Sam Altman's pants are on fire

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-pants-are-totally-on

by toomuchtodo • 9 months ago

210 123 9 months ago

garymarcus.substack.com

rhetocj233• 9 months ago

I personally called it within my circle that when Friar was hired she was going to commit a tremendous blunder. It may have been innocent, but the trend is now reversing in regards to its mantlehold of mindshare of consumers.

Someone I know who has been an absolute staunch advocate of chatgpt,and has been for the best part of the past 1.5 years suddenly changed their tune earlier this week. That is my signal that things are turning south.

There will be a reprieve for some time, with increasing revenue. But eventually that will jam to a halt and all the doubts will intensify.

an0malous5• 9 months ago

The VCs and bloggers have also shifted tone and are hedging to save themselves from embarrassment. It used to be “AGI is just around the corner” and now it’s “Just because we haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean we never will” (Andreesen) or “Actually bubbles are good” (Stratechery).

Gary called it a long time ago but I think the Dwarkesh and Karpathy podcast is when the shift started.

rhetocj233• 9 months ago

Something to note about this craze and Crypto is that the world is full of bozos who do not think deeply whatsoever.

Spooky233• 9 months ago

The Ben Thompson take attempting to find a lemonade in the lemons is the most terrifying: the bubble will pop and leave us with… excess electric generation capacity? (And bankrupt power producers?)

We truly live in the dumbest timeline.

Neywiny3• 9 months ago

There was also some woman (maybe a high up exec, I don't know their full roster) in one of those live audience interviews saying they were looking towards a government backstop on the loans. They know they have no way of ponying up 1.4T. That's an insane amount of money. Honestly if more investing and startups were "we have x front-runners, if he dies he dies" I think we'd be in s better spot. Maybe don't invest in capturing-helium-in-a-colander.ai just because it ends in "AI"

mitthrowaway2• 9 months ago

I think you must mean Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI.

Neywiny3• 9 months ago

Most likely. Who better to know their financial status is fried than the CFO

bpodgursky• 9 months ago

You can criticize OpenAI for many things but this was blatantly misquoted.

They were talking about backstops for chips, to get fabs constructed in the US. If anyone else said this, it would have been considered a great idea, both republicans and democrats talked about the same thing to get TSMC production into the US, but everyone pretended that OpenAI was talking about data centers in this context. They weren't/

Neywiny3• 9 months ago

My goodness is there a huge difference between TSMC and OpenAI. TSMC moving to the US is a benefit to all US fabless companies and fabless companies that want to do business in any sensitive US industry, and they have an incredible track record as an industry leader. Open AI's chip manufacturing is much more risky and much less payoff. I wouldn't want the government to pay a penny towards it. Especially because an estimated cost for a leading edge chip is maybe $500 million. If they can commit to $1.4T, they can do it on their own. It's almost an omen they don't feel comfortable spending that without a guarantor.

neuvarius2• 9 months ago

For sake of HN can we get a rundown that isn’t Gary Marcus flinging shit on people? I’d like something a bit more objective.

samrus5• 9 months ago

You could just read the primary sources. The things hes showing people to have said.

The gist is altman was trying to be slick about requiesting a government bailout, got called out on his bullshit, and then decided to lie and say he never wanted a bailout

The implication being the bubble is getting closer and closer to popping, since even altman is thinking about how to survive the pop

ungreased0675• 9 months ago

Somehow people like him seem to survive just fine. Adam Neumann still has infinite money and Billy McFarland is still getting investors for various schemes.

neuvarius2• 9 months ago

Unfortunately the shit flinging is recursive. I’m not looking to read more conjecture. And people are pulling an Elon v2 with Altman and the “any day now he’ll make a fatal mistake!” nonsense.

I’m not holding my breath for hot takes, but I got what I came for: sama said some stuff, the thread.

nostrebored3• 9 months ago

No particular love for Sam Altman, but the article reads as “I was right about X, so my interpretation of Y is correct.”

I don’t see any particular contradiction. Moving fabs onshore is absolutely in the interest of both parties.

samrus5• 9 months ago

The crux of the article was altman trying to get a bailout, and when people called him on his bullshit, lying thay he never wanted a bailout. You cant trust the man

ineedasername3• 9 months ago

It looks like the actual crux was Altman's plea that the backtops be granted... Not to OpenAI? The document linkedfrom the article that had the actual ask, rather than cleanup over deliberate misatributions by others, was to... "Extend eligibility", for the AMIC money already carved out, to companies that are producers of things such as "grid components such as transformers and specialized steel".

So: Altman did not ask for OpenAI loans to be guaranteed, nor did the CFO. It was on behalf of others drawn into the needs of the industry the AMIC grant was supposed to support. Self interested by OpenAI? Sure! And also not about to make the top 10k leaderboard for "sleezy things companies do".

mieses• 9 months ago

He might be fun to play a board game with but not in real life.

Jedd• 9 months ago

That wasn't my take - it was more broadly a 'given past statements and accompanying behaviour, we can't trust future statements to align with future behaviour'.

Can you more explicitly describe what the X and Y points you allude to are?

nostrebored3• 9 months ago

Every “6 months ago I said this!” added little to the article. In a real investigative report it would lay out the facts and fairly objectively state “6 months ago, Sam Altman was accused of …”

The article as a whole just seems libelous? Almost personal?

hiddencost2• 9 months ago

Gary Marcus has been writing a piece like this roughly every 2 months for 20 years, and he gets a lot of attention because he seems respectable (he is not), and many papers are looking for a respectable source that has this opinion.

nextworddev• 9 months ago

He’s playing the Nouriel Roubini game (another NYU adj prof).

Last time I checked Nouriel was partying up in the Hamptons so being a permabear is lucrative.

an0malous5• 9 months ago

Why is he not respectable?

chmaynard• 9 months ago

Nicely done! An ad hominem attack, the lowest form of discourse.

option• 9 months ago

This isn't a comment about Sam Altman, but given Gary's track record, why would anyone listen to him?

spiderice• 9 months ago

Care to enlighten those of us that know nothing about Gary's track record?

hiddencost2• 9 months ago

He posts some variant of this kind of anti AI piece roughly every two months for over 20 years. He's been wrong so far. Eventually he'll get lucky, but his track record is abysmal.

tim3333• 9 months ago

Gary is a bit of a stopped clock that always says the same time and is right occasionally. His basic position is these neural network things are not much good, they won't do whatever the current claim is.

franktankbank2• 9 months ago

Why comment then?

superconduct123• 9 months ago

I don't understand, what prompted OpenAI recently to need this 1.4T investment?

pinnochio5• 9 months ago

Believe it or not, that's actually a walkback from the $5 to $7 trillion he was pushing for almost two years ago.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/repor...

tootie• 9 months ago

I remember and it lends some credence to the notion that Altman is just making up big numbers.

jgalt212• 9 months ago

He was just anchoring.

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/w...

Gigachad• 9 months ago

They are going all in, promising so many deals to so many companies that if OpenAI fails, the entire US economy will explode. Expecting the government will bail them out to prevent such a disaster.

goatlover3• 9 months ago

Billionaires and corporations too big too fail are bad for democracy. They have an oversized impact on society and the government.

therein• 9 months ago

That would do nothing to prevent such a disaster. It would guarantee it.

JumpCrisscross2• 9 months ago

what prompted OpenAI recently to need this 1.4T investment?

Capital denial to competitors.

hoppp• 9 months ago

I think every company would like to have that. OpenAI is in a hyped up position that it can get it, so they go for it.

I don't buy that they can create AGI by investing trillions in training models and infrastructure.

If you ask me, this is just more money spent on pollution.

The need to replace humans to be profitable, just sounds like the end goal is to destroy the planet with datacenters and hurt people generally.

Sounds like a net negative for the planet.

an0malous5• 9 months ago

All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.

sumedh3• 9 months ago

LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.

ChatGpt is also building other products/brands like Sora to capture more mindshare.

Linux is free and yet people use Windows.

Spooky233• 9 months ago

The need to say “fuck you” to Elon and one-up him.

ineedasername3• 9 months ago

Absolutely nothing. They don't, they didn't, it's a poorly stitched together attack job.

The 1.4 T amounts to a broad nearly decade long capex plan, not liabilities.

The loans and backstops etc were a request, not for OpenAI, but on behalf of manufacturers of grid equipment, manufacturers that OpenAI wouldike the government to consider as eligible for money already carved out by the AMIC national investment in chips and AI, and also probably more money as well-- it's a separate group of tangential industries that weren't initially considered, so why not ask? Sure it would help keep the wheels moving in OpenAI and the broad AI and US semiconductor industry, but it's far away from and ask by Altman for a bailout of his company.

techblueberry3• 9 months ago

Narrator: it was in fact a bailout they were asking for.

chaosprint• 9 months ago

OpenAI's Bailout Blunder: How a CFO's Words Ignited a Firestorm

https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-11-06-openai-cfo/

"If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer." OpenAI and Microsoft Detail Landmark Partnership, Navigate Future of AI and Compute

https://founderboat.com/interviews/2025-11-01-openai-sam-sat...

Crazy sequences in a week...

lumost• 9 months ago

The "I don't need to answer your simple questions on profit and loss statements" sentiment was odd. Likely odd enough to spur institutional investors to dig deeper or attract short interest.

mrtksn• 9 months ago

This site(entropytown) has a certificate problem: https://a.dropoverapp.com/cloud/download/c3bc66a4-40a3-49fe-...

JumpCrisscross2• 9 months ago

“Altman, sensing that he had massively blundered…”

Altman is in bed with Trump. He isn’t all in. But Tuesday evidencing an electoral shift makes Friar’s comments exceptionally ill timed.

siliconc0w• 9 months ago

That agro response to a perfectly reasonable question, "if you don't want your shares, we'll find you a buyer" instantly reminded me of that Bernie Madoff movie.

ozozozd• 9 months ago

Spot on!

Animats• 9 months ago

Loan guarantees? Where did that come from?

The AI bubble must really be about to pop.

octoberfranklin3• 9 months ago

Yeah that and the rush to IPO OpenAI....

sidcool• 9 months ago

I'm no Sam fan. But Gary Marcus is quite publicly a Sam critic. So I'd not dismiss it, but would also take it with a pinch of salt.

meander_water• 9 months ago

Here's the juicy stuff mentioned in the article: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

octoberfranklin3• 9 months ago

s/pants/hair/

Somebody please tell me how to short this. I'm going all in.

rsync• 9 months ago

You buy puts on TQQQ.

BluSyn2• 9 months ago

I'm confused about language, as "loans" to me do not equal "bailout". The equating of the two seems odd, as many government incentives use loans that pay back with high interest, so governments MAKE money on those kinds of deals.

Also clear that the 1.4T figure includes some accounting for spend that does not come directly from OpenAI (grid/power/data infra for example). Obviously some government involvement is needed, but more at EPA/State/Local level to fast track construction permits, more-so than financial help from Treasury.

I'm confused why this generates such sensational headlines.

octoberfranklin3• 9 months ago

This is the same kind of bullshit rationalization they used to say that the bank bailouts of 2009 weren't really bank bailouts.

They were bank bailouts.

Unsecured government loans are either bailouts, entitlements in disguise, or (usually misguided) attempts at broad economic stimulus. This definitely isn't either of the latter two.

BluSyn2• 9 months ago

Unsecured government loan to a successful company to fund acceleration and growth is a "handout".

A "bailout" is what happened in 2009, in the sense the banks would literally have collapsed without it (and they probably should have).

OpenAI is not going to collapse without these loans. Huge difference.

Also for the record, not rationalizing, because I'm not in favor of either handouts or bailouts.

tim3333• 9 months ago

I'm with you on that - people use the wrong terms. Bailouts are supporting things like GM or failing banks because the government is worried about GM workers losing jobs or bank depositors losing money.

Altman's 1.4T isn't like that - it's a proposed new investment in stuff that doesn't exist yet and there would be no job losses or the like if it fails to exist. They have been talking about potential government support for the new ventures, partly to keep up with China which uses similar government support. I'm not sure if it's a good idea but it would not be a bailout, more a subsidy.

franktankbank2• 9 months ago

Those are typically structured as loans no?

palmotea• 9 months ago

Gary Marcus was blocked on X by Kara Swisher in November 2022 for saying that the board did not trust Sam Altman. Marcus remains blocked by Ms. Swisher to this day.

There was an Ezra Klein podcast awhile back where Swisher (a journalist) made it sound like she'd been buddy-buddy with Elon Musk for some time. What is/was her relationship to Altman?

blobbers4• 9 months ago

The crazy thing about Sam Altman is that he's basically a deal maker; does it remind you of anyone currently in power? No substance, no skill, just wheeling dealing, constantly saving his own neck from things that really should have ended his career.

Read: https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

" 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. "

Meanwhile America is having no Kings protests.

lioeters• 9 months ago

Hilarious how there's vigorous discussion happening under a post with 200 votes and 100 comments, while it's been flagged the whole time.

No substance, no skill, just wheeling dealing

That's their only real skill. There's an entire class of people who specialize in exploiting society's hard work.

blobbers4• 9 months ago

I think one thing I liked when I was in start-ups was working for folks straight out of grad school that genuinely cared about a problem, had some advanced knowledge about a topic and were just trying to turn it into a business.

I felt like those were the kind of folks I could get on board with; not someone with an MBA that needs head count to reach their KPIs. Someone that cared about solving a problem and was genuinely smart.

blobbers4• 9 months ago

Why is this post flagged?

Sam Altman's pants are on fire

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