Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
Please ask The New Yorker to extend some of their very generous subscription sale prices to Canada, I would subscribe to print if even a single sale applied to us, but all the sales are always USA only.
Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a]
This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world.
OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]
Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude, because they think it's a better product.[c]
Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position similar?
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[a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
[b] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-sh...
[c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response.
The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.
Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much about that.
I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors.
If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love to hear about it.
at this point even googles ai search results are better than gpt - obv. this is not for full programs but if you know what youre doing and just want a snippet, thats all you need.
Wild how different experience people can have. Both Google's models and Anthrophic's hallucinate a lot for me, even when I try the expensive plans and with web searches, for some reason, and none of them come close to the accuracy and hallucination-free responses of ChatGPT Pro, which to me still is SOTA and has been since it was made available. But people keep having opposite experiences apparently, I just can't make sense of it.
Ronan Farrow's expertise is investigations into elite amorality, not evaluating technical products. Why are you asking this question?
I didn't asking him to evaluate them. I asked him how customer and partners perceive them.
He's had so many conversations that he likely has a sense of how perceptions of the company and its offerings have changed.
I'm curious.
Much of the article and general palace intrigue is predicated on the idea that OpenAI has a singularly revolutionary product. If it later turns out to be a commodity, or OpenAI is simply outcompeted nonetheless, then the idea that Sam Altman's personal shortcomings are something to stress about would seem quaint. Just another hubristic tech billionaire acting in bad faith doesn't really pry attention the same way as someone "controlling your future".
My guess is that the answer to your question, fantastic question, is that nobody knows. I remember having the same thoughts when Covid was first “arriving” if you will: we wanted people in the know to throw us a nugget of information, and they just didn’t know.
As it turns out, and what I’m kind of going with for this LLM shit, is that it’ll play out exactly how you think it will. The companies are all too big to fail, with billionaire backers who would rather commit fraud than lose money.
How would fraud help here? Don't they just need scale of lots of customers paying a little bit? How do you fraud your way into that?
If you were in charge of the deciding what should be done with Sam Altman, what would you choose?
Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a better product.
No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.
Who is “us”? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex for its math capabilities but when it comes to general frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills library.
Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems
As a scientist (computational physicist, so plenty of math, but also plenty of code, from Python PoCs to explicit SIMD and GPU code, mostly various subsets of C/C++), I can confirm - Codex is qualitatively better for my usecases than Claude. I keep retesting them (not on benchmarks, I simply use both in parallel for my work and see what happens) after every version update and ever since 5.2 Codex seems further and further ahead. The token limits are also far more generous (and it matters, I found it fairly easy to hit the 5h limit on max tier Claude), but mostly it's about quality - the probability that the model will give me something useful I can iterate on as opposed to discard immediately is much higher with Codex.
For the few times I've used both models side by side on more typical tasks (not so much web stuff, which I don't do much of, but more conventional Python scripts, CLI utilities in C, some OpenGL), they seem much more evenly matched. I haven't found a case where Claude would be markedly superior since Codex 5.2 came out, but I'm sure there are plenty. In my view, benchmarks are completely irrelevant at this point, just use models side by side on representative bits of your real work and stick with what works best for you. My software engineer friends often react with disbelief when I say I much prefer Codex, but in my experience it is not a close comparison.
I've tried both against similar and haven't found it such a clear cut difference. I still find neither are able to fully implement a complex algorithm I worked on in the past correctly with the same inputs. Not sharing exactly the benchmark I'm using but think about something for improving performance of N^2 operations that are common in physics and you can probably guess the train of thought.
>As a scientist (computational physicist,
Is there one that you prefer for, i dunno, physics?
I'm in that camp -- I have the max-tier subscription to pretty much all the services, and for now Codex seems to win. Primarily because 1) long horizon development tasks are much more reliable with codex, and 2) OpenAI is far more generous with the token limits.
Gemini seems to be the worst of the three, and some open-weight models are not too bad (like Kimi k2.5). Cursor is still pretty good, and copilot just really really sucks.
Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are old news. If you're having problems, it's because you're not using the latest hotness: Cludge. Everyone is using it now - don't get left behind.
Cludge has been left behind by Clanker, that’s the new hotness. 45B valuation!
Us = me and say /r/codex or wherever Codex users are. I've tried both, liked both, but in my projects one clearly produces better results, more maintainable code and does a better job of debugging and refactoring.
That's interesting, I actively use both and usually find it to be a toss up which one performs better at a given task. I generally find Claude to be better with complex tool calls and Codex to be better at reviewing code, but otherwise don't see a significant difference.
If you want to find an advocate for Codex that can give a pretty good answer as to why they think it's better, go ask Eric Provencher. He develops https://repoprompt.com/. He spends a lot of time thinking in this space and prefers Codex over Claude, though I haven't checked recently to see if he still has that opinion. He's pretty reachable on Discord if you poke around a bit.
Quite irrelevant what factions think. This or that model may be superior for these and those use cases today, and things will flip next week.
Also. RLHF mean that models spit out according to certain human preference, so it depends what set of humans and in what mood they've been when providing the feedback.
Any difference in performance on mobile development?
For that I'm not so sure. I tried both early 2025 and was disappointed in their ability to deal with a TCA based app (iOS) and Jetpack compose stuff on Android, but I assume Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 are much better.
yea Im not in this "us" you speak of.
Of course you're not one of "us" if you're one of "them".
As some other people mentioned, using both/multiple is the way to go if it's within your means.
I've been working on a wide range of relatively projects and I find that the latest GPT-5.2+ models seem to be generally better coders than Opus 4.6, however the latter tends to be better at big picture thinking, structuring, and communicating so I tend to iterate through Opus 4.6 max -> GPT-5.2 xhigh -> GPT-5.3-Codex xhigh -> GPT-5.4 xhigh. I've found GPT-5.3-Codex is the most detail oriented, but not necessarily the best coder. One interesting thing is for my high-stakes project, I have one coder lane but use all the models do independent review and they tend to catch different subsets of implementation bugs. I also notice huge behavioral changes based on changing AGENTS.md.
In terms of the apps, while Claude Code was ahead for a long while, I'd say Codex has largely caught up in terms of ergonomics, and in some things, like the way it let's you inline or append steering, I like it better now (or where it's far, far, ahead - the compaction is night and day better in Codex).
(These observations are based on about 10-20B/mo combined cached tokens, human-in-the-loop, so heavy usage and most code I no longer eyeball, but not dark factory/slop cannon levels. I haven't found (or built) a multi-agent control plane I really like yet.)
Codex won me over with one simple thing. Reliability. It crashed less, had less load shedding and its configuration is well designed.
I do regular evaluation of both codex and Claude (though not to statistical significance) and I’m of the opinion there is more in group variance on outcome performance than between them.
This is the way. Eg. IME Gemini is really damn good at sql.
I've found claude startlingly good at debugging race conditions and other multithreading issues though.
My rule of thumb is that its good for anything "broad", and weaker for anything "deep". Broad tasks are tasks which require working knowledge of lots of random stuff. Its bad at deep work - like implementing a complex, novel algorithm.
LLMs aren't able to achieve 100% correctness of every line of code. But luckily, 100% correctness is not required for debugging. So its better at that sort of thing. Its also (comparatively) good at reading lots and lots of code. Better than I am - I get bogged down in details and I exhaust quickly.
An example of broad work is something like: "Compile this C# code to webassembly, then run it from this go program. Write a set of benchmarks of the result, and compare it to the C# code running natively, and this python implementation. Make a chart of the data add it to this latex code." Each of the steps is simple if you have expertise in the languages and tools. But a lot of work otherwise. But for me to do that, I'd need to figure out C# webassembly compilation and go wasm libraries. I'd need to find a good charting library. And so on.
I think its decent at debugging because debugging requires reading a lot of code. And there's lots of weird tools and approaches you can use to debug something. And its not mission critical that every approach works. Debugging plays to the strengths of LLMs.
Not a scientist and use codex for anything complex.
I enjoy using CC more and use it for non coding tasks primarily, but for anything complex (honestly most of what I do is not that complex), I feel like I am trading future toil for a dopamine hit.
I’m one of those ‘us’, Claude’s outputs require significant review and iteration effort (to put it bluntly they get destroyed by gpt and Gemini). I’m basically using sonnet to do code search and write up since it is a better (more human-like) writer than gpt and faster and more reliable than gemini, but that’s about it.
Many paying customers say that Anthropic degraded the capability of Opus and Claude Code in the last months and the outcomes are worse. There are even discussions on HN about this.
Last one is from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925
I also find Codex much more generous in terms of what you get with a Pro ($20/mo) subscription. I use it pretty much non-stop and I have yet to hit a limit. Weekly reset is much better as well.
GPT/claude/gemini is pretty interchangeable at this point.
Absolutely not the case. They're complementary.
i find myself being more productive with codex/copilot on coding tasks, but claude does seem to be better at planning
I prefer GLM 5.1 and MiniMax 2.7. With a better harness like Forge Code, I have better results for way less money than by using GPT and Opus.
Does this work for people? To me having a "better product" would be completely irrelevant if the use cases are evil.
Shill talk
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He’s replying on this twitter thread - perhaps someone with an account can ask there and link his comment here?
https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m
Here is the actual link, not a link to some weird third-party site that can't be trusted.
https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532
FYI xcancel is just a mirror that allows reading replies without needing an account.
Whereas X can be trusted?
Yes? It's the data source, not a third-party. How is this even a question?
There's pedantic, and then there's needlessly pedantic.
xcancel is a valid workaround for X links on Hacker News and is sufficient for original attribution.
X restricts what you can view without logging in. Many folks don't want to log in to X, for obvious reasons. Posting an xcancel link is kinda like folks posting various `archive` URLs to bypass paywalls, work around overloaded servers, etc. That's an extremely common practice here that usually goes without comment.
It's worth noting Codex has 2x more stories than Claude https://hn.algolia.com/?query=codex
But by page 5, those stories have around 50-60 karma, while claude page five is still 500+
(i found your comment surprising based on my daily hn reading recollection - i mostly read top N daily and feel i only occassionally see codex stories).
Yeah we moved to Claude a few months ago, mostly because the devs kept using it anyway. Altman stuff is interesting but at the end of the day you just go with whatever tool works
> You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are
Unfortunately it probably doesn't even matter here on HN considering how brigaded down this story is predictably getting.
But yeah, it was a fantastic piece.
It wasn't getting "brigaded down" - it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. I turned that off as soon as I saw it.
Fair request, here you go: https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041203911697068112
The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated?
Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It was founded by the parents of the psychologist who coined DARVO, directly in reaction to her accusing them of abuse.
Dissociation is real (I have a dissociative disorder, and abuse I “recovered” but did not remember for much of my adolescence and early adulthood has been corroborated by third parties) and many CSA survivors have severe memory problems that often don’t come to a head until adulthood. I know you didn’t dismiss her claim, but the way the public tends to think about recovered memories is shaped primarily by that awful organization.
All fair points on trauma and memory.
As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman's partners and what we found and didn't is as described.
Thanks for the response! Cheers just fully reread the piece and appreciate your reporting.
It's super neat to see you here on HN taking questions, kudos :)
That's not a fair assessment. "False memory syndrome" and "repressed/recovered memory" are both outside scientific mainstream consensus.
Correct, because there truly isn’t a great way to answer with certainty - there was evidence in the 80s of suggestive techniques being used by poorly trained psychologists, and there are many people who remember and then find corroboration.
There’s a lot more who remember and may not have corroboration more than with themselves and among their close friends or healthcare provider. Part of CSA is usually there is very little a kid can do about evidence, as the power discrepancy is far too much. Often with rich abusers, the exact same process occurs. Perps pick victims who are vulnerable or controllable, and constantly seek power and domination. Nothing to do with the boardroooms or batch of ceo billionaires running the economy right now certainly.
I am very sympathetic to the situation you describe. I certainly think it is possible that Annie is describing something that happened. I think the author did a fair job of representing the allegations, finding the right balance between disclosing that they were unable to corroborate the allegations without dismissing them.
That said, "recovering" memories as a therapy does not pass any sort of sniff test and it doesn't take a concerted effort to discredit the concept. Human memory is very malleable. Patients with mental health issues (which could predate abuse, or could be caused by abuse) are often in search of answers and that makes them very vulnerable.
Could a memory be buried deep in our subconscious, forgotten, only to return to the surface later? Sure, we all forget things and then remember them when triggered by something, whether that's a smell or sound or something else entirely. But can we engineer that process, with any degree of reliability? How can we even begin to reliably reverse engineer the triggers?
I think it is also important to keep in mind that Annie is rich, and the health care available to rich people can be very predatory. There are endless examples of nonsense therapies for all types of health, from ear seeds to treatments for "chronic Lyme".
Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't conflate them. If Annie's memories were triggered in adulthood, sure, that's really no different than remembering something... but "recovered"? That is something else entirely.
Correct me where I'm wrong, I'd like to learn your perspective, maybe there's a missing piece.
> recovering" memories as a therapy
Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy that leaned heavily on suggestion or was associated often with fairly coercive interrogations during the 80s CSA panic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
> Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't conflate them.
Agree, though I think the mechanism can be a bit more towards the idea of a “recovery” of traumatic memory, even if the term as understood carries false connotations.
The concept you’re missing is dissociation, and dissociative disorders. In the 40s it was called just “hysteria”, and for many cases up to the late 90s an extreme form was called multiple personality disorder, now DID (dissociative identity disorder). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder
Not everyone who goes through traumatic events will respond to it via dissociation of identity, and indeed not all people are equally capable of developing a dissociative disorder, 2 people may go through very similar events (say survive a war as siblings or even twins) and one might dissociate the traumatic experience and one might not. Dissociation doesn’t work quite like you might imagine from a term like “multiple personalities” - that happens in some extreme cases, but think of identity dissociation as an adaptive response to events or situations that are paradoxical (esp to a child’s mind), extreme or traumatic, and can’t be escaped or use of other mechanisms cant be called upon.
Dissociation is on a sort of spectrum, where at one side you have common experiences like zoning out when on a common commute, and on another you have separated self-parts/alter egos to handle wildly different situations.
It’s a mechanism I frankly wasn’t aware of and I’m not sure that I would be able to fully beleive or empathize with, but for my getting a diagnosis of a dissociative disorder changed my life, and made a thousand things about me that I could never figure out make sense. The “model” as it put it at the time responded to experiment, and by recognizing that I was dealing with pretty constant, heavy dissociation and different self states with memory deficiencies helped me figure out how to work through a ton of really intractable problems for me. I’m finally after decades of ineffective therapy able to really understand how I work.
Idk how to talk about it without sounding like I’m trying to sell the idea. But yeah it was a mind blowing thing to me. Over the last 20 years especially a ton of truly respectable research has been done and the increase in efficacy of treatments on dissociation, and trauma generally is one of the unsung advancements for humanity in the last decade. I think the number is that around 3-6% of people meet the clinical criteria for a dissociative disorder - OSDD, DID, DPDR, or dissociative amnesia. 5x more people than have schizophrenia, 5x more than have red hair.
My favorite public clinical resource I point to people is the CTAD Clinic YouTube - https://youtube.com/@thectadclinic?si=5AyR5H8K8Cf2sn3C
Pretty easy to understand explainers from a clinician in the UK.
For a more clinical and study approach this one is the currently best put together research IMO: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97810030573...
The TLDR is dissociation is an important mechanism that most people don’t know about but has had a wave of research and study and is much more common than one might expect. The sad part is how often dissociative disorders correlate w abuse.
Thank you very much for the details.
I’m reading more now and I think the missing piece for me is the distinction between “repressed” memories and “recovered” memories.
I understood repressed memories to be an accepted idea, distinct from “recovered” memories. I am reading that the people mentioned in your original comment rejected the idea of repressed memory altogether, and believed that everything traumatic must be remembered.
So, to me, reading that someone “recovered” memory reads like they went through a specific type of therapy intended to “find” these repressed memories. Whereas to you, “recovered” memories could be repressed memories that came back to the surface organically — whether at random, triggered or through a therapy intended to deal with disassociating. Is that right?
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Hi Ronan, thanks for the article and for answering questions.
My question is, how do you know when an enormous project like this, conducted over an 18-month time span is "done"? I assume you get a lot of leeway from editors and publishers on this matter. How do you make the decision to finally pull the trigger on publishing?
We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him.
All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around the Pentagon's decisions, not Anthropic's. And nobody seems interested in examining whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one. That seems like a story worth writing.
> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one
FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.
Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is actually genuine which is practically unicorn rarity in corporate America.
We have worked for FAANG so I know where they're coming from; this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this question for myself.
Are your friends also credited in Silicon Valley (2014)?
Yeah, every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good... Until they find themselves working somewhere else, then suddenly they have a lot to say about the unacceptable things going on there.
From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice folks who are primarily concerned with money and status. That's not a condemnation, but I reject all the "do no evil" fanfare as conveniently self serving.
My model is that Anthropic was founded by OpenAI engineers who self-selected for safety-consciousness. However, it's still subject to the same problem: power corrupts. I think they are better than OpenAI but they are definitely sliding.
> every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good
This isn't remotely true in my experience. The senior folks I know at Meta, for example, pretty much concede they're ersatz drug dealers.
It should perhaps be generalized as "employees usually match the general consensus of their peer-group". Before everyone considered Meta to be ersatz drug dealers, they'd report that they feel what everyone feels.
Google was "do no evil" until they had to choose between that and making the money. The culture has to be not only professed but tested.
Indeed. The bad behavior is emergent, where most individual intentions are good. Good story, bad outcome.
TBH I have worked at multiple FAANG and I don't know anyone other than maybe new grads that actually drank the koolaid.
Certainly most of us know we are just in it for the money, and the soul-grinding profit machine will continue to grind souls for profit regardless of what we want.
So that's why it is surprising to me when my (fairly senior) grizzled ex-FAANG friends, that share the same view, start waxing poetic about Anthropic being different and genuine. I think "maybe it is" and decide to interview. IDK, I guess some part of me wants to believe that nice things can exist.
I find it bizarre even the public image of Anthropic is seen as ethical after the Department of War debacle, in which they themselves admitted they had basically no qualms with their tech being used for war and slaughter at all except two very very thin lines, namely mass surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weaponry with their current models.
It only showed they were marginally more ethical than OpenAI and XAI which isn't saying much.
Anthropic has two principles they're willing to stand behind, even when it costs them. That's not a lot, but OpenAI only has one principle: look out for number one.
If you know even the basics of ethics then such claims are clearly nonsense. There is no stable context independent ethical behaviour. This is a great example of the dangers of motivated reasoning.
I have multiple friends at Anthropic. I can second this. One thing I notice about Anthropic culture is that it is unusually kind.
So much so that I worry they won't be Machiavellian enough to survive. Hope I am wrong.
I think cynicism is deserved just from observing Dario's remarks.
> the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere
I wonder what Anthropic tries to achieve by spreading such blatant lies with their bot accounts. I'm definitely not buying anything from a company so morally corrupt to smear the competition while claiming to be somehow "ethical". And I'm not talking just about this thread, it's a recurring pattern on Reddit.
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It might stick tbh. Their PBC+LTBT structure severely limits the power of shareholders. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
There may be a reason why Altman is talked about a lot. This article in particular surfaces real information and new perspectives we've not heard in this level of detail before on some pretty significant topics that will be impacting you, me, and pretty much everyone we know not only today but well into the future.
You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too and that there are interesting perspectives that we've not heard of on that front either.
But just because that's true doesn't mean this article isn't very much relevant and needed.
Because it is.
The New Yorker has given plenty of coverage about Anthropic in their past issues earlier this year.
For what it’s worth, the story, while focused on OpenAI, is not uncritical of Anthropic. It explores whether there is a wider race to the bottom in terms of safety, and erosion of even some of Anthropic’s commitments.
After the US launched its attack on Iran, the ethical AI lab's CEO wrote: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences." - https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war
"how easy it is, for those of us who play no part in public affairs, to sneer at the compromises required of those who do" - robert harris
Not making any value judgements, but I can see how one might value their interpretability research higher than what the ceo says in a time where the corrupt, criminal executive branch is muscling in to everything from what's written on currency, to journalistic sources. I generally blame fascists before i blame those unable or unwilling to resist them. though obviously, ideally, we'd all lock arms and, together through friendship, crush authoritarians and fascists.
They are a private company. They have zero obligation to sell anything to any part of the government or military. The only reason they are involved in "public affairs" is because they want to profit from the government. Moreover, long before this DoW controversy, they had plenty of nationalist and anti-China rhetoric in their press releases, more so than the other AI firms.
Seriously blame anyone other than the fucking abuser. These people
We should stop talking about potential problems or perpetrators, when we have talked about them “enough”?
That would be irrational.
We should give air time to other problems?
I think everyone agrees with that.
You have managed to distill a surprisingly pure vintage of false dichotomy, from a near Platonic varietal of whataboutism.
OP says they’ve been working on this for 18 months. Most of what you’ve said wasn’t the case until much more recently.
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Normies don't know what an "Anthropic" is. They use ChatGPT. Particularly sharp normies might know that ChatGPT is made by OpenAI, and the sharpest might know that Sam Altman is the CEO.
Now, they may have heard the word "Anthropic" due to recent media coverage. But they don't know what it is and don't remember what it makes. The fact that all businesses use "Anthropic" is about as relevant to them as knowing the overseas shipping company for all the shit they buy off Amazon.
So articles about OAI will always produce more revenue for the media, because it's related to what normies actually use day to day.
I just spent a while reading the article. I really appreciate you writing it. In my case, it made me like Sam Altman a lot more. But I was only able to conclude this because of all the evidence you took the time to put together. It paints the picture of someone trying to do something very difficult in a rapidly changing environment and a lot of pressure, but still making the important choices and not shirking them.
Interesting to hear! While this hasn’t been a commonplace reaction, I think if I do my job right it should allow people to read the facts as they will, exactly like this. It’s strenuously designed to be fair and, where appropriate, even generous.
Ronan Farrow on Hacker News. Now I’ve seen everything.
I’ve really appreciated how substantive and polite the discourse here is, overall!
I'm a mod here and wanted to let you know 2 things: (1) I've marked your account with a beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page). It might help you keep track of this rather large thread.*
(2) I'm sorry the post was downranked off the frontpage for a while this afternoon. A software penalty kicks in when the discussion seems overheated ("flamewar detector") but I turned this off as soon as I became aware of it. We make a point of moderating HN less when a story is YC-related (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) but as this goes against standard internet axioms, people usually assume the opposite.
(* And yes, any reader who wants this is welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com to ask - I haven't turned it on for everyone because I'm worried it would slow the site down. Also, it's a bit buggy and not only have I not had time to fix it, I've forgotten what the bugs are.)
>beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page)
Can't wait until this is released!
It’s good to have you! We try to keep it civil :)
Not a question but just wanted to make sure you saw this:
https://theonion.com/anyone-else-have-those-weird-dreams-whe...
Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and others continue to do journalism like this? (including commenting on HN?)
This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed individuals and companies essentially buying up the discourse.
I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to do so.
Got it! Any recommendations on who to subscribe to? Any personal links for you?
In developer communities often you can support individual developers or groups through a monthly subscription / donation on their github page or similar.
Well, this piece was in The New Yorker, which is reasonably priced and regularly includes excellent investigative journalism. I get the physical copies, which can be too much to keep up with if you try to read everything, but it’s easy enough if you skim and just read the things that stick out as being of particular interest.
The New Yorker also comes with Apple News+ subscriptions (part of an Apple One plan that many people get for extra iCloud storage) which further includes a number of top-tier and local news orgs such as the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Times of London, etc.
The Sam Altman piece can be read here: https://apple.news/APTX4OkywRWeJXIL7b8a7zQ
Drop Site News, 404 Media, Boston Review, The Intercept, and Atavist are all very worth supporting.
Treating quality investigative reporting like the scarce resource that it is, as one of the most well-known can you shed any light on why Reuters would delegate resources to commission investigative reporters to unmask Banksy (in a world where all-things-Epstein represents an unending source of investigative opportunities in the public interest)?
Wonderful work and writing, Ronan -- I'm appreciative of your careful balance between objective fact-finding and synthesis.
For me, a big worry about AI is in its potential to further ease distorting or fabricating truth, while simultaneously reducing people's "load-bearing" intellectual skills in assessing what is true or trustworthy or good. You must be in the middle of this storm, given your profession and the investigations like this that you pursue.
Do you see a path through this?
I had a question about reporting conventions. In the paragraph where Altman is said to have told Murati that his allies were "going all out" to damage her reputation, the claim is attributed to "someone with knowledge of the conversation" but the attribution is tucked inconspicuously into the middle of the sentence (rather than say leading upfront ("According to someone with knowledge of the conversation, Altman...")) and Altman's non-recollection appears only parenthetically.
As a reader, am I supposed to infer anything about evidentiary weight from these stylistic choices? When a single anonymous source's testimony is presented in a "declarative" narrative style like here (with the attribution in a less prominent position), should we read that as reflecting high confidence on your end (perhaps from additional corroboration not fully spelled out)? And does the fact that Altman’s non-recollection appears in parentheses carry any epistemic signal (e.g. that you assign it less evidentiary weight)? Or is that mostly a matter of (say) prose rhythm?
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Hi Ronan. TCatK is a phenomenal book, not only in exposing the wrongdoing of powerful people, but also in presenting the meta-issue of how hard it was to get the word out, and you handled it all with nuance. You're about as close as I have to a personal hero.
Long time HN lurker, made an account just to say that :)
Nice biography from Loopt to OpenAI. Why no mention of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency https://x.com/sama/status/1451203161029427208 in this piece? Was there nothing interesting to report in that area?
It was mentioned, but not by name.
> in 2014, [Graham] had recruited Altman to be his successor as president.
> [Graham's] judgment was based not on Altman’s track record, which was modest, but on his will to prevail, which Graham considered almost ungovernable.
One thing I don't understand is why Paul Graham offered YC to Altman if he knew how slippery he was..
Perhaps your question answers itself.
Just wanted to say what an incredible person you are! Catch and Kill and the related reporting was awesome too!
This is so appreciated, thank you! These stories can honestly take a lot out of me so thoughtful reactions mean a lot.
Great reporting.
Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star behind all this that’s not centered on himself?
The piece is an interrogation of this very question, at great length and with some nuance. I think what it does most usefully is scrutinize an array of different answers to the question.
My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he is identifying something of a true north star when he frames this around "winning." There are people in the story who talk about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opposed to, say, wealth). I think he probably also believes, to some extent, the story he tells that equates winning, and his gaining power, with a superabundant utopian future for all.
However, I think critics correctly highlight a tension between his statements about centering humanity writ large and his tilt into relentless accelerationism.
(Other people's) money.
Great article.
Thank you for fielding questions. And please don't stop, your work is great.
Hi Ronan, absolutely wild to see you here in the belly of the beast.
I have not read the article yet, because I get the physical magazine and look forward to reading it analog. I therefore only have an inconsequential question.
I love the New Yorker’s house style and editorial “voice,” and I have always been curious about the editing process. I enjoyed the recent exhibit at the NYPL, which had some marked up drafts with editor feedback and author comments.
Did you find that your editors made significant changes to the voice of the piece, and/or do you find any aspects of their editing process particularly notable or unusual?
Can’t wait to read this one, and hope the HN crowd treats you well.
Do we have a choice?
The last couple sentences tie things up really nicely.
This is brilliant work, guys. Did you get any pressure to soften or spike the story?
I won’t get into behind-the-scenes specifics here but I think you can imagine how pressurized this topic was and the amount of heat that tends to generate. I’m used to getting a lot of blowback and it’s never fun. I just hope the work is meticulous and fair enough, and that enough people see the benefits of that, that I get to continue to do it.
If you want another story to run, I'd really love to see an investigation into how these different companies are convincing governements that the only path forward to win global dominance is through achieving 'agi' first and how much that contributes to the reckless acceleration of ai software and infrastructure development
Also a good expose on accelerationists and e/accs and who among the elites fall in this group is direly needed as well
Hey, just want to say thanks for the piece and for all the hard work and effort you did to get this out there. I've published a bit here and there, and the actual writing is only ~50% of the work load (for me at least). So thanks for going through all the effort and pain to get it out, really appreciate all the work you do for me and the rest of Joe Public.
I know why the cantilevered pool statement is there and why you mentioned it.
I’m sure you don’t know half of the totally fucked up things Sam did to get “revenge” for the slight of a leaking pool.
As someone on a budget, how can I pay for good journalism when it so spread out across various (expensive) outlets?
Paying for 1 is doing more than paying for 0.
It's not your responsibility to fund for every single one, just find the one you like the most and subscribe to that one.
Do you think the recent conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War, and the apparent bootlicking by OpenAI has fundamentally altered the public perception of OAI? Are they the baddies now in the general public opinion?
what model was used to create the visual at the top of the article?
Have you considered doing a piece on Aaron Swartz? Timnit Gebru? Michael O. Church?
It could be titled "Hypergraphia"
Your report is mukraking, it doesn't include anything positive. I was considering subscribing to the New Yorker but won't do so now.
For anyone else interested, you can see ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini summarize their article here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/xQj0Ftl7j88
There's nothing positive in it. The report isn't worth reading, and anyone who reads it will know less about Sam Altman than they did before they read it.
In depth reporting is great. This is a really tricky topic to cover over the course of 18 months. A year and a half ago OpenAI was ascendant, now it's -at best- stalling and, more likely, trending toward irrelevant.
Love the visual. Fantastic.
hey I loved that Ricky Gervais joke about you at the globes
For those that don’t know or remember:
“Tonight isn’t just about the people in front of the camera. In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world. People from every background. But they all have one thing in common: They’re all terrified of Ronan Farrow.”
From time to time I have been accused of being an apologist for Sam Altman, but I have always tried to assess information based upon what it says instead of whether it matches an existing narrative. You list a number of distortions in your article which show the problem. If you are a good person, bad stories about you may be fake. If you are a bad person, bad stories about you may still be fake.
My prima facie view on Altman has been that he presents as sincere. In interviews I have never seen him make a statement that I considered to be a deliberate untruth. I also recognise that people make claims about him go in all directions, and that I am not in a position to evaluate most of those claims. About the only truly agreed upon aspect has been how persuasive he is.
I can definitely see a possibility of people feeling like they have been lied to if they experienced a degree of persuasion that they are unaccustomed to. If you agree to something that you feel like you didn't really feel like you would have, I can see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than accept that they had been intellectually beaten.
In all such cases where an issue is contentious, you should ask yourself, what information would significantly change your views. If nothing could change your view, then it's a matter beyond reason.
I think you will agree that there is no smoking gun in this article, and it is just an outlay of the allegations. Evaluating allegations becomes tricky because I think it becomes a character judgement of those making the claims.
I have not heard a single person in all of this criticise Ilya Sutskever's character. If he were to make a statement to say that this article is an accurate representation of what he has experienced, it would go a long way.
I think Paul Graham should make a statement, The things he has publicly claimed are at odds with what the article says he has privately claimed. I have no opinion if one or the other is true or if they can be reconciled but there seem to be contradictions that need to be addressed.
While I do not have sources to hand (so I will not assert this as true but just claim it is my memory) I recall Sam Altman himself saying that he himself did not think he should have control over our future, and the board was supposed to protect against that, but since the 'blip' it was evident that another mechanism is required. I also recall hearing an interview where Helen Toner suggested that they effectively ambushed Altman because if he had time to respond to allegations he could have provided a reasonable explanation. It did not reflect well on her.
I am a little put off by some of the language used in the article. Things like "Altman conveyed to Mira Murati" followed by "Altman does not recall the exchange" Why use a term such as 'conveyed' which might imply no exchange to recall? If a third party explained what they thought Altman thought. Mira Murati could reasonbly feel like the information has been conveyed while at the same time Altman has no experience of it to recall. Nevertheless it results in an impression of Altman being evasive. If the text contained "Altman told Mira Murati" then no such ambiguity would exist.
"Later, the board was alarmed to learn that its C.E.O. had essentially appointed his own shadow board" Is this still talking about Brockman and Sutskever? I just can't see this as anything other than a claim he took advice from people he trusted. I assume those board members who were alarmed were not the ones he was trusting, because presumably the others didn't need to find out. The people he disagreed with still had votes so any claim of a 'shadow board' with power is nonsense, and if it is a condemnable offence, is the same not true of the alignment of board members who removed him.
Josh Kushner apparently made a veiled threat to Muratti, the claim "Altman claims he was unaware of the call" casts him as evasive by stacking denial upon denial, but without any other indication that was undisclosed in the article, it would have been more surprising if he did know of the call. I also didn't know of the call because I am not those two people.
The claim of sexual abuse says via Karen Hao "Annie suggested that memories of abuse were recovered during flashbacks in adulthood." To leave it at that without some discussion about the scientific opinion on previously unremembered events being recalled during a flashback seems to be journalistically irresponsible.
Paul Grahams's latest public statement on the issue:
https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353
I have experience in dealing with Sam Altman-like behavior. I hope to explain how their tactics unfold.
> I can see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than accept that they had been intellectually beaten.
There are two angles to this: from an individual perspective and from a collective one.
One's interaction with such a manipulator isn't a single shot. There is not a single event that they are “beaten”. First, one gets persuaded --- you might argue that there's nothing wrong with a skillful persuasion. At some point they realize that the reality is not in line with their expectations. They bring the point up to the manipulator and ask for a change, this time in more concrete terms. The manipulator agrees with the change, negotiates compromises, and the relationship continues. After some time the manipulated party realizes that things are not going in the direction they desire. This time they ask for more concrete terms, without accepting any compromises. The manipulator accepts, yet continues to act against the terms. The manipulated party is now angry and directly confronts the manipulator. The manipulator apologizes and tells that none of it was intentional, and asks for another chance. However, at that point, the manipulator has run out of “politically correct” “persuasion tactics”, and tells blatant lies to make the other party behave.
From a collective perspective, even those “politically correct” “persuasion tactics” are discovered to be lies, because what the manipulator told different parties are in direct opposition to each other, i.e., they cannot all be truths.
> Helen Toner suggested that they effectively ambushed Altman because if he had time to respond to allegations he could have provided a reasonable explanation. It did not reflect well on her.
I understand how her behavior may raise a flag for the unsuspecting, but it was exactly the right one. Manipulators prey on the benefit of the doubt. If Toner were to bring Altman's behavior into attention of others, no doubt that Altman would manipulate them successfully.
It's unfortunate that many people are unaware of these tactics and assume the best of intentions, when such assumptions fuel the manipulation that they would better avoid.
> what information would significantly change your views
Quite simple: show me any single action took by Sam Altman which can not be construed as an attempt to get him more power/money/influence. You can't find it.
The difference between what he claims to believe and what he actually does is a textbook example of sociopathy.
You make very good points. Signed up to point this out to others.
I have the feeling that if you write an article in that style, the subject of the story becomes the hero even if you insert a couple of negatives. In the same manner that Michael Corleone becomes the hero of The Godfather.
I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted.
On the positive side, the Kushner ad Abu Dhabi involvements (and threats from Kushner) deserve a wider audience.
My personal opinion is that "who should control AI" is the wrong question. In the current state, it is an IP laundering device and I wonder why publications fall silent on this. For example, the NYT has abandoned their crown witness Suchir Balaji who literally perished for his convictions (murder or not).
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the piece at all avoids key areas of disillusionment with the technology. Quite the contrary.
Hi Ronan,
I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.
However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in.
I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted you to know.
You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income from me.
You could buy a physical copy (and this isn't meant to sound sarcastic).
You can walk down to a bookstore or anywhere that sells magazines and buy a physical copy
I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.
Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.
I really doubt the implementation difficulty is the actual reason. It's not hard to have an extra table of specific article permissions.
You could hit up a public library...
Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course, I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" - I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers they have :-)
Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.
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There's a very minor typo in the article:
> “Investors are, like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”
Should be:
> “Investors are like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”
I'm not seeing a typo. Just a stylistic difference.
In "that's, like, your opinion", "like" is an interjection, you can take it out and not change the meaning: "That's your opinion".
In "investors were like, you need to grow", you're semi-quoting someone, and can't take it out: "investors were you need to grow".
Pretty sure the correction is wrong, not merely a stylistic choice.
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Many browsers let you disable autoplay globally.
Sure, there are a couple of buttons I can press to stop the video. Why do I have to? Find me one person who likes auto playing videos. The page was created with a deliberate annoying choice that I have to go out of my way to override.
Why do you think the author of this piece, to who you originally replied, has any control over this?
I'm not talking about pausing the video after it starts playing. I'm talking about a global setting to prevent videos from playing before you manually unpause them. Safari has such a setting, for instance.
Exactly what “I have to go out of my way to override” covers, from my comment.
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Hard hitting journalism here. Is the person who lied for years to promote himself trustworthy? More news at 11!
Damn, just wanted to say reporters are scary... The amount of detail here is huge. You think of hackers as the ones good at doxing... Nah, its reporters.
The article is paywalled, where can we read it?
Any plans to tackle any of the other folks who might be mentioned in the same sentence as Altman, like Darius Amodei?
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I think the comment was out of legitimate interest rather than weighing one against the other
Huh? It's a genuine question. The article is great and the writer did a fantastic job.
Please try to give people the benefit of the doubt though I know it's hard in today's society.
Dang, can you substantiate that this is actually Mr. Farrow like he claims?
Or Mr Farrow can you post some evidence somewhere we can see?