Over at Bloomberg, Josh Tyrangiel has an excellent interview with OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, which I found well worth reading, though surely not “definitive,” regarding all the melodrama surrounding Sam’s role in founding OpenAI, not to mention his dramatic dismissal, his dramatic rehiring, and then predictable departure for greener, for-profit pastures. For all I know, Altman may be 90% good guy in all this, or at least—and perhaps more likely—one willing to read the writing on the wall—the part that says with great egos comes great inability to share, that is. Altman sounds very much in the mode of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk—after awhile “co” has got to go—although with Musk it seems there never was a “co”.
At any rate, I had no real kick with Steve until the very end, when Josh asked an “interesting” question and got a despicable answer, to wit:
Josh: A lot of what you just said interacts with the government. We have a new president coming. You made a personal $1 million donation to the inaugural fund. Why?
Sam: He’s the president of the United States. I support any president.
Uh, really? Even convicted felons who tried to overthrow our system to government? If I asked OpenAI that question, I wonder what kind of answer I would get.
Unlike a lot of liberals, I don’t hate “Big Tech” or even fear them. But the sort of cringing, hypocritical cowardice that Sam is displaying here is just a bit of a deal-breaker for me. Back in the day, Silicon Valley billionaire liked to see themselves as guys with “Fuck you” money. “Funny” how “Fuck you” money has been transformed into “Please don’t fuck me” money now that Tony Soprano is in the White House.
Special Stupidity Watch Watch Afterwords
Also kicking in with apparently now obligatory $1 mil for the “inaugural fund”—cash that can effectively be used for any damn purpose whatsoever, no questions asked and no questions askable, as Jonathan V. Last explains—is the clearly repentant Mark Zuckerberg, speaking in an online video to announce that Facebook will no longer be in the censorship business, which gets a hearty thumbs up from Reasonette Robby Soave, though Robby doesn’t have anything to say about the $1 mil that Big Donnie can perhaps use to fund off-site torture chambers for use on immigrants charged with crimes. (Since they’re literally “not human”, they can have no “rights”, so, you know, anything goes. Reason has a record of being generally pro-immigrant, so I’m not sure if Robby is down with all of this, but maybe he’s just looking at the “big picture”).
Well, even if you felt, as I did, feel that sometimes Facebook was too accommodating to the liberal line in keeping us safe from misinformation (and occasionally just plain “information” as well), Zuckerberg’s aboutface struck me as, if anything, a more egregious display of “Yessir, Mr. President” than Facebook’s previous kowtowing to the Biden White House. But what really killed me was not what Mark said in his video but what he was wearing on his wrist—a “Greubel Forsey ‘Hand Made 1’”, whatever the fuck that is. Well, whatever the fuck that is, they cost about $900,000 each.
How fucked up do you need to be to “need” to wear a $900,000 watch? How fucked up does a billionaire need to be to “need” to wear a $900,000 watch? Is Markie boy suffering from such low self esteem that he needs to be able to look over at his wrist and think “Oh, yeah, you’ve made it, big boy! You are in da club!” I mean, does he sleep with his teddy bear? Just askin’.
UPDATE
The Daily Beast tells us that the Wall Street Journal tells us that Zuckerberg really deep-sixed his old content controls because its content evaluating algorithm didn’t promote one of his own posts, the one about his knee surgery, which I confess I did not read. This sounds a bit “cute” to me, but, hey, when has the WSJ ever lied to you?
SPECIAL MANLY UPDATE!
The real reason the Z-man wears a $900,000 watch: It gives him swagger!
