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Comment by tensility | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is that Altman has legitimately destroyed public trust. We already have way too many immature robber barons playing the oligarchy game for the likes of such as him to be positive for society in the end. If he had a conscience, it appears that he's sold it already.

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> The real problem is that Altman has legitimately destroyed public trust.

This might seem true in our technical buble, but most of the public probably has no idea who he is. They try ChatGPT for a work task and think it's amazing and love it.

I've seen this happen many times, and once one person in a small team/company tries it, everyone else starts using it and they also love it. These people don't know what OpenAI or who Sam Altman is and there hasn't been any trust broken because ChatGPT works for them.

Apple just gave the company under his leadership a huge vote of confidence.

And? That's the company and not him as far as what iDevice users will care about. Again, even if they bother to learn the name of the company that makes chatgpt. Hell, they might even think that is the name of the company and not the product. I don't really understand your point

That's what they thought with Qualcomm.

i don't get the reference

The upstream comment I was replying to mentioned that SAMA destroyed public trust. If this were the case, then what he had done might be enough for a massive company like Apple to hesitate on making such a deal. And there are alternative routes Apple could have taken (maybe not as good as GPT4, but close in a fast moving space.) It's true that users may not know who the company is (let alone know about SAMA) - but he does have outsized control over a company which "isn't him." He had the power to reverse his sacking, make changes to the board, and is now considering changing the structure such that OpenAI is no longer a non-profit entity.

Where there's smoke there's fire. You don't get to a point where you "destroy public trust" without also destroying investor confidence. The upstream comment mentioned "public trust" - but there were also trust issues with the board. These issues then put further investment in limbo until he was able to change the board.

My point is, that any trust issues aren't likely what they seem given that Apple made such a large bet with the company. Sure, it's "only" a distribution deal. But Apple needs to know that OpenAI will continue to have access to the resources they need to continue servicing massive markets. The trust may be wobbly, but not destroyed.

But Apple's deal with OpenAI is superficial at best. It's not their entire approach to AI. You can use Apple Intelligence and not once submit something to ChatGPT. To me, that means that they are only using OpenAI as a crutch until they've improved to make it no longer necessary and/or gives them an option to swap out which ever 3rd party model is the new hotness. It's less embedded than having Google be the default search engine as ChatGPT isn't the default AI model and is absolutely opt-in with a warning message stronger than any data sharing message from anything they've offered.

Apple is pragmatic; they know ChatGPT has the mindshare of the public (90% of whom have never heard of Claude, etc.). But make no mistake, they will switch to their own similar offering once it's up to par.

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