Most of the article is well-trodden ground if you’ve been following OpenAI at all, but I thought this part was noteworthy:
Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years."
there’s so much wrong with that story — wealthy folks’ families (that don’t get disowned) have doctors on call and don’t go to the ER for issues that can be solved with medication. also, all the thyroid patients I know are fairly close with their endocrinologist and are utterly paranoid about their meds. maybe this is one of those stories where Scott’s actual mom waiting 30 minutes to see her endo turned, out of convenience for the point he wanted to make, into someone’s theoretical, more relatable mom who can’t afford medical care waiting 7 hours and not getting it
Aw dawg, that’s on me for supposing for a moment that his story had truth to it. I did think it strange that this rich dude’s mum had to go to the ER for something, but decided to apply good faith.
So now it’s even more cynical. Scott, who now lives a life of convenience, doesn’t have any of his own stories to parlay into AI hype, so he has to wear someone else’s suffering as stolen valor.