshit jobs.
As soon as we convince the billionaires to stop hiding their wealth and pay their fair share of tax.
Ie never.
The moment proper social democratic parties are builded/strengthen from within and the majority vote for social democrats.
Ireland has UBI for artists. Some countries see the future. Some.
Stop paying attention to this man already.
Ragebait marketing.
So, we’re just trafficking in misinformation now?
Sam Altman Thanks Programmers for Their Effort
True
, Says Their Time Is Over
Complete fiction. Clickbait misinformation.
The tweet:
I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took.
Thank you for getting us to this point.
If you swap “says” with “hints”, it works though.
If you swap “says” with “doesn’t say” it also works.
I agree, the “Says Their Time Is Over” part is clickbaity, but the sentiment is the same. He’s thanking “manual programmers” for taking us to this point, clearly implying that from now on they will be no longer required
And he’s out of his mind or lying just the same. AI needs constant supervision, and if a human has to understand the code well enough to debug it, they may as well learn about it the code by – writing it themselves…
He’s basically a salesman, you can’t expect him to say the truth against his interests
Someone who believes or pretends to believe they’re telling the truth when they try to sell me magic farts is still a lunatic or an asshole.
I can understand how that can be read into what he said.
I was simply pointing out that the headline is lying about what he said.
