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Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Do you feel this is a bad strategy? Or what?

Liquidity for employees is great. Nobody is forcing them to sell.

It's not a bad strategy. It's keeping an eye on Sam Altman's agenda. He is a political animal that few people on HN seem to realize.

What makes him great at his job isn't the typical techie path of becoming great at technical and building a great product. His ability is the ability to influence and gain power through good and bad means.

Today's strategy may be good for employees; tomorrow maybe not. And no, he isn't thinking of what's best for employees. They just happen to be aligned at the moment. He is goal oriented regardless of the means. That's just my ill-informed opinion though.

If you had to speculate, what is the end goal? Power for power’s sake?

Money, power just helps him get more.

I always thought it's the other way around.

There is a point at which marginal money is worthless. Usually it's nation states that reach that point...

I think people like power because it helps them get more money. You can easily get more power with money because you just buy people.

Purpose in life. Give yourself hundreds of millions of dollars. What now? Many people might say they'd go retire on a beach, and that's really fun for like a year or two. But even endless self indulgence of that sort becomes quickly pointless.

For all of us stuck in the hamster wheel, purpose is easy - because it's forced upon us. But for those who manage to step outside of the wheel, what now? Taken to extremes you even see things like 90+ year old Warren Buffet deciding to step back in the wheel, continuing to show up to grind his days away at the office.

If you appreciate that lots of behaviors of people are them simply looking for a purpose in life - a lot of things start to make much more sense, running the gamut from political extremism, activism extremism, or people who already have practically infinite wealth just turning life into a game of 'make number go up.'

Cyberpunk utopia, by his words.

Cyberpunk dystopia, by those who understand what he’s saying.

He wants to be in the tech billionaire club, that's validation that he didn't fall ass backwards into success.

I think it makes sense. As long as Microsoft is cool with it, they'll keep providing the compute power necessary to keep OpenAI alive.

Of course microsoft is cool with it. They reinstalled sam as ceo specifically so he could do this.

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