This creates urgency while potentially insulating OpenAI from criticism—acknowledging the bubble exists while positioning his company’s infrastructure spending as different and necessary.
I don’t find things that most corporate leaders say in contexts like this particularly interesting. Altman is willful but he’s also rational enough not to make any public statements that he and his marketing department haven’t reviewed thoroughly. He’ll never accidentally confess to anything. Even when he acknowledges problems, he does so with a plan to have OpenAI make the best of the situation and if acknowledging those problems wasn’t intended to help OpenAI somehow then he wouldn’t have done it.
I wonder about Musk sometimes. He often sounds downright deranged, but so does Trump and Trump has actually been very successful at using social media to spread his message and win over supporters. I know I’m in a bubble where people don’t respect behavior like theirs, but what if outside this bubble their behavior is actually a winning political strategy?
It’s because people don’t see it as affecting their lives, they view politics the same way they view reality television. They want entertainment, not realizing that what makes a good entertainer or TV show makes a terrible government or business.
My own hypothesis is different. People do view politics as affecting their lives, but many of them view intellectuals as out of touch, uninterested, or even hostile and they want someone in charge who isn’t one of those people. It’s the “good guy to have a beer with” sentiment which helped elect GWB but taken to an extreme. In this extreme, “owning the libs” is inherently good, not just a means to an end.
I’m not sure “intellectuals” is the right word here. The people I have in mind are college-educated but that’s not all there is to it. They are the the sort of people who Trump calls the “deep state” but they’re not just government employees - they’re judges who say that something is unconstitutional, but they’re also HR heads that say something is racist or scientists who say something is harmful to the environment. Large parts of the public now don’t just lack respect for them but actively hate them.
I don’t find things that most corporate leaders say in contexts like this particularly interesting. Altman is willful but he’s also rational enough not to make any public statements that he and his marketing department haven’t reviewed thoroughly. He’ll never accidentally confess to anything. Even when he acknowledges problems, he does so with a plan to have OpenAI make the best of the situation and if acknowledging those problems wasn’t intended to help OpenAI somehow then he wouldn’t have done it.
Nailed it. Only the dumbest, Musk front and center, spew random crap into the world.
I wonder about Musk sometimes. He often sounds downright deranged, but so does Trump and Trump has actually been very successful at using social media to spread his message and win over supporters. I know I’m in a bubble where people don’t respect behavior like theirs, but what if outside this bubble their behavior is actually a winning political strategy?
It’s because people don’t see it as affecting their lives, they view politics the same way they view reality television. They want entertainment, not realizing that what makes a good entertainer or TV show makes a terrible government or business.
My own hypothesis is different. People do view politics as affecting their lives, but many of them view intellectuals as out of touch, uninterested, or even hostile and they want someone in charge who isn’t one of those people. It’s the “good guy to have a beer with” sentiment which helped elect GWB but taken to an extreme. In this extreme, “owning the libs” is inherently good, not just a means to an end.
I’m not sure “intellectuals” is the right word here. The people I have in mind are college-educated but that’s not all there is to it. They are the the sort of people who Trump calls the “deep state” but they’re not just government employees - they’re judges who say that something is unconstitutional, but they’re also HR heads that say something is racist or scientists who say something is harmful to the environment. Large parts of the public now don’t just lack respect for them but actively hate them.