> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.”
I can't imagine having such uninspired thoughts and actually writing them down while in a role of such diverse and worthwhile opportunities. I'd like to ask "how the hell do these people find themselves in these positions", but I think the answer is literally what he wrote in his diary. What a boring answer. We need to filter these people out at every turn, but instead they're elevated to the highest peaks of power.
It's not surprising. I made this comment on HN before, but if you follow him on Twitter, it's pretty remarkable - the CTO of one of the most important technology companies in the world and he has never (that I've seen) posted something with some technical insight, or just anything interesting about technology. It's just boring truisms, cliches, empty statements, etc.
Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth.
The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.
I don't think it's all that hard to avoid working on anything shady. It's not as easy to avoid being associated with anything shady due to widespread cynicism and a tendency to treat tech companies with thousands of projects as a monolith.
> The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary
I hope that's not true. If it is, we live in a bleak world indeed.
I can confidently say I've never once dreamed of having billions. I've never wanted billions. Not even in a fanciful manner. What would I do with that money? Buy mansions and megayachts? That's loser stuff
Most of what I want out of life cannot be bought. The pieces that come with a price tag, like a comfortable home, do not require billions
I think only sociopaths want billions because they don't understand spending your life seeking things that actually matter, like family and human connection
> The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary
That's actually the difference, most people don't want a billion
Yeah, sure…
it is disappointing, but is it shocking that people most driven by gaining money/power are the ones the most successful at achieving it?
What sticks out to me most is that humanity consistently fails to weed these creatures out and regulate society. It's a bug in our social software; we seem to like these broken people rather than recognize that they're a liability.
Most people don't care as long as it does not affect them directly.
Trust is not a bug
You need to accept that every generation some people are going to try and fuck things up.
Then you get to decide to stop or help them
This isn’t a bug. It’s the driving force of our capitalist society. We are not trying to weed them out. We are trying to encourage them. It’s pretty simple, when they get rich, so do all their investors.
Sociopaths don't have much going for them in life other than winning status games.
Sociopath is the next word that people seem to want to entirely destroy the meaning of
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> Struck a nerve?
No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in. I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus visible).
Racism and fascism have been used correctly, its just that people do not like to be have their beliefs associated with negative things and thus, rather than perform self-reflection about themselves, instead the problem exists elsewhere. I am sure you can come up with outliers that prove what you are saying is true, but across the vast majority of applications of the use of both words they are correct relative to definitions of both words.
Speaking of overinclusion, 'wild' is my nominee for 2026 as I'm seeing it all over the place.
> 'wild' is my nominee for 2026
I don't know how to define the delineation I'm about to propose. But there is a difference between overinclusivity trashing a morally-loaded, potentially even technical, term, and slang evolving.
I'm sorry, we did what with the word "racist"?
> we did what with the word "racist"?
“Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in.” The next sentence.
While I agree that the word has been misused by some bad actors in the "Woke 1.0 era", it's worth pointing out that this isn't what most people complaining about the word being "diluted" are referring to as these are mostly people flat-out upset by any suggestion that they themselves might hold racist beliefs.
That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".
Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely aligning with two different segments of the population: 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e. "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure. "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates while still attempting to use it with the emotional weight and personal judgement of the former definition.
I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism" just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the latter definition requires a critique of systems, which is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging hierarchical power structures in general and thus necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics" policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate America leading up to and into the second Trump presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the current state of most US corporations and their subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").
I would be curious to hear you expand on that, walk me through it, maybe a small paragraph to explain what over inclusion happened with the weird fascist, what baddies you're vaguely referring to, and connect those dots?
While true and we can see them literally everywhere where there is some money and/or power (even miniscule places like classic banks have easily 1/3 of the staff with clear sociopathic traits, I have to deal with them daily... or whole politics) - thats just human nature, or part of it.
Its up to rest of society to keep them in check since classic morals are highly optional and considered nuissance blocking those games. And here we the rest fail pretty miserably, while having on paper perfect tool - majority vote.
Or, some fraction of otherwise good/normal people who “win” are turned into sociopaths by the power and sycophancy.
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